Last year we heard rumors that the iPhone 18 could be the first smartphone to use a 2nm chipset — following the drop to 3nm chips on iPhone 14 Pro in 2022. Well the latest word from analyst Jeff Pu is that this may not be the case.
In a research note to GF Securities (via MacRumors), Pu claims that the iPhone 18’s A20 chip will be built using TSMC’s N3P process. That’s the same 3nm process expected to be used to manufacture the A19 and A19 Pro chips that will debut in the iPhone 17 series later this year.
There are a bunch of benefits to having smaller chips powering your devices. The main one is that the smaller chips typically have greater transistor density, which means they offer a notable performance boost.
The smaller chips are also more energy efficient, which helps prolong battery life and reduce heat build-up.
iPhone 18 could still get some performance boosts
By sticking with a 3nm chip for another generation, Apple won’t be able to benefit from those improvements. Which means iPhone 18 may not have quite as big a performance boost as some people had hoped.
That said, Pu believes that the A20 chip could offer a boost to Apple Intelligence capabilities. He claims that the chip will utilize TSMC’s Chip on Wafer Substrate (CoWoS) packaging. This would allow tighter integration of the chipset’s various components, including processor, unified memory and neural engine
Though we can’t predict how much of a noticeable impact this change will have until we actually test the iPhone 18 for ourselves. And that isn’t going to happen for quite a long time yet.
Plus, if what Pu says is true, we’re going to have to wait even longer to see the benefits of a 2nm chipset. Because they may not be arriving until Apple until the release of iPhone 19 at the very earliest. By that point we might even have a foldable iPhone to obsess over.
