Look, I think posts like this are unhelpful - we don't know what will be in the next iPhone - Apple keep a very tight leash on their announcements. Nobody really knows what they are going to bring out until they make the announcement.
Also, we don't know where Akida will turn up next - look at
Renesas or
Megachips pulling the trigger on an IP deal - who really knew who they were? But they are significant players. In a gold rush, the people who consistently make the good money are the ones making and selling the shovels to the prospectors. Companies like
Renesas and
Megachips are the tech world equivalent of the shovel manufacturers. Renesas use
ARM processors in their products.
Qualcomm make
ARM based SOCs for a number of smartphone manufacturers (Snapdragon Series), they also have IP for modem units - but they don't make Apple System on Chips (SOCs).
Apple have a custom
ARM based SOC called the Bionic they are up to the A16.
TSMC fabs their silicon.
6 core CPU, 5 core GPU, and a 16 core AI "Neural Engine" for machine learning (ML) tasks.
https://www.androidauthority.com/apple-a16-bionic-3207607/It's similar in structure to the Pixel 6 "
Tensor" SOC - which is a customised version of Samsung's Exynos SOC. Which also uses
ARM IP
The important takeaway is more and more smartphones are including SOCs with a dedicated AI chip. At this stage the AI chip has to call back to a ML server, which provides an inference algorithm to the ML chip on board the device - learning happens at the server, not on the device. Who has the
commercially available IP to bring that learning back to the device and remove the need for contact with an ML server and can also do that processing work extremely efficiently?
You also have companies like
Prophesee using Akida in their vision sensors, who are also working with these manufacturers.
From a pure performance standpoint - removing the need to constantly call back to a ML server to receive a AI algorithms and also send back learning data has benefits. There are also security benefits if your custom voice recognition algo, face recognition, health monitor data etc etc etc doesn't have to go away from your device.
There's nothing definitive that I would claim, but you look at the connections and you'd have to be confident something is going to come up.
(20min delay)