4 ms·

Seems i am not the only one who wants to know whether the M1 neural engine is performant enough for prototyping :) It will be interesting how long the other de

• syntaxing 6y ago
  It would be pretty awesome to write an app, train the network, and deploy it using the same computer! I sometimes try to use google Colab to train some fun stuff (like style transfer) but sometimes it gives me a headache (grateful it is free though!!) It's hard to predict if the session will just stop and persistent data is a pain. Having an affordable (ironic using this word with Apple) for ML prototyping would be amazing.
• FPGAhacker 6y ago
  You know, they don’t mention the neural engine. I know very little of ML but maybe the neural engine isn’t helpful on the training side?
  • meowphius 6y ago
    The API of the neural engine is closed for some reason.
    • therealmarv 6y ago
      really? So WHO can use it then when not normal developers? Only Apple?
      • my123 6y ago
        It is not. See https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreml https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreml and https://github.com/apple/coremltools https://github.com/apple/coremltools. The neural engine on the Apple A11 wasn't exposed to apps at least at launch, but that's no longer a thing on A12 onwards.
• skwb 6y ago
  My gut instincts (based off of nothing but pure speculation and being a ML developer for several years) says no. For one, the M1 engine has 16 cores, vs over 1,500 for a 1660 series NVIDA card. I know it may not be apples to apples, but I have a very hard time believing it would be able to keep up with even the most marginal card for training.
  • wffurr 6y ago
    I don’t know about the neural engine, but the GPU on the M1 has 128 EUs in each of the 8 cores, making for 1024 EUs total. It’s not quite in the same league as a 1660 Ti but it’s close: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...