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Wednesday 9 September 2026

iPhone 18 Pro: A20 Pro adds a dual 16-core Neural Engine

Updated

Apple has introduced the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max with the A20 Pro chip. According to Apple, the chip has a new dual 16-core Neural Engine, 32 cores in total, which the company describes as double the AI processing power of A19 Pro. Apple says the Neural Engine accelerates on-device AI models and computational photography.

Apple A20 Pro chip on a black background
Image: Apple.

The A20 Pro also offers 50 percent more memory bandwidth than A19 Pro, and its 6-core CPU includes integrated Neural Accelerators. Apple positions the chip for “more advanced on-device AI workloads” alongside games.

The phones ship with iOS 27, Apple Intelligence and the new Siri AI. Apple states that Apple Intelligence uses on-device processing together with Private Cloud Compute. Pre-orders start on 12 September, with availability from 18 September; prices start at $1,199 for the iPhone 18 Pro and $1,299 for the iPhone 18 Pro Max, both with 256 GB.

Update, September 20, 2026. The retailer ZEERA reports results from a Max Tech side-by-side comparison of the iPhone 18 Pro Max and iPhone 17 Pro Max. Local LLM generation rose from 33.5 to 55.4 tok/s, a gain of 65 percent, and measured memory bandwidth from 66.5 to 111.8 GB/s, a gain of 68 percent. The comparison also lists 25 percent higher single-core and 29 percent higher multi-core CPU scores in Geekbench 7, and a 48 percent higher graphics score.

Apple’s developer page for Apple Intelligence says the Foundation Models framework gives Swift apps direct access to the same on-device model that powers Apple Intelligence. New multimodal prompts pass images alongside text, and the model can call Vision framework tools such as OCR and barcode readers, all on-device according to Apple. Apps can also work with any model that conforms to the Language Model protocol, including cloud models like Claude and Gemini. Members of the App Store Small Business Program with fewer than 2 million first-time downloads get the next generation of Apple Foundation Models on Private Cloud Compute at no cloud API cost.

The new Siri AI is a three-tier hybrid system, not fully on-device. A new System Orchestrator in iOS 27 routes every request to the right tier:

  • Tier 1 — On-Device: Simple tasks (timers, app launches, local context search) run entirely on Apple’s Foundation Models (~3B parameters, 4-bit quantized) on the Neural Engine. Nothing leaves the iPhone.
  • Tier 2 — Private Cloud Compute: Moderately complex requests route to Apple’s own servers on Apple Silicon (M2 Ultra, now M5) in hardware-isolated Secure Enclaves. Personal data is stripped and tokenized. Apple retains control; no data retention.
  • Tier 3 — Google Gemini: The heaviest reasoning, real-time knowledge, and multimodal tasks are sent through PCC’s privacy proxy to a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter Gemini model on Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPUs in Google Cloud. Before any query reaches Google, the user’s identity and personal data are removed. Google is contractually barred from training on these queries.

Apple reportedly pays Google ~$1 billion per year for this partnership. The System Orchestrator decides the routing threshold in real time based on task complexity and context size. Apple’s public materials only name On-Device and PCC as the two processing locations — Gemini is never mentioned on Apple’s consumer pages.

Foundation Models can now work with any language model, including Apple’s own, Claude, and Gemini, through a single Swift interface. Apple did not publish details of the routing logic or which types of queries are sent off-device.

Update, September 21, 2026. Adrien Grondin, who works on the Locally AI app, says on X that the iPhone 18 Pro runs a 27B model at double the speed of the iPhone 17 Pro. His 11-second video shows the demo, but the post names neither the model nor its quantization and gives no tok/s figures.

Wccftech reports on the same demo, attributing it to Grondin and saying the model is Bonsai 2 27B from Prism ML — a ternary-weight version of Qwen3.8 27B at 1.76 bits per weight, 5.9 GB total. PrismML describes Bonsai 2 27B as released under Apache 2.0, running on Apple devices through MLX and on NVIDIA GPUs through CUDA.

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