With Apple joining the fight, the AI ​​chip wars have gone nuclear

The artificial intelligence (AI) chip war has officially kicked into high gear. On Tuesday, Apple (AAPL) revealed its latest iPad Pro lineup, complete with the company’s new M4 chip. The processor, Apple says, features a CPU that’s 50% faster than the M2 chip in the previous-generation Pro, as well as a GPU with four times the performance of its predecessor.

But Apple focused more on the M4’s neural engine, the part of the chip dedicated to running AI applications. According to the company, the M4’s neural engine is the company’s fastest and is more powerful than any neural processing unit available in current AI PCs.

All of this may seem like Apple is puffing out its chest at the competition, and to a point. But it also shows that we’re entering a new era of PC marketing focused on the promise of generative AI applications running directly on our machines, rather than in the cloud.

Microsoft (MSFT) is already making headway in the AI ​​PC category alongside Intel (INTC), AMD (AMD), Qualcomm (QCOM), and Nvidia (NVDA), and with Apple entering the fray, the battle over which company is The new AI Champion has officially begun.

The AI ​​Wars

The AI ​​PC, or in the case of the Apple AI iPad or AI Mac, is designed to be able to run smaller versions of the types of large language models that power applications like ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Google’s Gemini. In fact, Google (GOOG, GOOGL) already runs a version of its Gemini model called Gemini Nano on its Pixel smartphones.

AI PCs are generally PCs that include neural processing units (NPUs) or, in Apple’s case, a neural engine. These are essentially parts of a chip dedicated to powering AI applications. Intel’s Core Ultra chips, launched in December, feature their own NPUs, while AMD has been showing off chips with its XDNA AI engine since May 2023. Qualcomm, meanwhile, has also joined the fight with its Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus Chips.

All of these chips should reach Windows PCs on store shelves by the end of the year. Microsoft is already betting that AI-powered PCs will be a huge success, going so far as to introduce a dedicated Windows keyboard button to its AI-powered Copilot software. It’s the first new button on the keyboard in nearly 30 years.

Apple, on the other hand, has been incorporating its Neural Engine into its chips since it introduced its A11 processor in the iPhone X in 2017. The company has regularly touted the capabilities of its Neural Engine over the years, but the debut of the M4 chip marked the first time Apple has started releasing key performance metrics.

The story continues

During the press event introducing the M4, Apple certainly highlighted that not only has it been equipping its chips with neural processing engines for years, but that the M4 is capable of performing 38 trillion operations per second (TOPS). TOPS is more or less a measure of how well a chip can handle AI tasks.

Qualcomm, in turn, claims that its Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips offer 45 TOPS of performance. And according to CNET, Intel and AMD chips reach 34 and 38 TOPS, respectively.

You can’t mention AI performance without mentioning Nvidia, but it’s almost unfair to compare its chips to the competition. This is because Nvidia’s graphics chips are dedicated to graphics processing and can be programmed to run AI applications. But since they’re not all-in-one chips like those from Apple, Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm, they’re much more capable. In truth, Nvidia claims its laptop chips offer 20 to 60 times the performance of competing neural processing units.

The point is, there’s a new statistic these tech companies must fight for, and you can be sure they’ll do just that. The fact that Apple has already released its own measurement is proof enough of this.

TOPS and you

What does this mean for the average consumer? Still not that much. Generative AI applications running on PCs, Macs and iPads are still few and far between. Until now, there are programs that help manipulate photos and videos or track eye movement in video chat applications.

But there still isn’t a killer app that will make me run out the door to buy an AI PC. However, this could all change in the coming weeks. This is because Microsoft and Apple are about to launch their annual developer conferences, where they are expected to launch a series of AI applications and services, and at least some of them are expected to run on their respective devices.

How much they will be able to entice consumers to pay for AI PCs and the like, however, will depend on whether they are actually useful or not.

Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.

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