IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo said something interesting following the iPhone Duo introduction on Wednesday: “Apple showed up years after everyone else, yet it walks in and sets the rules.”

He’s right. From the IP resistance to the little touches that set the new foldable apart from most of the competition, Apple has set expectations for the entire market, and while competitor Samsung is trash talking the foldable, even it stands to benefit from the millions Apple is about to sell. Apple is, after all, allegedly paying Samsung $250 for each iPhone Duo display.

But it is not just the rules concerning foldables the company has now defined; it has also set the standard competitors must follow in chip design with its A20 Pro, a super-powered processor that delivers noticeable performance improvements even compared to last year’s iPhone 17. 

What’s new in the chip?

With six CPU cores, seven GPU cores and a new Dual 16-core Neural Engine, the new chip boasts numerous improvements compared to the A19 Pro, not the least of which is that it’s the first 2nm chip Apple has put inside a smartphone. These enhancements bestow it with a series of superlatives:

• Memory bandwidth is 50% higher than last year’s chip.
• GPU graphics performance increases up to 40% over the A19 Pro.
• AI performance is expected to double.

These are all significant improvements that make for noticeable experience boosts for anyone using one of these phones. Prosaically, I anticipate first reviews will celebrate how fast and responsive these devices are, and this will be most evidenced in tasks such as video capture and photography. Pictures will capture more swiftly, open faster, and edit features will become (and already are) more advanced and sophisticated than before. Apple spent ample time celebrating the iPhone 18 Pro series for the new frontiers in digital photography they open up, and not just because of the new reflexive lens.

The point is that the devices have the horsepower to get through computationally intensive tasks, including AI, thanks to the Neural Engines and GPU.

Thermal management is the icing on the quake

What those tasks have in common is heat, which Apple’s product designers have addressed in two critical ways: liquid cooling and processor design.

The processor design is the important thing, because in this case Apple has moved away from the InFO POP packaging of the A19 Pro in which the DRAM is stacked above the chip. It’s now embraced a side-by-side design it described as “inspired by” M-series Apple Silicon.

That works because placing both components alongside each other, rather than in a perpetual embrace, reduces the overall temperature of both by putting a little space between them. As Apple explained it, this Wafer-level Multi-Chip Module (WMCM) approach means the memory gets out of the way of the processor, allowing the latter to make direct contact with the vapor chamber cooling system.

In layman’s terms, it means both memory and chip can perform more intensively while being more efficiently cooled, a move that helps Apple’s iPhone meet those astonishing performance achievements. The vapor chamber is also bigger, made of new material with three times the surface area of before, making it even better at cooling the device.

It also means Apple has achieved a lot of things competitors have not, most particularly in packaging, the use of 2nm chips in a mass market product, and overall design.

That’s where it gets interesting. Both Qualcomm and MediaTek now plan to follow in Apple’s footsteps with the adoption of 2nm chips and side-by-side packaging.

Digitimes suggests it is a move others will follow, as vendors work furiously to ensure their hardware can run AI effectively on device, which iPhones already do. Apple, of course, already knows its Macs, iPhones, and iPads have been designed from the ground-up to support on-device AI as it works to provide the world’s best mass market platforms for secure and private use of the tech.

Friends don’t let friends bet against Apple

All the same, even at the microprocessor level, it’s hard to ignore that where Apple goes, others follow — even while where others go, Apple frequently follows later, but seems to do it better. It has never been a company to bet against, after all. People really should stop doing that.

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