iMac Pro Tipped to Offer Always-On Siri Voice Recognition With Apple A10 SoC

We know Apple is preparing the stage for the iMac Pro, and now reports tip it would ship with an Apple A10 Fusion coprocessor to support hands-free Siri voice control. The latest development would make the upcoming iMac Pro the first Mac in the company's history to debut with a coprocessor - similar to the recent MacBook Pro models that included a custom T1 chip. To recall, the iMac Pro is set to go on sale in December.

Digging into the BridgeOS 2.0 code, reverse engineering expert Jonathan Levin has found a mention of Apple's A10 coprocessor - which was debuted on the iPhone 7 last year. Developer Steve Troughton-Smith, who had revealed some major details about HomePod in the past, has leveraged the code spotted by Levin and pointed out the presence of always-on "Hey Siri" hotword on the new iMac Pro. "If I had to guess, I would say that the A10 in the iMac Pro could be capable of always-on 'Hey Siri'," the developer tweeted.

The A10 Fusion chip is likely to be accompanied by 512MB RAM to support the standalone Siri integration. Troughton-Smith notes that unlike the case of the MacBook Pro that uses the T1 chip only when its Touch Bar is in use, the new iMac Pro would always be running the A10 to enable the hands-free experience. The presence of A10 Fusion doesn't mean that Apple is about to totally rely on its native chips. The next-generation iMac Pro can be expected to have an x86 processor as the primary powerhouse.

As the development suggests, Apple would make the experience more intuitive by adding hands-free Siri on the next iMac Pro. Third-party developers are not likely to receive access to the A10 coprocessor to add any custom tweaks. However, the coprocessor itself would enable the system to enhance power efficiency and make the interface speedier by handling low-power tasks.