During Apple's iPhone event in September, Apple's SVP Worldwide Marketing revealed the chip behind the new iPhones, the A11 Bionic processor with a new AI component that Apple calls the 'Neural Engine." This neural network hardware can perform up to 600 billion operations per second and is used for Face ID, Animoji and other machine learning tasks. The neural engine allows Apple to implement neural network and machine learning in a more energy-efficient manner than using either the main CPU or the GPU.

Today the European Patent Office published Apple's trademark filing for 'Neural Engine' as noted in the trademark form presented in-part below.

Apple has filed their trademark under International Class 009. Apple legal has chosen the scope of this class to cover the following:

"Handheld digital electronic devices capable of providing access to the internet and for the sending, receiving, and storing telephone calls, electronic mail, and other digital data; computer chips."

Patently Apple posted a report in late September titled "A new Research Report Claims that Apple has now Outpaced Google on AI with the new iPhone X." While Google had tried to take the lead with their Tango project, the report noted that "AR-enabled smartphones have failed to wage an AR campaign because their prices are too high due to the adoption of high-priced components such as depth measuring sensors, and the number of users of Tango-based AR phones is scarce due to limited cooperation smartphone partners, as well as immature integration between related AR software and hardware."

On the flip side, the latter point regarding Google's ecosystem being weak and uncoordinated is of course Apple's strength. Apple's SVP of hardware Technologies Johny Srouji stated in a recent interview that "We have better knowledge versus external chipmakers about where things are going to end up. Since we own the silicon, we own the software, the operating system and everything else, we deliver, always. We deliver for the exact specification of iOS and nothing else. We don't have to worry about other operating systems."

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