Apple’s self-driving car program never really got off the ground, but it may have been what made the company’s chips the powerful AI performers they are. Early in the development of the self-driving platform, Apple realized that it would need powerful on-device AI processing. While the car processor was never finished, as Mark Gurman details in his latest Power On newsletter, it did lead to the development of the Neural Engine, the backbone of Apple’s on-device AI processing.

The Neural Engine made its debut with the iPhone X and the A11 Bionic. In those early days, it was primarily used for computer vision, powering FaceID, Animoji, and a …

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