Apple Testing External Display With Built-in A13 Chip and Neural Engine, Says Report

Apple may be internally testing a new external display with an onboard A13 Bionic System on a Chip (SoC) as well as Apple’s Neural Engine — reports 9to5Mac, citing sources close to the matter.

The new display is reportedly code-named J327, but not much else is known about it at this point. The sources say that Apple is currently testing the display with a built-in A13 chip, which is the same processor sported by the iPhone 11 lineup, and Apple Neural Engine — an in-house Apple processor designed specifically to handle machine learning and  AI-related tasks.

The A13 chip is definitely no slouch, and could accelerate graphics rendering from a connected computer to the external display while relieving a significant amount of stress on the computer’s internal CPU.

In addition, the integrated processor could also team up with the internal chip on a connected computer to tackle more intensive graphics tasks and improve rendering performance.

While the resolution on this new display or other technical specifications are anyone’s best guess right now, it could end up being the successor to Apple’s Pro Display XDR, which was originally rumoured to have a dedicated GPU, in the future.

There have been reports of Apple developing an external display with onboard processing power since as far back as 2016, and it looks like Apple hasn’t given up on those plans. Originally, however, Apple was rumoured to be working on external displays with built-in GPUs, not CPUs.

Right now, this new display is merely a report of Apple working on something of the sort internally. A lot about the project may change as it makes its way through Apple’s product pipeline.