Apple is working with semiconductor company Broadcom on its first server chip designed to handle artificial intelligence (AI) apps, reports The Information, which cited three unnamed “people with knowledge of the project.”
The chips are purportedly code-named internally Baltra. The Information says Broadcom and Apple are focused on the chip’s networking technology, which is critical for connecting a device to a network for AI processing.
The company aims to complete the chip design within 12 months, per the report. However, it seems that Broadcom may only be providing “chipsets” rather than designing and producing the server processors themselves.
The Information also says that this past summer, Apple canned the development of a high-performance Mac chip that would have consisted of four smaller chips stitched together. This was supposedly done in order to free up engineering resources for an AI server chip.
