Apple would be working on a new chip dedicated to artificial intelligence

Enhanced Reality/Virtuality and Artificial Intelligence. Two mantras repeated almost from all major technology companies, primarily Apple, Google and Microsoft. Just the AI ​​is the one with more real short-term impact capability, it is nothing more than we have at least partly used it for many years.

It was Apple with Siri to open virtual assistant dances, making a drastic change to the previous limited voice control capabilities of the devices. Over time, the Cupertino company has not only improved Siri’s capabilities, but added additional features in its software products (an example is the automatic album creation in the Photo app of iOS 10 ). The next step would seem to involve hardware directly, as Mark Gurman reports on Bloomberg.

Apple engineers would be developing a new chip, internally called the Neural Engine, dedicated to tasks where artificial intelligence is masterful. Think about recognizing faces in photos, suggestions ” Proactive, ” but also with Siri.

These elaborations have so far been shared between the main processor and the GPU, which is the overall performance of the device, as the apple has tried to minimize potential discomfort.

By shifting the AI ​​load to the add-on circuit, valuable resources in the SoC would be freed up for other intensive operations, similar to what happened in 2013 when the Mx coprocessor series took over all the motion sensor processes such as accelerometer, gyroscope and compass , Along with voice recognition.

Apple would not be the first to make this type of separation: Google and nVidia already have server solutions (in the case of Big G are called TPUs), while the smartphone / tablet side Qualcomm has introduced an artificial intelligence module in the Snapdragon 835.

Adoption in iDevice would nevertheless, create a driving effect on the market, leading to the addition of similar chips not only to Qualcomm-linked producers, but also to Huawei and Samsung, who rely heavily on home-made SoC.

Broadcasting times would not be short, they will have to be widened in time between the various market bands, obviously starting from the tops. In addition, Gurman points out that Apple itself could use more.

Although its sources include prototypes of the iPhone equipped with Neural Engine, its seventeenth-century debut is not at all deserved. More likely, at least for this year, Tim Cook’s efforts and partners remain primarily on a software plan, having the chance for us to better understand ourselves in a few days at WWDC 2017.