Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ... by nmfisher on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @04:53AM (#23611416)

Raw CPU performance, perhaps not. But people definitely do care about a specific set of user-facing, ML-driven functionality - think speech recognition, speech synthesis, realtime video filtering, and so on.

Many of these are only barely possible on "pre-neural" mobile ARM CPUs, and at a significant cost to power consumption. Developing for newer devices is like night and day.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ... by martinald on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @05:47AM (#23611766)

Not sure that's true to be honest. Speech recognition on my old Pixel 2 is miles ahead of anything I've seen on any iPhone, which are 2-4x faster.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ... by nmfisher on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @10:00AM (#23614000)

Google's speech recognition is damn impressive, but I'm talking performance/power consumption, not "quality". Sticking a 2080 into an iPhone won't give you better speech recognition results, but it will give you bad results faster.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ... by RNCTX on Wednesday June 24, 2020 @06:58AM (#23626485)

Because speech recognition quality is a product of data harvesting, the one thing Google does well?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ... by cesarb on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @07:30AM (#23612530)

> > Many of these are only barely possible on "pre-neural" mobile ARM CPUs

> Speech recognition on my old Pixel 2

I don't think the Pixel 2 can be called "pre-neural". "[...] The PVC is a fully programmable image, vision and AI multi-core domain-specific architecture (DSA) for mobile devices and in future for IoT.[2] It first appeared in the Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL [...]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Visual_Core

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ... by pjmlp on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @07:03AM (#23612339)

When speech recognition starts understanding European Portuguese without me playing stupid accent exercises, and mixed language sentences as well, then I will care about it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ... by yyyk on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @08:38AM (#23613052)

I suspect access to a vast trove of user data is more important for ML than raw CPU power on the client.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ... by nmfisher on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @09:54AM (#23613936)

I'm just talking real-time performance and power consumption, not accuracy.

[ Parent | on HN ]