Apple's iPhone 18 Pro Debuts 2nm A20 Pro With 32 Neural Engine Cores, 2x FP8, On-Device LLM Support

At its Sept 9 'Surprise and Shine' event, Apple unveiled the A20 Pro, its first 2nm smartphone chip, with a 6-core CPU (two 'desktop-class' super cores up to 20% faster), a 7-core GPU with neural accelerators baked into shader cores, and a redesigned 32-core Neural Engine claiming 2x compute over its predecessor and native 8-bit floating-point math. Apple pitched it as 'the ultimate chip for running advanced on-device models,' saying it can execute large language models directly on device. Custom M-series-style packaging bonds silicon and memory to a vapor chamber, and Apple claims 40% more sustained performance than the A19 Pro and 2x the A18 Pro.