Apple is about to launch the iPhone 16 series which will be (at least the pro models) powered by the A18 Pro chipset. The company has finally joined the AI race and has developed a couple of exciting AI features for the upcoming iPhones.
You may be already aware of the importance of NPUs (Neural Processing Units) in in an SoC in performing AI-related tasks. Now the latest news is about the capability of the NPU of the Apple A18 Pro. According to a report, the NPU inside the Apple A18 Pro is more capable than the Apple M4 SoC that powers the latest iPad Pro. Not to mention, the powerful NPU hints at a respectable AI performance of the upcoming iPhones.
Apple has been building up the foundation for integrating AI with iPhones for a long time
The NPU inside the A17 Pro chip, which powers the iPhone 15 Pro models, comes with 16 cores and the AI performance is measured at 35TOPS. For reference the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 from last year offers an AI performance of 15TOPS. We will need to see what Qualcomm manages to achieve this year with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 SoC.
The 11″ and 13″ iPad Pro released this year equips the M4 chipset, which is based on TSMC’s 3nm process node, and the NPU capability of the SoC is measured at 38 TOPS, slightly higher than the A17 Pro from last year. Now it is said that the new smartphone chipset from Apple will surpass the M4 again in this regard. Nonetheless, the end-user experience or the implementation of specific AI features depends on other aspects such as the form factor of the device.
At the last Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) event, Apple announced its contribution to AI, “Apple Intelligence”. It is integrated into iOS 18 system apps and voice assistant Siri. Now iOS 18 requires a chipset with a powerful NPU as Apple focuses on running as many AI features as possible natively on iPhones.
It is said that the NPU capability of the A18 Pro may surpass 45 TOPS, exceeding the strongest NPU among current Windows AI PC processors, which is offered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite.
