Future iPhones and iPads might have a special chip just for processing AI

Apple's reportedly working on a new kind of chip -- potentially for future iOS devices -- that'll be used just for processing AI, Bloomberg reports. Bloomberg says the chip's called the Apple Neural Engine internally, and could be used for "offloading facial recognition in the photos application, some parts of speech recognition, and the iPhone's predictive keyboard to the chip." By moving AI processing to a dedicated chip, battery life in devices could also see a boost since the main CPU and GPU wouldn't be crunching as much data and gobbling as much power. The report says Apple plans to integrate the chip into its devices, but it's unclear when that'll happen, and if any iOS devices launching this year will have it. Virtually every tech company is working on improving AI processing on mobile devices. Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 835 chip, which is already in devices like the Samsung Galaxy S8, has a special module dedicated to processing AI tasks.