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> M4 has Apple’s fastest Neural Engine ever, capable of up to 38 trillion operations per second, which is faster than the neural processing unit of any AI PC to
by NorwegianDude 2y ago
> M4 has Apple’s fastest Neural Engine ever, capable of up to 38 trillion operations per second, which is faster than the neural processing unit of any AI PC today.
I always wonder what crazy meds Apple employees are on. Two RTX 4090s is quite common for hobbyist use, and that is 1321 TOPS each,
making two over 69 times more than what Apple claims to be the fastest in the world. That performance is literally less than 1 % of a single H200.
Talk about misleading marketing...
- syntaxing 2y agoDefinitely misleading but they’re talking about “AI CPU” rather than GPUs. They’re pretty much taking a jab at Intel.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- akshayt 2y agoThey are referring to integrated npus in current cpus like in the intel cote ultra. They explicitly mentioned in the event that the industry refers to the neural engine as a NPU
- mort96 2y agoBut the word they used isn't "NPU" or "neural engine" but "AI PC"??? If I build a PC with a ton of GPU power with the intention of using that compute for machine learning then that's an "AI PC"
- fwip 2y agoThe technicality they're operating on is that the "AI PC" doesn't have a "neural processing unit." > faster than the neural processing unit of any AI PC today.
- mort96 2y agoAh. I guess you could argue that that's technically not directly false. That's an impressive level of being dishonest without being technically incorrect. By comparing the non-existent neural engine in your typical AI PC, you could claim that the very first SoC with an "NPU" is infinitely faster than the typical AI PC
- sroussey 2y agoThe phrase AI PC used by Intel and AMD is about having an NPU like in the Intel Ultra chips. These are ML only things, and can run without activating the GPU. https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/14/23998215/intel-core-ultra-cpu-specs-availability https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/14/23998215/intel-core-ultr...
- SllX 2y agoOn paper you’re absolutely correct. AI PC is marketing rubbish out of Wintel. Apple’s doing a direct comparison to that marketing rubbish and just accepting that they’ll probably have to play along with it. So going by the intended usage of this marketing rubbish, the comparison Apple is making isn’t to GPUs. It’s to Intel’s chips that like Apple’s, integrate, CPU, GPU, and NPU. They just don’t name drop Intel anymore when they don’t have to.
- mort96 2y agoIf they literally just said that the iPad's NPU is faster than the NPU of any other computer it'd be fine, I would have no issue with it (though it makes you wonder, maybe that wouldn't have been true? Maybe Qualcomm or Rockchip have SoCs with faster NPUs, so the "fastest of any AI PC" qualifier is necessary to exclude those?)
- aurareturn 2y ago“AI PC” is what Microsoft and the industry has deemed SoCs that have an NPU in it. It’s not a term that Apple made up. It’s what the industry is using. Of course, Apple has had an NPU in their SoC since the first iPhone with FaceID.
- max51 2y agowhen they made up that term, they also made up a TOPS requirement that is higher than what the m4 has. It's not by much, but technically the m4 is not even fast enough to qualify as an AI PC.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- numpad0 2y agoMicrosoft/Intel are trying to push this "AI-enabled PC" or whatever for few months, to obsolete laptops without NPU stuffed in unused I/O die space of CPU. Apple weaponized that in this instance. 1: https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/what_is_an_ai_pc/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/what_is_an_ai_pc/
- stetrain 2y ago"AI PC" is a specific marketing term from Intel and Microsoft. I don't think their specs include dual RTX 4090s. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-shares-new-ai-pc-definition-launches-ai-pc-acceleration-programs-and-core-ultra-meteor-lake-nuc-developer-kits-at-ai-conference https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-shares...
- oarth 2y agoAn AI PC is a PC suited to be used for AI... Dual 4090 is very suited for small scale AI. It might be a marketing term by Microsoft, but that is just dumb, and has nothing to do with what Apple says. If this was in relation to Microsofts "AI PC" then Apple should have written "Slower than ANY AI PC." instead, as the minimum requirements for "AI PC by Microsoft" seems to be 45 TOPS, and the M4 is too slow to qualify by the Microsoft definition. Are you heavily invested in Apple stock or somehting? When a company clearly lies and tries to mislead people, call them out on it, don't defend them. Companies are not your friend. Wtf.
- pertymcpert 2y ago> Are you heavily invested in Apple stock or somehting? This isn't a nice thing to say.
- stetrain 2y ago> Are you heavily invested in Apple stock or somehting? When a company clearly lies and tries to mislead people, call them out on it, don't defend them. Companies are not your friend. Wtf. I don't own any Apple stock, at least not directly. I'm not defending Apple, just trying to understand what their claim is. Apple does plenty of consumer un-friendly things but they aren't dumb and they have good lawyers so they tend not to directly lie about things in product claims.
- NorwegianDude 2y agoFair enough. You are correct that Apple aren't dumb, but they do mislead as much as they can in marketing, and by their own words from previous court cases you're not a reasonable person if you think it's facts. In this case they do straight up lie, without a question. There is no reasonable explanation for the claim. If they had some absurd meaning behind it then they should have put a footnote on it.
- NorwegianDude 2y agoThe text clearly states faster than any AI PC, not that its faster than any NPUs integrated into a CPU. They could have written it correctly, but that sounds way less impressive, so instead they make up shit to make it sound very impressive.
- aurareturn 2y agohttps://www.microsoft.com/en-us/americas-partner-blog/2024/03/21/introducing-the-new-ai-powered-microsoft-surface-pcs/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/americas-partner-blog/2024/0... It’s the term Microsoft, Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm decided to rally around. No need to get upset at Apple for using the same term as reference for comparison. Ps. Nvidia also doesn’t like the term because of precisely what you said. But it’s not Apple that decided to use this term.
- max51 2y agoIf you want to adopt this new terminology, remember that Intel and Microsoft have a requirement of 40 TOPS for "AI PCs". How can the m4 be faster than any AI PC if it's too slow to even qualify as one?
- pertymcpert 2y agoSource? IIRC that 40 TOPS was just Microsoft saying that was the requirement for "next gen" AI PCs, not a requirement for any AI PC to be classed as one.
- janalsncm 2y agoI’ve never heard anyone refer to an NPU before. I’ve heard of GPU and TPU. But in any case, I don’t know the right way to compare Apple’s hardware to a 4090.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- talldayo 2y agoWatching this site recover after an Apple press release is like watching the world leaders deliberate Dr. Strangelove's suggestions.
- make3 2y ago(A H200 is a five digits datacenter GPU without a display port, it's not what they mean by PC, but your general point still stands)
- MBCook 2y agoThat’s not a neural processing unit. It’s a GPU. They said they had the fastest NPU in a PC. Not the fastest on earth (one of the nVidia cards, probably). Not the fastest way you could run something (probably a 4090 as you said). Just the fastest NPU shipping in a PC. Probably consumer PC. It’s marketing, but it seems like a reasonable line to draw to me. It’s not like when companies draw a line like “fastest car under $70k with under 12 cylinders but available in green from the factory”.
- NorwegianDude 2y agoOf course a GPU from Nvidia is also a NPU. People are spending billions each month on Nvidia, because it's a great NPU. The fact is that a GPU from Nvidia is a much faster NPU than a CPU from Apple. It is marketing as you say, but it's misleading marketing, on purpose. They could have simply written "the fastest integrated NPU of any CPU" instead. This is something Apple often does on purpose, and people believe it.
- MBCook 2y agoA GPU does other things. It’s designed to do something else. That’s why we call it a GPU. It just happens to be it’s good at neural stuff too. There’s another difference too. Apple’s NPU is integrated in their chip. Intel and AMD are going the same. A 4090 is not integrated into a CPU. I’m somewhat guessing. Apple said NPU is the industry term, honestly I’d never heard it before today. I don’t know if the official definition draws a distinction that would exclude GPUs or not. I simply think the way Apple presented things seemed reasonable. When they made that claim the fact that they might be comparing against a 4090 never entered my mind. If they had said it was the fastest way to run neural networks I would have questioned it, no doubt. But that wasn’t the wording they used.
- sudosysgen 2y agoNVidia GPUs basically have an NPU, in the form of Tensor units. They don't just happen to be good at matmul, they have specific hardware designed to run neural networka. There is no actual distinction. A GPU with Tensor cores(=matmul units) really does have an NPU just as much as a CPU with an NPU (=matmul units).
- phren0logy 2y agoI have a MacBook M2 and a PC with a 4090 ("just" one of them) - the VRAM barrier is usually what gets me with the 4090 when I try to run local LLMs (not train them). For a lot of things, my MacBook is fast enough, and with more RAM, I can run bigger models easily. And, it's portable and sips battery. The marketing hype is overblown, but for many (most? almost all?) people, the MacBook is a much more useful choice.
- ProllyInfamous 2y agoExpanding on this, I have an M2Pro (mini) & a tower w/GPU... but for daily driving the M2Pro idles at 15-35W whereas the tower idles at 160W. Under full throttle/load, even though the M2Pro is rated as less-performant, it is only using 105W — the tower/GPU are >450W!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- SkyPuncher 2y agoAll of the tech specs comparisons were extremely odd. Many things got compared to the M1, despite the most recent iPad having the M2. Heck, one of the comparisons was to the A11 chip that was introduced nearly 7 years ago. I generally like Apple products, but I cannot stand the way they present them. They always hide how it compares against the directly previous product.
- Aurornis 2y agoIt's a marketing trick. They're talking about NPUs specifically, which haven't really been rolled out on the PC side. So while they're significantly slower than even casual gaming GPUs, they're technically the fastest NPUs on the market. It's marketing speak.
- kllrnohj 2y agoIt's still lower than Qualcomm's Snapdragon Elite X (45 TOPS)
- smith7018 2y agoYou’re calling $3,600 worth of GPUs “quite common for hobbyist use” and then comparing an iPad to a $40,000 AI-centric GPU.
- sudosysgen 2y agoIt's almost 70x more powerful. A 4 year old 3070 laptop was cheaper when it came out and has about 200 TOPS, 7 times as much. It's just factually incorrect to call it "faster than any AI PC", it's far slower than a cheaper laptop from 4 years ago.
- astrange 2y ago"Powerful" isn't the thing that matters for a battery-powered device. Power/perf is.
- sudosysgen 2y agoIf they thought that peak performance didn't matter, they wouldn't quote peak performance numbers in their comparison, and yet they did. Peak performance clearly matters, even in battery powered devices: many workloads are bursty and latency matters then, and there are workloads where you can be expected to be plugged in. In fact, one such workload is generative AI which is often characterized by burst usage where latency matters a lot, which is exactly what these NPUs are marketed towards.
- acdha 2y agoAI PC is a specific marketing term which Intel is using for their NPU-equipped products where they’re emphasizing low-power AI: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/what-is-an-ai-pc.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/what-i... In that context it seems fair to make the comparison between a MacBook and the PC version which is closest on perf/watt rather than absolute performance on a space heater.
- sudosysgen 2y ago
- password54321 2y agoJust two 4090s? If you don't have at least 8 4090s do not even call yourself a hobbyist.
- numpad0 2y agoAlso the 38 TOPS figure is kind of odd. Intel had already shown laptop CPUs with 45 TOPS NPU[1] though it hasn't shipped, and Windows 12 is rumored to require 40 TOPS. If I'm doing math right, (int)38 falls short of both. 1: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-says-lunar-lake-will-have-100-tops-of-ai-performance-45-tops-from-the-npu-alone-meeting-requirement-for-next-gen-ai-pcs https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-says-l...
- kllrnohj 2y agoSnapdragon Elite X is 45 TOPS as well, so Apple's isn't even the fastest ARM-based SoC NPU
- citizenpaul 2y agoThis is standard apple advertising.The best whatever in the world that is the same as some standard thing with a different name. Apple is like clothing makers that "vanity size" their clothes. If you dont know that basically means a size 20 is 30 size 21 is 31 and so on. Neural processing unit is basically a made up term at this point so of course they can have the fastest in the world.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- DeathArrow 2y agoApple always had the fastest, the biggest, the best. Or at least they have to claim that to justify the price premium. Previous iPads had the best screens in a tablet even if they weren't oleds. Now that they finally use oleds, they have the best oled screens and the best screens in a tablet.