Apple is reportedly working on a dedicated artificial intelligence (AI) chip that will power most future iPhones and iPads discretely. The tech giant is bringing AI to chips, which will be directly run by hardware, unlike the present technology that relies on software.
According to a report by Bloomberg Technology, a source familiar to the matter said that Apple is presently working on a processor that will be dedicated specifically for AI-related tasks. The chip is internally known as the Apple Neural Engine, and the same would help future Apple devices to handle tasks that would otherwise need human intelligence. These tasks could be facial recognition, speech recognition, and a few more. The source wished to remain anonymous as the company hasn’t made it public as yet. Apple has also denied commenting on the subject.
In the race to beat its rivals, Alphabet and Amazon Inc, Apple’s engineers are trying to catch up with in the AI game. Though Siri was the first AI from Apple for voice recognition, competitor tech giants have been very aggressive in the respective fields with Google and Amazon already mastering their products such as Assistant and Echo, respectively.
The new AI chip could also help Apple integrate their advanced AI-tech into autonomous cars and robots that could need artificial intelligence for operations and automation.
The report also quoted former Apple analyst stating that Apple is betting high on AI which is the base requirement for future AR and self-driving cars.
The new dedicated chip could also help Apple make its future devices perform faster, since the present devices from Apple, which handle the current AI processes with the help of the processor and the graphics chip. The new chip will then help offload AI tasks from the two processors, thus helping improve on battery life.
‘Should Apple bring the chip out of testing and development, it would follow other semiconductor makers that have already introduced dedicated AI chips. Qualcomm Inc.’s latest Snapdragon chip for smartphones has a module for handling artificial intelligence tasks, while Google announced its first chip, called the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), in 2016. That chip worked in Google’s data centers to power search results and image-recognition. At its I/O conference this year, Google announced a new version that will be available to clients of its cloud business. Nvidia Corp. also sells a similar chip to cloud customers,’ reported Bloomberg.
The source for Bloomberg also said that Apple has presently tested the prototypes for future iPhones with the new chip, but is unclear if the same would be ready for this year’s products.
