iPhone 16 rumored to bring powerful AI Chip Unit

Apple‘s iPhone 16 will feature powerful artificial intelligence (AI) technologies thanks to the upgraded chip unit suggests a rumor from Taiwan.

A Taiwanese media report reveals that Apple’s M4 and A18 processors will bring a “significant” increase in AI computing cores. M4 and A18 chipsets will be used in the next generation of Mac devices and the iPhone 16 series respectively.

An AI core is a processor unit that is part of the chipset. It is designed for AI tasks such as speech recognition, machine learning, and natural language processing.

Apple has been using its version of the NPU AI unit as Apple Neural Engine (ANE). The first generation ANE was launched with A11 chipset in iPhone X in 2017.

The iPhone 11 series unveiled an 8-core neural engine and the iPhone 12 used an upgraded 16-core neural engine. Since then, the company has been increasing its computational capacity but not cores.

The A15 Bionic’s neural engine conducts 15.8 trillion operations per second (TOPS). A16 increased this capacity to 17 TOPS and A17 Pro took it to 35 TOPS.

Apple already increased its AI processing capability but the company may have been focusing on the Large Language Model (LLM) for the A18 chipset.

Qualcomm introduced Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with 10 billion parameters last year. Apple’s South Korean rival Samsung leveraged its AI capability to introduce LLM features in its S24 flagship device.

AI features simplify the way users interact with smartphones and Galaxy S24 is a recent and major example. This phone is receiving good responses from customers around the globe, especially for its software features.

Similarly, Apple may look more on LLM and less on the design side for the iPhone 16 series. A past report suggests that these iOS 18 will bring new AI features and these will use the new chipset’s capabilities.

(via – Macrumors)