I imagine it is nothing new to you if it is your habit to follow (even slightly) the news about the world of Apple, that Tim Cook and his class as well as the rest of Silicon Valley, it should be noted are increasingly focused in the two magic letters of the technology: IA. Artificial intelligence is seen as the next step in technological evolution, and so we basically have a race going on between big and small companies to decide who emerges as a pioneer and champion in the art of producing intelligent digital consciousness.
Amid recent acquisitions and investments, Apple has been doing its part to gain a comfortable foothold in this dispute, and now a new rumor could set the fire on the incessant quest for perfect artificial intelligence on Cupertino's side.
Tasks such as face and voice recognition would be relegated to this coprocessor, requiring less of the main SoC.
According to the Bloomberg, which cites information obtained from a source "familiar to Apple's plans," Ma is developing a new type of coprocessor to power future iOS devices; Its sole function would be to deal with system tasks related to artificial intelligence.
The chip, which internally called the Apple Neural Engine (something like "Apple's Neural Motor"), would work in conjunction with the A-series main processor, as well as the M-series chips responsible for handling device movement and positioning data. This way, tasks such as face and voice recognition would be relegated to this coprocessor, requiring less of the main SoC and thus saving battery power and improving device performance.
Apparently Apple's plan is ambitious and even involves giving developers access to the chip so they can take advantage of the technology. Thus, in addition to native coprocessor-managed features such as face recognition in the Photos app, speech recognition and predictive keyboard, third party applications would also have their AI capabilities expanded by the new hardware piece.
Still according to BloombergApple would already be testing these coprocessors on iPhones prototypes, but it is unclear whether the new chip will be included in the "iPhone 8 / X / Pro / Edition" and / or speculated "iPhones 7s / 7s Plus" for the second. half. Another place where such a piece could be put to good use would be in the rumored dedicated Siri speaker which, as some rumors indicate, could be featured in WWDC 2017's opening keynote in less than two weeks. In this case, the Apple Neural Engine would be very close to us let's wait and see what happens.
via AppleInsider
