iPhone 18 Pro chip leak points to much faster graphics

Someone on Weibo has reconstructed Apple’s unreleased A20 Pro chip without ever seeing the chip. The account, 白饭炒白米饭 or “Fried White Rice,” has been right about Apple silicon before, which is why this one travelled fast.

Apple A20 Pro chip

The GPU goes from six cores to seven, the biggest Apple has put in a phone

The leaked layout shows a seven-core GPU, up from the six cores in the A19 Pro inside the iPhone 17 Pro. That’s about 16% more cores, which on its own sounds modest. Macworld reckons the real-world gain lands closer to 20 to 30% once you factor in the other changes.

The memory interface widens from 64-bit to 96-bit

This is the part the headlines mostly buried. The diagram points to a 96-bit interface for LPDDR5X memory, 50% wider than the A19 Pro’s 64-bit bus. More bandwidth feeds the GPU and the neural engine, so games and on-device AI both benefit. A motherboard leak back in June showed the same 96-bit figure, though that one suggested LPDDR6 rather than LPDDR5X. Two separate leaks agreeing on the bus width is worth something.

The CPU stays at six cores, but the small cores get more cache

Still two performance cores and four efficiency cores, same as last year. The efficiency cores now share 8MB of L2 cache instead of 6MB, while the performance cores keep their 16MB. Extra cache on the small cores helps with background work and larger data sets, not with peak speed.

The whole thing is guesswork from solder ball positions, so treat it carefully

The leaker mapped where the chip’s solder contacts sit, then overlaid die-level images to work out which block goes where. He tested six, seven and eight core GPU layouts across more than ten arrangements before deciding seven fit best. Careful work, but it’s still an estimate, and nothing about the neural engine or image processor can be read from it at all.

Apple’s event is on September 9

That’s when the iPhone 18 Pro line and, reportedly, Apple’s first foldable get announced, along with the real numbers.

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I am the Owner of HexaCore. I just love using Apple devices. Yes iPhone, a MacBook, Airbuds and an Apple Watch. I love their sleek designs and unqiue ideas. Writing about Apple products and updates is my hobby now.
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