Apple will launch the iPhone 16 series, which (at least the professional models) will be powered by the A18 Pro chipset. The company has finally joined the AI ​​race and developed some exciting AI features for the upcoming iPhones.

You may already be aware of the importance of NPUs (neural processors) in SoCs for AI-related tasks. The latest news is about the NPU capabilities of the Apple A18 Pro. According to the report, the NPU inside the Apple A18 Pro is more powerful than the Apple M4 SoC that powers the latest iPad Pro. We cannot help but mention that the powerful NPU indicates respectable AI performance in future iPhones.

Apple has long been laying the groundwork for integrating artificial intelligence into the iPhone

The NPU in the A17 Pro chip running on iPhone 15 Pro models consists of 16 cores and artificial intelligence performance is evaluated as 35TOPS. For reference, last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 offers 15TOPS AI performance. We’ll have to see what Qualcomm manages to achieve with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 SoC this year.

This year’s 11-inch and 13-inch iPad Pros are powered by TSMC’s M4 chipset based on 3nm process, and the NPU SoC is rated at 38 TOPS, slightly higher than last year’s A17 Pro. It is now said that Apple’s new smartphone chipset once again surpasses the M4 in this regard. However, the end-user experience or implementation of certain AI functions depends on other considerations such as the form factor of the device.

At the recent Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple announced its contribution to artificial intelligence called “Apple Intelligence.” It is integrated into iOS 18 system applications and the Siri voice assistant. iOS 18 now requires a chipset with a powerful NPU, as Apple focuses on running as many AI features as possible on the iPhone.

The A18 Pro’s NPU is said to be capable of over 45 TOPS, surpassing the most powerful NPU among current Windows AI PC processors offered by Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite.