By putting the A20 Pro chip in it rather than A16/A17/A18 which is on base iPads and iPhones.

Perhaps they are planning to launch application features that require or benefit from the A20. Anyway it looks like the base model of the new iPad is using binned CPUs that were not quite good enough for the iPhone 18: 5 cores instead of 6, 1 neural engine instead of 2.