Apple 'Neural Engine' chip could power AI on iPhones

But to keep its devices competitive, Apple is building a secondary mobile processor dedicated to powering AI. The tech titan's devices currently split AI tasks between two chips -- the main processor and a GPU -- but this new one, allegedly known internally as the Apple Neural Engine, has its own module dedicated to AI requests. That puts Apple further behind Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon mobile chips, which already have a dedicated AI module, and Google's Tensor Processing Units available in its Cloud Platform to do AI heavy lifting. Unlike the company's differential privacy methods protecting data sent to Apple's servers, the Neural Engine chip would let devices sift through data on their own, which would be faster and easier on the battery, just like the M7 processors did for motion back in 2013.