The chip inside the iPhone 7 will reportedly be inside Apple's new iMac Pro as well (AAPL)

iMac Pro

New leaks surfaced over the weekend mention that the chip powering the iPhone 7 may live inside Apple's upcoming iMac Pro as a coprocessor to handle lighter tasks.
These tasks may include an always-on "Hey Siri" feature to summon the digital assistant with your voice.

Apple's A10 Fusion system-on-a-chip (SoC), the one that powers last year's iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, will feature as a coprocessor inside the upcoming iMac Pro, according to Apple developers who digged inside a publicly available software package.

In a series of tweets, first written up by 9to5Mac, they mentioned that such a move would allow Apple to "experiment with tighter control" of macOS, in a similar fashion to how the company controls virtually all of the insides of the iPhone (it most recently introduced Apple-designed graphic processing units, or GPUs, for the first time in the new iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X).

Developer Steve Troughton-Smith — who leaked correct information about the iPhone X before its release from examining unreleased HomePod software — said that the A10 Fusion would actually never be fully dormant inside the iMac Pro, and enable things such as an always-listening "Hey Siri" feature, similar to the iPhone.

Confirmed: "Hey, Siri" is coming to the Mac http://pic.twitter.com/Dw9bRAzbxD
— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) November 18, 2017

We had already heard that there could be a secondary chip inside the machine, but early signs pointed towards something more akin to the T1 processor that helps the new MacBook Pros offload the management of the TouchBar and the Touch ID fingerprint reader.

The A10 Fusion, with its much more powerful innards, could theoretically help to do even more (To put things in perspective, the A11 Bionic chip inside the newest iPhones, which is an improvement over the A10 but still roughly in the same league, performed better than the Core i5 SoC inside the latest MacBook Pros).

There is no official date on the iMac Pro's release yet, but Apple announced that the all-in-one machine should hit retailers' shelves before the end of the year.

Looks like the iMac Pro's ARM coprocessor is arm64 🤔 Seems to handle the macOS boot & security process, as expected; iMac Pro lets Apple experiment with tighter control without the rest of the userbase freaking out. More info & download here: https://t.co/wmbNeVSEZX
— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) November 18, 2017