Apple to Power AI Features With M2 Ultra Servers

Thursday May 9, 2024 12:18 pm PDT by Juli Clover

Apple plans to power some of its upcoming iOS 18 features with data centers that use servers equipped with Apple silicon chips, reports Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

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M2 Ultra chips will be behind some of the most advanced AI tasks that are planned for this year and beyond. Apple reportedly accelerated its server building plans in response to the popularity of ChatGPT and other AI products, and future servers could use next-generation M4 chips.

While some tasks will be done on-device, more intensive tasks like generating images and summarizing articles will require cloud connectivity. A more powerful version of Siri would also need cloud-based servers. Privacy has long been a concern of Apple’s, but the team working on servers says that Apple chips will inherently protect user privacy.

Gurman previously claimed that all of the coming iOS 18 features would run on-device, but it sounds like some capabilities coming this year will in fact use cloud servers. Apple plans to use its own servers for now, but in the future, it may also rely on servers from other companies.

Tags: Bloomberg, Mark Gurman

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Top Rated Comments

brett_x

32 months ago

If only they had a server operating system of their own....
(says a former OS X Server sys admin)

Score: 37 Votes (Like | Disagree)

andrewxgx

32 months ago

Maybe just use Nvidia GPU's that are like 50 times faster and are actually built for this type of workloads ?

why pay nvidia 80% margin if you can use your own hardware?

you are also missing the obvious: the M2 Ultra is a niche product, and bigger chips (the so-called M1/M2 Extreme) were cancelled because of that.
now Apple has an incentive to built those as not only they can sell it in Mac Pro/Studio, they can run their own servers on it with massive cost saving compared to what AMD and Nvidia offers.

big chips were given green light if this rumor is true

Score: 32 Votes (Like | Disagree)

HobeSoundDarryl

32 months ago

"Introducing our magical, incredible iCloud AI Pro Max... starting at only $69/month.

We think you'll love it!" ;)

Score: 23 Votes (Like | Disagree)

BC2009

32 months ago

I don't see how any chip could "inherently protect user privacy" -- that is just nonsense. Privacy is primarily a function of the software running on the chip. While there may be features of a chip that could help protect privacy in a multi-tenant environment (like a cloud server), that would be at a very low level such as protecting memory from being read across processes or threads.

Score: 21 Votes (Like | Disagree)

DelayedGratificationGene

32 months ago