Does 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.
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.
Thanks. I didn't realise how much faster. Probably you can do 10x the FLOPs in similar die space on dedicated silicion vs GPU. I thought it would be faster, but not an order of magnitude more.
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.