The next iPhones and iPads should run a much faster Neural Engine from Apple, featuring more cores to support generative AI features coming to iOS 18.
A February 15 report from Economic Daily News claims the upcoming Apple M4 and Apple A18 chips will have a more powerful Neural Engine featuring additional cores for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tasks.
The report, translated from Chinese, claims the upcoming Neural Engine will sport “significantly” more cores than its predecessor. The A18 chips are expected to power the upcoming iPhone 16 models.
What is Apple Neural Engine? What does it do?
Neural Engine is a custom-built AI and ML accelerator and one of the defining features of Apple silicon. The Neural Engine debuted in the A11 Bionic chip that first appeared in the iPhone 8 and iPhone X models in 2017.
It was designed to handle the Face ID facial recognition system faster than the CPU but using far less battery. The subsequent Apple silicon chips introduced more capable Neural Engines with more cores. The first Neural Engine in the A11 Bionic chip had just two cores that performed 600 billion operations per second.
By contrast, the current Neural Engine in the A17 Pro chip that powers iPhone 15 Pros sports sixteen cores capable of 35 trillion operations per second. Apple says it’s up to 2x faster than the iPhone 14 Pro’s Neural Engine.
Actually, the fastest Neural Engines are in the M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max chips. They’re equipped with sixteen cores, running 60 percent faster than the Neural Engine in the Apple M1 family of chips and outperforming 32-core Neural Engines in the M1 Ultra and M2 Ultra chips powering the Mac Studio and Mac Pro desktops.
Generative AI coming to Siri, Photos, Pages, Keynote, etc.
Apple has been rumored to be working on bringing generative AI features to its Siri digital assistant, as well as Apple Music and productivity apps like Pages and Keynote. Large-language models (LLM) would enable a more conversational Siri that would chain together multiple commands to carry out complex tasks.
Pages would get a writing assistant, while Keynote might automatically create slide decks from prompts. You can expect other generative AI features elsewhere throughout iOS 18, namely the Photos and Camera apps that already make heavy use of ML-powered object, subject and scene recognition.
When will iOS 18 come out?
CEO Tim Cook recently hinted Apple has been developing new AI features that would come to its platforms later this year.
The Cupertino company is expected to preview iOS 18 alongside other major updates at the WWDC, its annual developer conference held in June.
Apple will be testing iOS 18 throughout the summer, releasing the software update for public consumption ahead of new iPhones in September.