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Apple Is Working On a Dedicated Chip To Power AI On Devices (bloomberg.com)
According to Bloomberg, Apple is working on a processor devoted specifically to AI-related tasks. "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," reports Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the matter. From the report: Engineers at Apple are racing to catch their peers at Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc. in the booming field of artificial intelligence. While Siri gave Apple an early advantage in voice-recognition, competitors have since been more aggressive in deploying AI across their product lines, including Amazon's Echo and Google's Home digital assistants. An AI-enabled processor would help Cupertino, California-based Apple integrate more advanced capabilities into devices, particularly cars that drive themselves and gadgets that run augmented reality, the technology that superimposes graphics and other information onto a person's view of the world. 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.
What could possibly go wro-
KILL ALL HUMANS
Wouldn't it be easier for Apple to use its massive cash hoard and acquire Cyberdyne?
We've kind of tapped out x86 performance lately. My 6 year old laptop is still fairly competitive.
Your six year old laptop is about to become an ancient slow piece of crap.
It takes more and more processing power just to run the OS because they keep bloating up to the specs of the latest processors. This is true for Windows and the mainstream Linux WM's, although not quite so bad on the Linux side of things.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
Apple Neural Engine + Boston Dynamics' Atlas + Fleshlight
and I'm a buyer.
Not a single time. The company I work for makes voice-controls for machinery to be used by the disabled, so we were very curious about Siri. Even with high quality microphones, training, and simple one word commands, our stuff still isn't 100% reliable even after over twenty-five years since we delivered our first voice-controller sewing machine to Goodwill. Voice control, especially speaker-independent, isn't anywhere nearly ready for consumers.
Siri is certainly better than it was a few years ago but it still does brain dead things like trying to route you to another continent when you ask "How do I drive to ..." where "..." is usually just a suburb or three away.
The amount of background noise seems to be the determining factor: if I don't turn off the radio, wind the windows up and speak with about 1/2 second gaps between my words then I'll have to dictate messages to it three or four times before it gets them correct enough to actually send them.