Apple’s iPad event was an AI appetizer

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Apple’s recently hatched plan to catch up to rivals in artificial intelligence, specifically in generative AI (GenAI), have begun to be revealed, starting with the company’s May 2nd conference call with analysts following its Q224 earnings release and with this week’s
“Let Loose” iPad event showcasing the company’s new M4 SoC, with a new Neural Engine for artificial intelligence and machine learning.

M4 has an extremely fast Neural Engine — an IP block in the chip dedicated to the acceleration of AI workloads. This is Apple’s most powerful Neural Engine ever, capable of an astounding 38 trillion operations per second — an astouding 60x faster than the first Neural Engine in Apple’s A11 Bionic (launched September 12, 2017). Together with next-generation ML accelerators in the CPU, the high-performance GPU, and higher-bandwidth unified memory, the Neural Engine makes M4 an extremely powerful chip for AI.

The M4 unveiling… [serves] as an appetizer for the AI features the company will present at its WWDC event in June, when Apple is widely expected to debut a slew of generative AI-powered software features for its various devices.

Apple pointed to a number of the M4’s AI bona fides during the keynote, with vice president of platform architecture Tim Millet specifically noting that the chip is capable of 34 [sic 38] trillion operations per second, a measurement commonly used when describing a chip’s AI performance.

Millet also said that the M4’s neural engine is more powerful than any neural processing unit in any AI PC. That’s a direct shot at Intel (INTC), AMD (AMD), and Qualcomm (QCOM), which are preparing to or are already rolling out their own AI PC chips designed to run large language models on Windows laptops and desktops.

The company also didn’t provide information about the M4’s performance while training or running large language models (LLMs), something that Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD regularly point to as indicators of their chips’ strengths.

Still, the fact that Apple gave consumers, and Wall Street, an early look at its AI thinking is important.

The company is widely viewed as behind the curve when it comes to the generative AI race, and investors are banking heavily on WWDC serving as Apple’s big AI coming-out party.

Via: Yahoo Finance