The artificial intelligence (AI) chip war is officially in full swing. On Tuesday, Apple (AAPL) announced its latest iPad Pro lineup, powered by the company's all-new M4 chip. Apple says this processor has a CPU that's 50% faster than the previous generation Pro's M2 chip and a GPU that's four times more powerful than the previous generation.
But Apple's biggest focus was on the M4's Neural Engine, the part of the chip dedicated to running AI applications. The company says the M4's Neural Engine is the company's fastest ever and more powerful than any neural processing unit available in today's AI PCs.
It may all seem like Apple is pampering itself with competition, but that's only to a point. But it also signals that we are entering a new era of PC marketing that emphasizes the potential of generative AI applications running directly on the machine rather than in the cloud.
Microsoft (MSFT) is already driving the AI PC category along with Intel (INTC), AMD (AMD), Qualcomm (QCOM), and Nvidia (NVDA), and Apple's entry into the race will make it easier for companies to The battle to become a company has begun. AI Champion has officially begun.
AI war
AI PC (or Apple AI iPad or AI Mac) is designed to run smaller versions of the kinds of large language models that power apps like ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot, and Google's Gemini. In fact, Google (GOOG, GOOGL) is already running a version of the Gemini model called Gemini Nano on its Pixel smartphones.
An AI PC is generally a PC with a Neural Processing Unit (NPU), or in Apple's case, a Neural Engine. These are essentially part of a chip dedicated to powering AI applications. Intel's Core Ultra chips, which debuted in December, feature their own NPU, while AMD has been showing off chips with its XDNA AI engine since May 2023. Qualcomm is also joining the fray with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. X plus tip.
All of these chips will be on Windows PC shelves by the end of the year. Microsoft is already counting on AI PC to be a huge success, going so far as to introduce dedicated Windows keyboard buttons for its AI-powered Copilot software. This is the first new keyboard button in nearly 30 years.
Apple, on the other hand, has been building Neural Engines into its chips since 2017, when it introduced the iPhone X with the A11 processor. The company has regularly touted the capabilities of its Neural Engine over the years, but the debut of the M4 chip caught its attention. When Apple first started publishing key performance metrics.
At the press event announcing the M4, Apple made sure to point out that in addition to having a neural processing engine on its chip for years, the M4 can perform 38 trillion operations per second (TOPS). TOPS is more or less a measure of how well a chip can handle AI tasks.
Qualcomm says the Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips deliver 45 TOPS of performance. According to CNET, Intel and AMD chips can reach up to 34 TOPS and 38 TOPS, respectively.
You can't talk about AI performance without talking about Nvidia, but it's almost unfair to compare its chips to its competitors. That's because Nvidia's graphics chips are dedicated to graphics processing and can be programmed to run AI apps. However, it's not a multi-purpose chip like Apple, Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm, so it's much more capable. In fact, Nvidia claims that its laptop chips offer 20x to 60x the performance of competing neural processing units.
Importantly, these tech companies have new statistics to contend with, and we can be confident that they will do just that. The fact that Apple has already published its own measurements is proof enough.
tops and you
What does that mean for the average consumer? Not much yet. There are still a small number of generative AI apps running on PC, Mac, and iPad. So far, there are programs that can help you manipulate photos and videos, as well as track eye movements in video chat apps.
But there's still no killer app that'll make you run out the door to get your AI PC. However, all that could change in the coming weeks. That's because Microsoft and Apple are set to kick off their annual developer conferences, where they're expected to announce a slew of AI apps and services, at least some of which should work on their respective devices.
However, the extent to which consumers can be persuaded to buy things like AI PCs will depend on whether they are truly useful.
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter @Daniel Howley.
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