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> The Apple Neural Engine (ANE) is a separate unit in M-series chips, and isn’t directly accessible to third parties. As a result, knowledge of it is limited...
by uticus 3y ago
> The Apple Neural Engine (ANE) is a separate unit in M-series chips, and isn’t directly accessible to third parties. As a result, knowledge of it is limited...Access to ANE computation is only available through CoreML and related features in macOS. Even there, developers are given limited options as to what does get executed in the ANE, and in practice it appears little used even when running Machine Learning tasks.
I had no idea ANE wasn't very accessible. Especially when the marketing materials [0] seem to tout is is available for use by devs, or when people are asking 'can I run LLM x on my Mac' [1]
[0] "An enhanced 16-core Neural Engine accelerates popular machine learning models. Image processing tools like DeNoise AI and Gigapixel AI from Topaz get even faster." https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38267869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38267869
- saagarjha 3y agoThey are plenty accessible if you use the APIs Apple provides to talk to them, such as the one mentioned in the article: CoreML.
- uticus 3y agoWell, that's my point though, it is already pointed out in the section I quoted: > Access to ANE computation is only available through CoreML and related features in macOS. Even there, developers are given limited options... The article makes it sound like it's not 'plenty accessible.'