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Apple Neural Engine Internal: From ML Algorithm to HW Registers
- blopeur 5y agoVideo : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wvBDUnPNEo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wvBDUnPNEo
- retskrad 5y agoFTC should investigate Apple for misleading and false advertising. Apple in their presentation compared the M1 Max to the NVidia RTX 3080 mobile and claimed the M1 Max chip can compete with the Nvidia card but yesterdays video by Linus Tech Tips show that the M1 Max is only competitive when it comes to editing video, which is an extremely narrow use case. As a general purpose GPU, the M1 Max is years behind the RTX 3080.
- manuelabeledo 5y agoThe M1 Max runs also at a fraction of the 3080 TDP. Performance in gaming is a non issue. Apple didn’t advertise it as a gaming machine, and quite honestly, nobody buys a $3000+ MacBook to play games.
- smoldesu 5y agoVery few people buy gaming laptops to edit video on, but that's not a reason for them to perform poorly at the task. The most frustrating part about the M1-series is that it's gaming performance is limited by arbitrary software decisions.
- treesknees 5y agoI bought my M1 Pro not for the sole purpose of being a gaming rig, but I did certainly buy it with the hopes that it could play games at least better than my old Intel integrated graphics laptop did. And it does - I can run the PCSX2 PS2 emulator with a controller and my fans don't even spin up. And with Rosetta II there are plenty of Mac games I can play without any issues.
- smoldesu 5y agoWhat do you intend to do when they remove Rosetta?
- Raymonf 5y agoUse a Windows VM? x86(_64)->ARM64 is not going away on Windows anytime soon.
- officeplant 5y agoPray that there are more natively ported games by then, and just not updating and holding onto Rosetta for much longer than I should. Win11ARM in Parallels doing x86 emulation works pretty well for older games and its how I play old shooters and Everquest at the moment.
- photojosh 5y agoYep. I'm running the Dolphin emulator which runs perfectly, even rendering at a much higher resolution. Except Apple broke Wiimote connecting via the native Bluetooth with Monterey. :(
- sudosysgen 5y agoPerformance is worse than a 3060 with basically the same tdp. Let's not pretend it's about games. Most workloads see 3060 level performance, basically anything except editing video in prores and ML workloads that require a lot of memory.
- manuelabeledo 5y agoHow so? The M1 Max TDP tops at 90W, and runs at around 40W during benchmarking. The minimum configuration for the RTX 3060 Mobile runs at 60W, and the maximum, at 115W, both for the GPU alone. You would need to pair it with a CPU with a max TDP of 30W.
- sudosysgen 5y agoThe M1 Max uses 120W when stressing GPU and CPU. The GPU by itself uses around 60W. These are sustained, not peak, figures. The M1 Max GPU does use 60W and so do many 3060 Mobiles with worse overall performance, at almost three times the price. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
- manuelabeledo 5y ago> The M1 Max uses 120W when stressing GPU and CPU. The GPU by itself uses around 60W. The article clearly states that it is 120W on the wall. The SoC goes up to 92W. Nowhere it says that the GPU itself uses 60W. You have also glossed over the fact that the article asserts that the MacBook runs at half of the wattage of an Intel system with a RTX 3080, 120W v. 256W. > The M1 Max GPU does use 60W and so do many 3060 Mobiles with worse overall performance A 3060 runs on 60W at the very low end. Usual configurations are 80W and 115W, and the differences in performance between those two are quite noticeable [1]. And again, you seem to focus on gaming, which is fine, but not the target market of a MacBook Pro. Notice that all the games tested are not native, but running on top of Rosetta 2. The M1 Max does great when it comes to video [2], and I would say the same for other workloads [3] [4] that have been, at least historically, where Apple has mostly focused on. > at almost three times the price Citation needed. Three times the price of what? The Intel system used in the Anandtech article is $3,149.00 [5], is the MacBook Pro $9,000? By the way, Nvidia also has pro versions of their GPUs, they don't perform as well in gaming as they do in other tasks, and they really are way more expensive than their consumer counterparts. Are we now going to dismiss a Quadro RTX because it does not do too well running Tomb Raider? [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/rtx3060mobile-multiple-tdp-configs-tested https://www.tomshardware.com/news/rtx3060mobile-multiple-tdp... [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/6 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... [3] https://blog.yiningkarlli.com/2021/10/takua-on-m1-max.html https://blog.yiningkarlli.com/2021/10/takua-on-m1-max.html [4] https://austinmann.com/trek/macbook-pro-m1-max-for-photographers https://austinmann.com/trek/macbook-pro-m1-max-for-photograp... [5] https://www.adorama.com/msige7611054.html https://www.adorama.com/msige7611054.html
- quenix 5y agoHow is this relevant to the Apple Neural Engine and this BlackHat talk?
- deep-root 5y agoIf you're shopping for a Macbook Pro, gaming is the extremely narrow use-case, no? Edit: various benchmarks seem to show the M1 Max games at about the FPS of a RTX 3060L (though with lower power). It's around the same price as a similarly spec'd 3060L gaming laptop.
- LegitShady 5y agoIt's signiticantly more expensive than a 3060 equipped Zephyrus and that doesn't change apples marketing pretending it was a 3080.
- vesrah 5y agoHaving owned one of those Zephyrus and owning a M1X there is no comparison on terms of quality or usability. Zephyrus is hot, loud, has a poor screen in comparison, and poor battery life.
- LegitShady 5y agoYou're right about the battery life, but in exchange an AMD zephyrus is significantly more performant at a lower price. That's a fair trade off. It's also not a ticking time bomb, since the SSD can be changed without sending the device into apple to change the entire CPU/SSD/GPU combo. Every one of these apple devices basically has planned obsolescence built in.
- katbyte 5y agoThe person your responding to listed 5 things the m1 max was better at. You responded by saying “but it’s faster!!!” While addressing none of them.
- LegitShady 5y agosome of those things are just subjective ('usability'), and some are part of the trade-off I was talking about. The zephyrus isn't as hot or loud when its limiting itself to the mac pros performance.
- RealityVoid 5y agoThe M1 is an impressive chip... for what it is. I bought an Air just to mess with it, while in the past I would not have touched Apple with a 10 foot pole. But, the whole framing around M1 being better than _everything_ in the x86 world was just weird and not true. Yes, perf/watt it was unbeatable, but the rest...if you just care about raw processing power, you'd still buy a desktop x86. I think Apple framed it this way and most media ran with it, but I don't see this a sue apple kind of deal.
- vmchale 5y agoI've actually found it slightly better in single-threaded performance. Only slower with rosetta.
- Jcowell 5y agoIf raw performance is the only thing you care about then you would get a desktop. If you care about mobility as well or changes a lot.
- marderfarker2 5y agoIt’s funny that you mention mobility. I usually see people stuck an extra slab of USB C to HDMI/USB hub beside their thinnest and lightest Apple laptops so that they can use peripherals.
- Toutouxc 5y agoUsually, except for the overwhelming majority of people who don't use a hub. (e.g. my Air has two cables running into it, power and display)
- caconym_ 5y agoNot sure I understand what point you're trying to make, but when I "go mobile" I am typically leaving behind my monitor, my wired keyboard and mouse/trackpad, my backup drive, and most of the other shit I might have daisychained off a USB hub. So I actually see it as an incredible convenience that I can run all of that, plus charging, plus wired networking, off a single USB-C port. It feels far more "mobile" than a setup where I need to plug/unplug all that stuff into the body of the laptop whenever I want to use my laptop away from my desk.
- perardi 5y ago1. Cite exactly what they said in the presentation, and in particular did they compare actual games, or synthetic benchmarks? 2. It is insanely competitive, especially given power consumption, with the NVidia card in both synthetic benchmarks and video editing. Not so much with games…but that's complicated by most games still running in Rosetta. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/6 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... 3. Video is not an edge case. And how can I claim that? Because you are here citing…a video. 4. What does this have to do with the linked article?
- mhh__ 5y agoSurely bigger issue is most games having given up supporting MacOS?
- pjmlp 5y agoAll game engines that matter in the market support Metal.
- mhh__ 5y agoDo frostbite and the call of duty engine/s support it? Also engine support means nothing if you can't actually buy any games for a few years.
- pjmlp 5y agoApparently not. On the other hand I guess there might be possible to buy some games written in Unreal, Unity Ogre3D, Defold, Xenko/Stride,....
- dhruvdh 5y agoFor 3: you cannot compare consuming media with creating media.
- ctdonath 5y ago
- exdsq 5y agoPicking up am M1 Pro tomorrow I hope. Assuming it can play Factorio?
- judge2020 5y agoFactorio has a Mac client[0] so the M1 Pro will surely play it just fine. 0: https://store.steampowered.com/app/427520/Factorio/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/427520/Factorio/
- selectodude 5y agoIt doesn't support ARM64 and according the developer, probably never will but it runs very well on Rosetta.
- i_like_apis 5y agoOof. Clicking this link got me blacklisted from my router. Had to spoof my MAC address to reconnect.
- Toutouxc 5y agoWhat?
- i_like_apis 5y agoThe router I'm connecting with is this Meraki thing I don't manage. It has some security features. Upon opening a link to blackhat.com, it put my MAC address on a blacklist.
- mr_toad 5y agoSounds like you should put the manufacturer on a blacklist.
- djrogers 5y agoThat is so completely bass-ackwards it’s not even comprehensible. If the router knows you’re trying to connect to a malicious site, it should block your access to that site. Taking action against your device in this scenario doesn’t serve any purpose at all. I’m going to assume that this router is incredibly misconfigured, and that’s not a default behavior.
- i_like_apis 5y agoI think the logic is that if you're browsing blackhat.com then you are a malicious user, going there to download hacking tools or attacking the network.
- exikyut 5y agoRouters are stupid (and the engineering around them is often incompetent), here's a random incidental example of how they used to make life hard for Chrome 10 years ago: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=12066#c26 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=12066#...
- mensetmanusman 5y agoFascinating in a sense. All of this knowledge exists somewhere, but people are building their careers trying to understand what Apple built so that they can better understand what apple forgot.
- kccqzy 5y ago> I just did byte flipping on the ANEProgram, and an iOS kernel OOB read was issued. This does not give us a lot of confidence.
- martinald 5y agoDoes anything actually use the ANE? I've had asitop on vanilla M1 running and have literally never seen anything use it. This may be a dumb question, but would the space not be better used for more GPU cores? Then if an app actually does need to do neural net stuff, just use the GPU anyway? This way you wouldn't have the space the ANE uses idle 99.9% of the time.
- justin_ 5y ago> asitop Neat little tool > Does anything actually use the ANE? I poked around for a few minutes to see if I could get anything. I saw a blip of usage on in Photos when adding a photo, probably for the new text recognition feature. I was able to see a lot of usage in Photo Booth, I guess for face detection for effects. There's definitely third-party apps making use of Core ML, but it's not something I know much about. On the iPhone devices, it's also used for Face ID (as the article mentions), which is probably much more important to Apple. > This may be a dumb question, but would the space not be better used for more GPU cores? Then if an app actually does need to do neural net stuff, just use the GPU anyway? The ANE is likely going to be more power-efficient than GPU cores loaded up for similar processing. Could they use the space for more GPU cores? Maybe, but they would have to work it into their memory architecture, support the additional power requirements, and presumably handle other engineering challenges like thermal design. Including the ANE also gives them something else to put in their marketing materials lol.
- tgymnich 5y agoANE is used for the portrait video effect (blurred background) and other camera features.
- dannyw 5y agoDedicated neural net silicon is faster than GPU, at the cost of being less general purpose. NVIDIA GPUs for example dedicate a modest fraction of their die to Tensor cores, at the cost of less general-purpose CUDA cores.
- martinald 5y ago
- erwincoumans 5y agogeohot reverse engineered ANE last year, for his tinygrad project, https://github.com/geohot/tinygrad https://github.com/geohot/tinygrad He streamed the many-hours efforts on Youtube, in case this is your thing: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mwmke957ki4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mwmke957ki4