Apple’s newly-released iPhone Air includes new custom chips designed in-house for greater artificial intelligence capabilities, giving the company full control of its core chip architecture.
Previous iPhone chips were made by Broadcom. Apple has been supplying chips for its products like the Apple Watch for nearly 10 years, and for the MacBook for almost five years.
“With the most Apple-designed chips in an iPhone — the powerhouse A19 Pro, N1, and C1X — iPhone Air is the most power-efficient iPhone ever made,” Apple wrote.
Apple’s A19 Pro chip features neural accelerators in each graphics processing unit core to give the device greater compute power for AI applications. The company’s AI system, known as Apple Intelligence, was introduced last year.
“We are building the best on-device AI capability that anyone else has,” said Apple’s vice president of platform architecture Tim Millet.
“Right now we are focused on making sure that these phones that we’re shipping today, or shipping soon, will be capable of all the important on-device AI workloads that are coming.”
Apple is prioritising on-device AI through these new chips to ensure users’ privacy, according to Millet.
Its N1 wireless chip will be included across this month’s iPhone 17 and Air lineup, which the company has said will offer better performance from wireless connectivity applications like AirDrop.
Apple has also begun rolling out a second-generation version of its C1X iPhone modem for the iPhone Air. Previous modems were made by Qualcomm, and other iPhones in this month’s lineup still include Qualcomm’s modems.
Apple’s custom chips are manufactured by companies like TSMC, with many set to be built at TSMC’s new factory in Arizona. Last month, Apple CEO Tim Cook raised its United States spending commitment to US$600 billion in four years, after the U.S. government announced tariffs of 100% on chips from companies not building in the U.S.
Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) share price closed at $245.50 on Friday, up from its previous close at $245.69. Its market capitalisation is $3.64 trillion.
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