Apple is working on a chip that is dedicated to Artificial Intelligence. The report comes from Bloomberg, which also said that the chip will allow all the devices on Apple’s ecosystem, to get better at tasks that require a human level of intelligence. The chip is being refereed to as the Apple Neural Engine, and it could boost the company’s efforts in facial recognition and speech recognition.
Apple has been playing catch with many of its industry peers. From Amazon to Google, all of these companies have their assistants out and running. Apple started out earlier but it has since given way to the aggressive exploits of competitors. Considering that the company does launch a chip focused on AI, it could well bring in more capabilities to its systems. Such a chip and its future iterations, could also form the cornerstone of the coming era, which will be replete with self-driving cars, and AI powered tools
A dedicated chip would also free up the main chip and the GPU, for regular processing tasks. What this would mean is that, the processing of regular tasks inside the phone would increase as AI related tasks would be dealt by a completely different chip.
In creating a different piece of hardware, Apple isn’t reinventing the wheel. Google has a Tensor Processing Unit that it recently announced. Similarly, Qualcomm has been integrating dedicated modules for AI into its chips. Apple has reportedly been testing the chip with future iterations of the ipHone and the results imply that the company could integrate the chip inside these devices in a few year time
Meanwhile, not much data is available on the topic.The Cupertino giant could discuss all this at the WWDC next month where it will be introducing a lot of goodies, including fresh operating systems and updated hardware for some of its devices.
