First iPhone with 12GB RAM on the horizon with triple 48MP camera

Alleged Apple iPhone 17 series specs | Image credit – IceUniverse/Weibo)&nbsp

According to famed Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the specific Large Language Model (LLM) that Apple Intelligence runs on the iPhone or iPad devices themselves alone requires roughly 2GB of DDR RAM. The LLM chatbot-type services are artificial intelligence platforms written to recognize, interpret, and then generate text that looks like a natural conversation with the user. 

For Kuo, the 11 TOPS (trillion operations per second) that the M1 chipset of Apple can run is the minimum for Apple Intelligence, but a working minimum, so any Apple A16 chipset and above will do the trick.  “Microsoft believes the key specification for an AI PC is 40 TOPS of computing power. However, for Apple, integrated with cloud AI (Private Cloud Compute), 11 TOPS of on-device computing power is sufficient to start providing on-device AI applications,” mentioned Kuo.

In the future, he is of the opinion that Apple will be aiming for an Apple Intelligence LLM with 7 billion parameters, and that will require at least another 2GB RAM on top of the current iPhone maximum, so it could serve as an additional Pro and non-Pro model fragmentation pretext.

iPhone 17 Pro and the triple 48MP camera

This sensor uniformity makes color balancing much easier and more uniform, and does wonders for HDR stacking and detail preservation all along the zoom range. The complex computational photography involved, however, needs more operating memory to function instantly and with the needed quality, so Apple may have had to introduce 12GB RAM to its iPhone for the first time for those exact same reasons. 

Exciting times ahead, but we wouldn’t hold our breath for the iPhone 17 to get folded optics zoom as well, that one will likely remain reserved for the Pro series for the foreseeable future.