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Apple Wants to Add Machine Learning Chips to Smartphone SoCs

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday May 28 2017, @01:46PM   
from the smartphones-that-talk-back dept.

takyon writes:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-26/apple-said-to-plan-dedicated-chip-to-power-ai-on-devices

Apple is working on a processor devoted specifically to AI-related tasks, according to a person familiar with the matter. The chip, known internally as the Apple Neural Engine, would improve the way the company's devices handle tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence -- such as facial recognition and speech recognition, said the person, who requested anonymity discussing a product that hasn't been made public. Apple declined to comment.

[...] Apple devices currently handle complex artificial intelligence processes with two different chips: the main processor and the graphics chip. The new chip would let Apple offload those tasks onto a dedicated module designed specifically for demanding artificial intelligence processing, allowing Apple to improve battery performance.

Should Apple bring the chip out of testing and development, it would follow other semiconductor makers that have already introduced dedicated AI chips. Qualcomm Inc.'s latest Snapdragon chip for smartphones has a module for handling artificial intelligence tasks, while Google announced its first chip, called the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), in 2016.

Google will supposedly put mini TPUs into smartphones in the coming years.

Previously:
Google's New TPUs are Now Much Faster -- will be Made Available to Researchers

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Original Submission

• Could be a "good thing" Could be a "good thing" (Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday May 28 2017, @03:07PM (1 child)

  by Runaway1956 (2926) on Sunday May 28 2017, @03:07PM (#516763) Journal

  Your phone is no longer a tool for the spies to use, to spy on you. Now, the phone IS THE SPY!! It has it's own brain, learns all about you, and reports what it decides to report. If you talk to it nicely, it may decide it likes you better than the spy masters. Whether that be so, or not, the AI can probably condense all the spying into rather short reports, and avoid sending gigs of data on you. It sits there, watching and listening to everything you do, and decides just what sort of victim you are, and sets you up to buy whatever bit of junk it thinks you'll like. The guys who sit on the other side of the world, trying to decide what all your numbers mean, and trying to work up adverts to induce you into purchasing THEIR junk will be out of work.

  Isn't automation wonderful?

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• Re:Could be a "good thing" (Score: 2) by butthurt on Sunday May 28 2017, @10:07PM

  by butthurt (6141) on Sunday May 28 2017, @10:07PM (#516894) Journal

  There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually, it will be 'My phone is spying on me'.

  ―Philip K. Dick

  Parent