iPhone Breeze is the heavy newcomer amongst Apple’s actual lineup that went on sale Friday, however throughout the thin telephone’s raised plateau is any other unused piece of {hardware} that indicators a renewed focal point on synthetic logic.
Apple’s customized A19 Professional chip introduces a significant structure trade, with neural accelerators added to every GPU core to extend compute energy. Apple additionally debuted its first ever wi-fi chip for iPhone, the N1, and a 2d future of its iPhone modem, the C1X. It’s a exit analysts say provides Apple regulate of all of the core chips in its telephones.
“That’s where the magic is. When we have control, we are able to do things beyond what we can do by buying a merchant silicon part,” mentioned Tim Millet, Apple vp of platform structure. He sat i’m sick with CNBC at Apple Ground in September for the primary U.S. interview concerning the unused chips.
Till now, Broadcom used to be the primary supplier of wi-fi and bluetooth chips for iPhones, even supposing Apple has made networking chips for the AirPods and Apple Attend to for just about a decade. Apple’s N1 is in all the iPhone 17 lineup and the iPhone Breeze.
Arun Mathias, Apple vp of wi-fi instrument applied sciences and ecosystems, gave CNBC an instance of the N1’s stepped forward Wi-Fi capability.
“One of the things people may not realize is that your Wi-Fi access points actually contribute to your device’s awareness of location, so you don’t need to use GPS, which actually costs more from a power perspective,” Mathias mentioned. “By being able to do this more seamlessly in the background, not needing to wake up the application processor as much, we can do that significantly more efficiently.”
Apple’s unused customized SoC for iPhone, A19 Professional, has neural accelerators added to the GPU cores to prioritize AI workloads
Emily Ground
For iPhone modems, Qualcomm has been the only real supplier since 2020. That modified in February when Apple unveiled the C1 within the iPhone 16e. It’s a plan first poised in movement in 2019, with Apple’s acquire of Intel’s modem industry for $1 billion. Qualcomm has lengthy warned traders of the approaching trade.
Qualcomm modems stay within the iPhone 17, 17 Professional and 17 Professional Max, however Apple’s C1X is within the iPhone Breeze.
“It may not be as good as Qualcomm’s yet, in terms of just overall throughput and performance, but they can control it and they can make it run at lower power. So you’re going to get better battery life,” mentioned Ben Bajarin, CEO of Ingenious Methods, a generation analysis and consulting company. He expects Apple to “completely phase out” Qualcomm within the “next couple of years.”
Apple’s Mathias mentioned the C1X is “up to twice as fast” because the C1 and “uses 30% less energy” than the Qualcomm modem within the iPhone 16 Professional.
Neither Qualcomm or Broadcom noticed a lot marketplace have an effect on following Apple’s announcement, and each firms will uphold licensing offers with Apple for sure core applied sciences.
“They probably won’t ever have their own Apple model like Google or OpenAI,” Bajarin said. “They’re still going to run those services on iPhone, right? They want the iPhone to be the best place for developers to run their AI.”
Apple has been making its own system on a chip, or SoC, since the A series launched with the iPhone 4 in 2010. The latest generation A19 Pro has a new chip architecture that prioritizes AI workloads, adding neural accelerators to the GPU cores.
“We are building the best on-device AI capability that anyone else has,” Millet told CNBC. “Right now we are focused on making sure that these phones that we’re shipping today, or shipping soon, will be capable of all the important on-device AI workloads that are coming.”
Privacy is a major reason Apple is prioritizing on-device AI, but Millet said there’s another reason, too.
“It is efficient for us. It is responsive. We know that we are much more in control over the experience,” he said.
One “built-in AI” feature Millet highlighted is the new front camera that uses AI to detect a new face and automatically switches to taking a horizontal photo. “It’s leveraging a full complement of almost all the capabilities in the A19 Pro,” Millet said.
Apple’s original AI hardware, its Neural Engine, was first unveiled back in 2017. It was barely mentioned at the launch. Instead, it’s all about adding compute power to the GPUs.
“The integration of the neural processing is reaching MacBook Pro class performance inside an iPhone,” Millet said. “It’s a big, big step forward in ML compute. And so when you look inside the Neural Engine, for example, you have a lot of dense matrix math. We didn’t have that capability in our GPU. But now we do with A19 Pro.”
Bajarin told CNBC that Apple’s neural accelerators may work similarly to the tensor cores on Nvidia‘s AI chips, such as the H100.
“We’re integrating neural processing in a way that allows someone who’s writing a program to one of those small processors, extending the instruction set so they have a new class of computer that they have access to right there, and they can switch back and forth between 3D-rendering instructions and neural-processing instructions, all seamlessly inside the same microprogram,” Millet said.
Apple’s previous generation A19 SoC is in the base model iPhone 17, while the A19 Pro is in the iPhone Air, iPhone 17 and 17 Pro Max.
Apple’s iPhone 17 Pro shown on September 9, 2025 at Apple Park in California has enhanced 3D-rendering capabilities powered by Apple’s custom chip, A19 Pro, with neural accelerators added to the 6 GPU cores.
Katie Tarasov
Following overheating issues in the iPhone 15, a new “vapor chamber” in the Pro models keeps the custom chips cool.
“It’s actually positioned in concert with where the system on a chip, the A19 Pro is positioned,” said Kaiann Drance, Apple’s vice president of worldwide iPhone product marketing. “We think about how that all goes together, including with that forged unibody aluminum design, which is incredibly thermally conductive so that we can effectively dissipate heat with the vapor chamber, with where it’s positioned with our chip. And it’s even laser welded into it, which creates a metallic bond which also helps dissipate heat.”
“We expect that there would be modems coming to Mac. We would expect there’s modems coming to iPad. There’s probably N variants of the networking chip coming to Mac,” Bajarin said. “I think over the course of the next few years, it will be on all of the portfolio.”
When CNBC asked Apple’s Millet if neural accelerators will be in the GPU cores of M5, the next anticipated SoC for Mac, he said, “We have a unified approach to architecture.”
The iPhone maker plans to manufacture at least some of its custom chips in the U.S., at facilities like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company‘s new campus in Arizona, where CNBC got a tour of the first completed fab.
Apple’s A19 Pro is made at the leading edge of TSMC’s 3-nanometer node. While TSMC is workingtowards 3nm manufacturing in Arizona by 2028, it’s no longer there but.
“If you need to be on the leading edge, it’s going to be Taiwan for the time being,” Bajarin mentioned.
In August, Trump introduced a 100% tariff on chips from firms no longer making locally. That very same future, Apple higher its U.S. spending constancy to $600 billion over the upcoming 4 years. CEO Tim Cook dinner mentioned a part of that may exit towards developing an “end-to-end silicon supply chain right here in America.”
“There’s really a question of what part of tariffs impact the silicon supply chain,” Bajarin mentioned. “This is obviously why Apple and Tim Cook are on their mission and out there talking about investing in America.”
As a part of that plan, Bajain mentioned Apple may give suffering U.S. chipmaker Intel “serious consideration if 14A really does deliver on all of its promises.” Despite the fact that, he added, it’s “going to be awhile” prior to Intel “becomes a viable option.”
For now, Apple is dedicated to creating chips at TSMC Arizona.
“We are super excited about TSMC’s push into U.S. manufacturing. Obviously it will help us from a time zone perspective, and we also appreciate that the diversity of the supply is also really important,” Millet mentioned.
When requested if he is aware of how a lot of Apple’s $600 billion U.S. spend will exit towards customized silicon, Millet mentioned, “I hope it’s a lot.”
Attend to the video to look a behind-the-scenes have a look at Apple’s actual customized silicon.
