Apple has just announced the M6, the company's first chip manufactured on the 2nm process of TSMC Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. According to MacRumors, this is also a clear sign of the development direction of the A20 Pro, expected to be equipped on the iPhone 18 Pro.
A20 Pro may be the first 2nm iPhone chip
The A20 Pro is said to use a 2nm process, which helps increase transistor bulb density and improve performance, while reducing power consumption.
Reports now suggest that the A20 Pro can be up to 18% faster and save up to 30% energy compared to the A19 Pro.
Neural Engine can be upgraded
M6 owns two 16-core Neural Engine processors, giving AI processing capabilities up to 2 times higher than the previous generation. This raises the possibility that the A20 Pro will also be strongly upgraded in AI processing capabilities.
However, whether the A20 Pro uses a dual Neural Engine design or not has not been confirmed. MacRumors believes that the limitations on chip area and temperature on iPhone may force Apple to adjust the design.
GPU continues to improve
M6 is upgraded with shader core architecture, Dynamic Caching, hardware seepage capability and increased geometry processing speed by 50%.
If Apple maintains similar development between A and M chips, these improvements may appear on the A20 Pro, helping the iPhone 18 Pro increase graphics processing capabilities and AI tasks on the device.
Memory bandwidth may not increase sharply
M6 achieves a maximum memory bandwidth of 170 GB/s, 10% higher than the M5 chip. This shows that Apple is likely still using high-speed LPDDR5X memory instead of switching to LPDDR6.
According to MacRumors analysis, the A20 Pro can reach about 85 GB/s, not too much of an increase compared to the 76.8 GB/s of the A19 Pro. Performance improvements may come more from multi-chip packaging technology, helping to shorten the data transfer distance between memory and processing components.
No AV1 encryption yet
M6 still supports AV1 decoding but does not support AV1 encryption. Therefore, the possibility of the A20 Pro being supplemented with this feature is also considered low.
In general, the M6 shows that the A20 Pro can focus on the 2nm process, AI performance, graphics and power saving capabilities, instead of creating a huge leap in memory bandwidth.
