Report claims Apple is working with Broadcom to develop a custom chipset for AI – SiliconANGLE News

iPhone maker Apple Inc. is said to be working with Broadcom Inc. on the development of a customized server processor that will power the artificial intelligence features built into its iOS operating system.

A report from The Information cites three unnamed sources as saying that the project has been given the codename of “Baltra”, and the chip in question is slated to launch in 2026.

Apart from that, the report provides few other details, which is not surprising given the secretive way both companies operate. What we do know is that, during Apple’s developer conference earlier this year, the iPhone maker’s senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, said some Apple Intelligence features will be powered by on-device chips, with others running on cloud-based servers that use the company’s proprietary chips.

If Apple is indeed developing its own chips for generative AI, it would not be much of a surprise. The company has been using its own, Arm-based central processing units for years already. It’s also not a surprise to hear that Broadcom is working with Apple on such a project, as it already helps the company out with some of its 5G modems.

It remains to be seen why Apple is tapping Broadcom’s expertise again, but one theory is that it’s interested in the company’s semiconductor interconnect designs, which can enable faster chip-to-chip communications. Earlier this year, Broadcom showed off a new optical interconnect chiplet that’s designed to work with graphics processing units and other types of AI accelerators, and it also unveiled its 3.5D packaging technology, which can help chips to scale beyond existing limits.

Broadcom’s 3.5D eXtreme Dimension System in Package, known as 3.5D XDSiP, is a kind of blueprint that customers can use to build multi-die processors similar to those found in Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s MI300X GPUs. Those chips combine eight compute chiplets, vertically stacked on top of four input/output dies that handle chip-to-chip communications and memory management.

Rather than stacking its chips vertically, Broadcom’s design is said to use a face-to-face approach, enabling denser electrical interfaces between the chiplets, based on hybrid copper bonding or HBC technology. Broadcom has said this will deliver significantly faster die-to-die interconnect speeds and shorter signal routing, which translates to much higher bandwidth for chips to talk to one another.

Broadcom said the largest of its 3.5D XDSiP designs can support two 3D stacks, a couple of I/O chiplets and as many as 12 High Bandwidth Memory or HBM modules on a single package. The company has said the 3.5D XDSiP packaging technology will enter production sometime in 2026.

Given that Apple’s project Baltra has a similar timeline, it therefore wouldn’t be surprising if Apple’s customer server processor is using the same technology, though that cannot be confirmed. However, there is a precedent, considering that some of Apple’s chips, such as the M2 Ultra, already utilize multi-die architectures.

For now this is all just speculation, and we probably won’t know much more about Baltra until it’s officially announced, which means probably not before 2026. That’s because Apple is notoriously secretive about the new things it’s working on, while Broadcom is just as notoriously secretive about who is using its technology.

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