Apple doubles the iPhone's AI silicon to make Siri work

Apple's A20 Pro doubles the iPhone's AI silicon: a dual 16-core Neural Engine, 32 cores in total, built on a 2-nanometer process, for twice the AI throughput of the A19 Pro — with 50% more memory bandwidth feeding it. The 7-core GPU is up to 40% faster, and the 6-core CPU now carries Neural Accelerators inside each core.

All of it serves the one thing Apple has been promising since 2024: a Siri that actually does things. The rebuilt assistant gets personal context across messages, email and photos, onscreen awareness, and the ability to take actions inside apps — including third-party ones. It runs on-device where it can and falls back to Private Cloud Compute where it can't. There's a Siri mode in the Camera app, Image Playground now does photorealistic output, and Safari can watch a page and tell you when it changes.

The rest is battery and money: up to 45 hours of video playback on the Pro Max (36 on the Pro), 50% charge in 15 minutes, and $1,199 / $1,299 starting prices. Preorders open 12 September, shipping 18 September. It was also new CEO John Ternus's first keynote.

Why it matters: Apple is betting silicon that a personal-context assistant can live on the phone instead of being rented from a frontier lab.