iPhone 16 rumour promises powerful on-device generative AI thanks to massive NPU boost on A18 SoC

It seems like all anyone in tech can talk about these days is generative AI, and the tech giants are more guilty of this than anyone else — just look at how much of the launch event for the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra (curr. $1,309.50 on Amazon) and its kin was dedicated to Galaxy AI. Notebookcheck previously reported that Apple would be introducing a new on-device version of Siri that will be based on a LLM, making the virtual assistant far more capable.

A new rumour from Taiwanese publication Economic Daily News doubles down on the previous rumour, indicating that the Apple A18 SoC that is expected to power the upcoming iPhone 16 will feature a significantly more powerful Neural Engine and the first bump in NPU core count since the Apple A14 Bionic from 2020.

It's unclear how much of an upgrade the new A18's NPU will see, but given that the iPhone 15 (curr. $729.99 at Best Buy) already saw a claimed 2× increase in performance over its predecessor, it's safe to say that an increase in cores will give Apple a firm increase in AI processing headroom, compared to the 16-core configuration found in the current Apple A17 Pro SoC.

A more powerful NPU certainly indicates that Apple expects to do a lot of the processing for its generative AI features on-device, rather than in the cloud, which theoretically makes it more secure than other AI systems, like ChatGPT or Bing Chat.

Having the bulk of the processing happen on-device would also be something of a first for the mobile segment. Google was caught late in 2023 offloading much of the Pixel 8 Pro's generative AI processing to the cloud, despite previously claiming otherwise.

Similarly, while Samsung's Galaxy S24 series devices do perform some of their generative AI tasks on-device, they still rely on cloud-based processing for more complex operations.