Apple’s AI system, Apple Intelligence, is the biggest highlight of this year’s WWDC; the smarter Siri, various generative AI features, and the integration of ChatGPT are highly anticipated.
Many users complain, about why are the devices with only the A17 Pro and M series chips usable.
The key reason lies in the memory capacity.
With the release of Apple Intelligence, Apple emphasized that it is only available for iPhone 15 Pro and Macs or iPads equipped with M series chips; that is to say, at least chips of the A17 Pro and M1 level are required to support Apple Intelligence.
Since the NPU performance of the A16 chip is 17 trillion operations per second, and the NPU performance of the M1 chip is 11 trillion operations per second, it is clear that the problem does not lie in computing power but in memory capacity.
Because iPads and Macs equipped with M1 chips start with 8GB of RAM, and only the iPhone 15 Pro among iPhones has 8GB, while the iPhone 15 with the A16 chip has 6GB.
Apple Intelligence will run a large language model with 3 billion parameters, and to reduce the space occupied by the language model, part of the data is compressed into a mixed form of 2-bit and 4-bit, requiring 0.7-1.5GB of storage space for operation at any time, meaning that Apple Intelligence currently requires about 2GB or less of memory.
The 8GB memory space of the A17 Pro and M1 chips, with 6GB for daily use, leaves 2GB available for Apple Intelligence; the A16 chip only has 6GB, with no extra space available to run Apple Intelligence, thus it cannot be used.
Microsoft’s demand for AI PCs is 40 TOPS; for Apple, with cloud computing, the device end only needs 11 TOPS to run AI applications.
In the future, Apple Intelligence will undoubtedly continue to upgrade (most likely to a large language model with 7 billion parameters); by then, more RAM will be required to operate, and Apple may use this as a standard to distinguish between high-end and low-end products.
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