An unconfirmed image of the iPhone 18 Pro's motherboard was recently shared online that appears to suggest that the A20 Pro chip is built on a new packaging technology. It might not sound exciting, but it could deliver an instant jump in real-world performance over the A19 Pro currently used in the iPhone 17 Pro models.
The image shows an apparent A20 Pro chip integrated using TSMC's Wafer-Level Multi-Chip Module (WMCM) architecture. Previous rumors have suggested Apple is moving to WMCM for the iPhone 18 Pro, so the purportedly leaked image is not so surprising, but it is the first time we've seen it in the wild.
Apple has long relied on package-on-package (PoP) designs, where the DRAM sits directly on top of the main processor. While this approach has kept latency low, it's known to concentrate heat in the packaging area, which isn't good news performance-wise however you look at it.
To get around the bottleneck, the new WMCM packaging moves the working memory to the side of the system-on-a-chip (SoC). It sounds like a fairly straightforward change, but it should bring several benefits.
Separating the processor and DRAM will reduce the thermal coupling between them and improve the heat dissipation, especially during sustained workloads – which is where iPhones typically start throttling.
The memory believed to be used in the new architecture provides the second advantage. In the A19 Pro chip that powers the existing iPhone 17 Pro, Apple uses 64-bit LPDDR5X memory. In contrast, the A20 Pro is said to pair with LPDDR6 on a 96-bit bus, which should move more data while drawing on less power.
The third benefit should be AI performance. The overall die size looks roughly the same as the A19 Pro, but the Neural Processing Unit appears much larger, which suggests Apple is going all-out to improve its on-device AI compute.
Like we said, the image has not been verified, though WMCM has been repeatedly rumored for the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. The same architecture is expected to be used in Apple's first foldable iPhone, which is also likely to be powered by an A20 Pro using TSMC's more advanced 2nm process. All three devices are expected to be unveiled by the company this September.
