According to a report in Taiwan's new Economic Daily, the iPhone 16 could receive a significant upgrade to enhance its AI capabilities.

The A18 chipset, which is believed to power this year's new iPhone, could feature an upgraded neural engine with more computing cores. This is Apple's designation for its Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which is designed to tackle machine learning and AI tasks.

Hopefully, this core upgrade will apply to both the standard A18 chipset in the regular iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus and the A18 Pro in the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max. However, the report does not reveal how many more cores will be added to the existing 16-core setup of the iPhone 15 series.

Apple is behind in the cell phone wars when it comes to AI, as Samsung's Galaxy S24 series includes several Galaxy AI features. These include everything from Circle to search, live translation, instant slow-mo for videos, and generative AI photo editing.

This rumor apparently also applies to the M4 line of Mac/iPad chips. However, the current Apple M3 chip is not yet available in any device other than the MacBook Pro M3, and given Apple's established chip upgrade pattern, it seems likely that the M4 series will appear some time after the iPhone 16 is introduced.

EDN's claims dovetail nicely with what we are hearing about iOS 18, a major software update for the next iPhone that is said to be packed with AI features, including trendy generative AI.

Some of these could be features exclusive to the iPhone 16 and would likely require a higher number of Neural Engine cores to make them work. Hopefully, Apple will reveal at least some of its AI plans for iOS 18 and other updated operating systems at WWDC 2024 this spring.

The iPhone 16 series will likely not be released until September, but in the meantime, expect to see a lot of leaked information to get a good idea of what to expect. Along with these AI-related rumors, it appears that the iPhone 16 Pro will feature an upgraded camera, a larger display, and a new Capture button on all models.