Rumor: Apple is developing chip dedicated to AI tasks

Apple may be working on a chip that will only be responsible for tasks related to artificial intelligence. The use of such a chip would lead to better performance and longer battery life with, for example, the iPhone and iPad.

The report comes from an anonymous source from Bloomberg news agency. The man or woman would be well acquainted with the developments. The chip, which Apple would call the Apple Neural Engine at this stage, will take on tasks such as facial and speech recognition and keyboard predictions on its own. Because it is specifically geared to these types of tasks, the CPU, which handles them less efficiently, does not have to be used for this, which saves energy and translates to better overall performance and battery life. There is already a similar split in the area of ​​the cpu and the gpu.

Apple would follow the competition with the move. Big names like Intel, IBM, Qualcomm, and Google are all in various stages of developing and deploying chips dedicated to performing AI tasks. Nvidia would also take steps to develop hardware specifically focused on AI. Artificial intelligence not only plays a role now in applications such as the smart assistant Siri, but in the future they will also be crucial for the operation of self-driving cars.

It is not yet clear whether Apple will introduce the chip in models released this year. In due course developers would get access to the chip so that they could write tasks for it themselves. Apple declines comment to Bloomberg. Apple’s annual Developer’s Conference is back in June. The company may officially reveal the project there.