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Re:iPhone Air by sercand on Tuesday September 09, 2025 @03:22PM (#45187358)
Where did you see the matmul acceleration support? I couldn't find this detail online.
Re:iPhone Air by aurareturn on Tuesday September 09, 2025 @03:32PM (#45187525)
Apple calls it "Neural Accelerators". It's all over their A19 marketing.
Re:iPhone Air by emchammer on Tuesday September 09, 2025 @04:17PM (#45188249)
Does this mean that equivalent logic for what has been called Neural Engine is now integrated into each CPU core?
Re:iPhone Air by rmccue on Tuesday September 09, 2025 @04:20PM (#45188312)
Each GPU core, but yes, this was part of what they announced today - it’s now integral rather than separate.
Re:iPhone Air by kamranjon on Tuesday September 09, 2025 @04:15PM (#45188211)
Don’t all of the M series chips contain neural cores?
Re:iPhone Air by aurareturn on Tuesday September 09, 2025 @04:34PM (#45188526)
Yes, they do. They're called Neural Engine, aka NPUs. They aren't being used for local LLMs on Macs because they are optimized for power efficiency running much smaller AI models.

Meanwhile, the GPU is powerful enough for LLMs but has been lacking matrix multiplication acceleration. This changes that.

Re:iPhone Air by cchance on Tuesday September 09, 2025 @07:07PM (#45190706)
These are different these are built into the GPU Cores
Re:iPhone Air by astrange on Tuesday September 09, 2025 @09:58PM (#45192167)
The neural engine is used for the built-in LLM that does text summaries etc., just not third party LLMs.

And there's an official port of Stable Diffusion to it: https://github.com/apple/ml-stable-diffusion

Re:iPhone Air by mrheosuper on Tuesday September 09, 2025 @09:58PM (#45192172)
I thought 1 of the reason we do ML on GPU is fast Matrix multiplication ?

So the new engine is accelerator for matmul accelerator ?

Re:iPhone Air by wtallis on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @01:54AM (#45193831)
From a compute perspective, GPUs are mostly about fast vector arithmetic, with which you can implement decently fast matrix multiplication. But starting with NVIDIA's Volta architecture at the end of 2017, GPUs have been gaining dedicated hardware units for matrix multiplication. The main purpose of augmenting GPU architectures with matrix multiplication hardware is for machine learning. They aren't directly useful for 3D graphics rendering, but their inclusion in consumer GPUs has been justified by adding ML-based post-processing and upscaling like NVIDIA's various iterations of DLSS.
Re:iPhone Air by kridsdale3 on Tuesday September 09, 2025 @04:06PM (#45188045)
What a ridiculous way to market "linear algebra transistor array".
Re:iPhone Air by jacquesm on Tuesday September 09, 2025 @04:14PM (#45188191)
Hey man, it helps you think different. You just never knew your neurons needed accelerating.
Re:iPhone Air by kridsdale1 on Tuesday September 09, 2025 @11:21PM (#45192804)
I accelerate them every morning with an Americano.
Re:iPhone Air by liamwire on Tuesday September 09, 2025 @11:31PM (#45192875)
I have to ask out of curiosity, why is your first comment made with one account, and the reply with a similarly-named alt?
Re:iPhone Air by kmarc on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @04:00AM (#45194640)
To confuse all those neural accelerators scraping this conversation.
Re:iPhone Air by liamwire on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @04:16AM (#45194758)
That seems incredibly prescient for accounts created before even GPT-1. Obviously broad data scraping existed before then, but even amongst this crowd I find it hard to believe that’s the real motivator at play.
Re:iPhone Air by fennecfoxy on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @09:05AM (#45197046)
Account on laptop, account on mobile.
Re:iPhone Air by jimbokun on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @10:04AM (#45197881)
Which means what, exactly, to someone whose not a machine learning researcher?
Re:iPhone Air by butlike on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @11:44AM (#45199384)
I really hope someone got fired for this blunder