It is rumored that the NPU performance of the Apple A18 processor will be more powerful than that of the M4!

Xinzhixun

2024-06-26 11:52Posted on the official account of Guangdong Xinzhixun

On June 25, according to the user @Mapple_gold on the social media platform "X", it was revealed that the NPU performance in Apple's upcoming A18 series processors may be more powerful than the NPU in the M4 processor.

Apple will release a new iPhone 16 series of phones this fall, which is expected to be equipped with Apple's new generation of A18 series processors, and may use TSMC's second-generation 3nm process (N3E) for foundry. At the same time, at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 10 this year, Apple unveiled a new AI system called Apple Intelligence, which will be integrated into the new OS for iPhone, iPad and Mac, combined with the ability of Apple silicon to understand and create language and images, as well as unleash AI capabilities across applications. For this, the new A18 series processors are needed to provide enhanced NPU performance.

According to previous information, the previous generation A17 Pro processor had an NPU of 16 cores and a performance of 35TOPS. However, in order to support the device-side large model, the mobile phone needs to support the large model with tens of billions of parameters to run on the device. In the definition of "AI PC" given by Microsoft, the computing power of NPU must reach at least 40TOPS. As a result, the NPU performance of Apple's A18 series processors is likely to be further improved, even surpassing that of the M4 processors for the Mac lineup.

In May this year, Apple released a new generation of 11-inch and 13-inch iPad Pro models that were the first to be equipped with the latest M4 processor. According to Apple's introduction, M4 is based on TSMC's second-generation 3nm process technology, with 28 billion transistors (an increase of 3 billion transistors compared to M3), 4 performance cores, and energy efficiency cores have also increased to 6 (2 more energy efficiency cores than M3), GPU is still 10 cores like M3, but NPU computing power has been increased from 18TOPS to 38TOPS, supporting dynamic cache, hardware-level ray tracing, hardware-accelerated mesh shading, support AV1 decoding and AI acceleration functions.

In this way, it should not be difficult for the NPU performance of Apple's A18 series processors to surpass that of M4, and it may even reach 45TOPS, which is the strongest NPU among the current AI PC processors.

Editor: Xinzhixun-Rogue Sword

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