2024-02-15 07:49:14
Apple plans to boost the AI capabilities of its upcoming iPhone and Mac models with a new generation of chips with more AI computing cores.
According to a report from the Economic Daily News, the A18 and M4 chips that will power the iPhone 16 and future Macs will feature a significantly improved neural enginethat is, the part of the chip that manages artificial intelligence and machine learning tasks.
The report claims that the new neural engine will not only improve the performance of existing AI functions, such as Siri, Face ID and Photos, but also enable new generative AI functions that will be introduced in iOS 18.
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Apple CEO Tim Cook alluded to the company’s work on generative AI during an earnings conference call this month, saying that the company would share more details “later this year”. As a reminder, this is the same type of AI that ChatGPT uses, so we might well see huge improvements for Siri. iOS 18 is expected to be announced at the WWDC conference in June.
The report does not specify the number of cores of the new neural engine, but it indicates that it will bea “large increase” over the current 16-core design used since the iPhone 12. The neural engine has already become faster over the years, even without changing the number of cores. For example, the A17 Pro chip in the iPhone 15 Pro has a neural engine twice as fast as the A16 chip in the iPhone 14 Pro, and can process up to 35 trillion operations per second.
The new Neural Engine will also benefit Mac models that use Apple chips, like the M4 chip which is expected to launch in late 2024 or early 2025. Most Macs with Apple chips have a 16-core Neural Engine, except the Mac Studio and Mac Pro, which have a 32-core Neural Engine when configured with an M1 Ultra chip or M2 Ultra. It now remains to be seen what features will arrive with iOS 18.
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