The iPhone 16 has been tipped to receive a huge AI boost thanks to an A18 chip with a vastly upgrade Neural Engine.
Taiwanese website Economic Daily News claims that both the A18 chip and the next-generation M4 chip for Mac will “significantly increase the number of built-in AI computing cores” (via machine translation).
With iOS 18 widely tipped to see Apple catching up to Google on the generative AI stakes, it makes sense that the next generation of Apple chips would ramp up the AI power.
In a recent earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that his company was working on generative AI, and that the product of that would be publicly displayed in 2024. June’s WWDC event sounds like the most likely culprit, as it’s where iOS 18 will be revealed.
Back in November, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that the iPhone 16 would represent a relatively modest hardware upgrade, but that iOS 18 would provide an “ambitious and compelling” update with new features and designs, as well as big performance and security boosts.
While iOS 18 will be coming to a whole bunch of older iPhones, it has been rumoured that some of the operating system’s features will be exclusive to the iPhone 16. If they were to require a whole new advanced Neural Engine to function, that would explain why.
With arch rivals Google and Samsung both going all in with AI, it looks as if Apple is going to be late to the party again. The question is, can it pull its usual trick of nailing the delayed implementation in a uniquely intuitive way?
