Tech Desk 
Jun 20, 2024
Apple Intelligence was launched with a warm welcome at WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) 2024, which was set to be compatible only with iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max.
Apple’s Senior Vice President for machine learning and AI strategy Giannandrea stated: “While it would be possible to run Apple Intelligence on older, less powerful iPhones, it wouldn't be fast enough. The inference of large language models is incredibly computationally expensive. You could in theory run these models on a very old device, but it would be so slow that it would not be useful."
SVP of software engineering Federighi said: "Our first move in any way is to figure out how we can bring features back as far as we can."
"It's a pretty extraordinary thing to run models of this power on an iPhone and it turned out it took us building this iPhone."
Read more: Apple WWDC 2024 — Apple Intelligence brings every new AI feature for iPhone, Mac
Moreover, for detailed information, Federighi stated that Apple Intelligence compatibility is dependent on "many dimensions of the system", and that "RAM is one of the pieces." The significance of RAM ability for operating Apple Intelligence was already supported by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who noticed that 8GB RAM appears to be the minimum in any compatible Apple device.
Additionally, Giannandrea directed to the Neural Engine, Apple’s in-house NPU as a significant factor. "A17 Pro (the chip inside the iPhone 15 Pro) is not the first A chip that's got a Neural Engine, but it's got a much bigger Neural Engine than the chip that came before."
The A17 Pro’s Neural Engine is competent of 35 TOPS (tera/trillion operations per second), compared to the 17 TOPS of the A16 Bionic chip utilised in the introductory iPhone 15 and the iPhone 14 Pro.
People are expecting that all iPhone 16 models are capable of using Apple Intelligence, while according to the rumours, all models are expected to utilise enough RAM and advanced enough chipsets.
