Fresh from Samsung leaning heavily into AI and amid swirling rumors that iOS 18 will bring huge upgrades to Siri via new AI tools, it appears Apple could be upgrading the iPhone's internals to help make it smarter, with a second report suggesting so this week.
While generative AI remains controversial for leveraging existing assets to produce something 'new', a new report from Taiwan (thanks, GSMArena) suggests that the iPhone 16 will lean into it with a new Neural Engine that packs "significantly" more cores.
The report doesn't state a specific number of cores, but there have been 12 cores in the Neural Engine since the iPhone 12 which launched in 2020.
It also backs up recent reports that the iPhone 16 and other Apple devices will lean on new chips including the A18 and M4, each with a renewed focus on more powerful Neural Engines.
What does it mean for the consumer?
The Apple Neural Engine (or ANE) is a much more efficient processor than the CPU or GPU, and uses AI for things like language processing and image analysis on-device.
That's perhaps an oversimplification, but the Neural Engine is the piece of tech you have to thank for being able to search "dog" in your Photos library to find all of the images of your fluffy friend, or for Face ID unlocking and Animoji, augmented reality and the Deep Fusion techniques employed within the image processing pipeline.
The included cores are so efficient that they can remain relatively cool despite working through complex data and calculations either on command or in the background.
If these reports regarding additional cores are correct, it'll certainly give Apple's AI possibilities a boost. iOS 18 is expected to make Siri considerably more useful, as well as offer a boost for Spotlight.
It's worth noting that while Apple reportedly has its own team working on AI-based language models, it's not entirely trusting of generative options from competitors. In fact, the company has banned the use of ChatGPT and others for fear of the algorithms learning company secrets.
