Can someone help me understand when these neural engines kick in in open source software?
I typically use python ML libraries like lightgbm, sklearn, xgboost etc.
I also use numpy for large correlation matrices, covariance etc.
Are these operations accelerated? Is there a simple way to benchmark?
I see a lot of benchmarks on what look like C functions, but today in my jobs I rely on higher level libraries. I don't know if they perform any better on apple HW, and unless they have a flag like use_ane I'm inclined to think they do better.
Of course chatgpt suggested I benchmark an Intel Mac vs. newer apple silicon. Thanks chatgpt, there's a reason people still hate AI.
> when these neural engines kick in in open source software?
It mostly doesn't because NPUs are bespoke and vendor-specific (which incents neglect by software devs working on open source numerics and ML/AI infrastructure), and the Apple ANE is no exception. Part of this effort is most likely about fixing that for the specific case of the Apple ANE.
Much of this information we already knew the very basics of from documentation of the M1/M2 ANE as accessed via bare-metal from Asahi Linux, but it's nice to see confirmation and it being explored in further depth. Note that according to OP Parts 1/2 for very large matmuls CoreML adds little to no overhead compared to the lower-level interface, so there seems to be plenty of scope for supporting ANE for prefill in local AI frameworks. Decode is generally memory-bandwidth limited unless context is very large, and the ANE requires special handling (converting from matmul to 1x1 convolution as described here is wasteful of memory bandwidth, as is potentially dequantizing to INT8/FP16 in memory) so it's less of a clear win.
> Throughout this series, “we” refers to maderix (human) and Claude Opus 4.6 (by Anthropic) working as a pair. The reverse engineering, benchmarking, and training code were developed collaboratively
Sure, "collaboratively." Why would I ever trust a vibe coded analysis? How do I, a non expert in this niche, know that Opus isn't pulling a fast one on both of us? LLMs write convincing bullshit that even fools experts. Have you manually verified each fact in this piece? I doubt it. Thanks for the disclaimer, it saved me from having to read it.
Humans also write endless amounts of convincing bullshit, and have done since time immemorial. False papers and faked results have been a growing scourge in academia before LLMs were a thing, and that's just counting the intentional fraud - the reproducibility crisis in science, especially medical and psychological science, affects even the best designed and well intentioned of studies.
Humans also make mistakes and assumptions while reverse engineering, so it will always need more engineers to go through the results, test things
The recent news is that Apple is supposedly replacing the Core ML framework with an updated version that will make it easier to integrate third party LLMs into your apps.
> the company is also planning a few other software-based AI upgrades, including a new framework called Core AI. The idea is to replace the long-existing Core ML with something a bit more modern.
We've got about a year before so many people are interacting with LLMs on a daily basis that its style starts to reverse infect human speech and writing
Great insight – Would you like to try and identify some specific "AI-isms" that you've noticed creeping into your own writing or your colleagues' emails lately?
Also the Prior Art section, which has telltale repetition of useless verbs like "documenting," "providing insight into," and "confirming" on each line. This was definitely AI-written, at least in part.
Below are the items from that section. How should they be written to not look like an AI?
> hollance/neural-engine — Matthijs Hollemans’ comprehensive community documentation of ANE behavior, performance characteristics, and supported operations. The single best existing resource on ANE.
> mdaiter/ane — Early reverse engineering with working Python and Objective-C samples, documenting the ANECompiler framework and IOKit dispatch.
> eiln/ane — A reverse-engineered Linux driver for ANE (Asahi Linux project), providing insight into the kernel-level interface.
> apple/ml-ane-transformers — Apple’s own reference implementation of transformers optimized for ANE, confirming design patterns like channel-first layout and 1×1 conv preference.
Reverse Engineering with AI is only going to get better. I have seen some crazy things friends of mine have done with Claude alone. Let's just says SaaS isn't the only industry that could one day suffer.
I have always wondered if the neural engine could be used for training - pretty excited for part 3 of this to see if the juice is actually worth the squeeze
I remember the good old days when Apple was desperate for developers and produced great documentation and there were a lot of great 3rd-party books too. You can't just give out awards in hopes that someone will make that great app.
For me, what AI brings is augmented humans. Just as we don't calculate on paper anymore, what is the reason of doing things by hand when a machine in X times better.
Want to code by hand, as artisans of old? Suit yourself.
If you strip away the branding, Apple has and continues to ship a ton of algorithms that likely use the ANE and end users can use CoreML to do the same.
Just some things that people will likely take for granted that IIRC Apple have said use the ANE or at least would likely benefit from it: object recognition, subject extraction from images and video, content analysis, ARKit, spam detection, audio transcription.
Don’t forget FaceID and many of the image manipulation.
And while everyone else went to more powerful giant LLMs, Apple moved most of Siri from the cloud to your device. Though they do use both (which you can see when Siri corrects itself during transcription—you get the local Siri version corrected later by the cloud version).
Can someone help me understand when these neural engines kick in in open source software?
I typically use python ML libraries like lightgbm, sklearn, xgboost etc.
I also use numpy for large correlation matrices, covariance etc.
Are these operations accelerated? Is there a simple way to benchmark?
I see a lot of benchmarks on what look like C functions, but today in my jobs I rely on higher level libraries. I don't know if they perform any better on apple HW, and unless they have a flag like use_ane I'm inclined to think they do better.
Of course chatgpt suggested I benchmark an Intel Mac vs. newer apple silicon. Thanks chatgpt, there's a reason people still hate AI.
> when these neural engines kick in in open source software?
It mostly doesn't because NPUs are bespoke and vendor-specific (which incents neglect by software devs working on open source numerics and ML/AI infrastructure), and the Apple ANE is no exception. Part of this effort is most likely about fixing that for the specific case of the Apple ANE.
I worked on the Xcode team for years and know the lengths Apple goes to make this stuff difficult to figure out.
I just wanted to say that you’ve done an excellent job and am looking forward to the 3rd installment.
>I worked on the Xcode team for years
Why did you guys remove the ability to detach the console and move it to another window?
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Part 2 has benchmarks: https://maderix.substack.com/p/inside-the-m4-apple-neural-en...
6.6 FLOPS/W, plus the ability to completely turn off when not in use, so 0W at idle.
I've been guilty of this myself, but every other comment here is like "What about <insert something unrelated to the topic but related to apple>".
Much of this information we already knew the very basics of from documentation of the M1/M2 ANE as accessed via bare-metal from Asahi Linux, but it's nice to see confirmation and it being explored in further depth. Note that according to OP Parts 1/2 for very large matmuls CoreML adds little to no overhead compared to the lower-level interface, so there seems to be plenty of scope for supporting ANE for prefill in local AI frameworks. Decode is generally memory-bandwidth limited unless context is very large, and the ANE requires special handling (converting from matmul to 1x1 convolution as described here is wasteful of memory bandwidth, as is potentially dequantizing to INT8/FP16 in memory) so it's less of a clear win.
> Throughout this series, “we” refers to maderix (human) and Claude Opus 4.6 (by Anthropic) working as a pair. The reverse engineering, benchmarking, and training code were developed collaboratively
Sure, "collaboratively." Why would I ever trust a vibe coded analysis? How do I, a non expert in this niche, know that Opus isn't pulling a fast one on both of us? LLMs write convincing bullshit that even fools experts. Have you manually verified each fact in this piece? I doubt it. Thanks for the disclaimer, it saved me from having to read it.
Humans also write endless amounts of convincing bullshit, and have done since time immemorial. False papers and faked results have been a growing scourge in academia before LLMs were a thing, and that's just counting the intentional fraud - the reproducibility crisis in science, especially medical and psychological science, affects even the best designed and well intentioned of studies.
Humans also make mistakes and assumptions while reverse engineering, so it will always need more engineers to go through the results, test things
Claude likes to hide bad benchmarks from you, so it will show you where you are clearly winning. You even see some weird benchmarks in the article.
It's insane that the source code of ANE is not available even to the MLX team, possibly one of the reasons Awni (MLX project head) left Apple.
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Yes I haven't worked at a hardware company, nothing to be ashamed of!
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The recent news is that Apple is supposedly replacing the Core ML framework with an updated version that will make it easier to integrate third party LLMs into your apps.
> the company is also planning a few other software-based AI upgrades, including a new framework called Core AI. The idea is to replace the long-existing Core ML with something a bit more modern.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-03-01/apple-...
This article was clearly written by a human (and AI) but still has a few "LLMisms" such as:
- The key insight - [CoreML] doesn't XXX. It YYY.
With that being said, this is a highly informative article that I enjoyed thoroughly! :)
The article links to their own Github repo: https://github.com/maderix/ANE
We've got about a year before so many people are interacting with LLMs on a daily basis that its style starts to reverse infect human speech and writing
Great insight – Would you like to try and identify some specific "AI-isms" that you've noticed creeping into your own writing or your colleagues' emails lately?
This said, there were people that talked like this before LLMs, it didn't develop this whole cloth.
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My honest take? You're probably right
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Also the Prior Art section, which has telltale repetition of useless verbs like "documenting," "providing insight into," and "confirming" on each line. This was definitely AI-written, at least in part.
Below are the items from that section. How should they be written to not look like an AI?
> hollance/neural-engine — Matthijs Hollemans’ comprehensive community documentation of ANE behavior, performance characteristics, and supported operations. The single best existing resource on ANE.
> mdaiter/ane — Early reverse engineering with working Python and Objective-C samples, documenting the ANECompiler framework and IOKit dispatch.
> eiln/ane — A reverse-engineered Linux driver for ANE (Asahi Linux project), providing insight into the kernel-level interface.
> apple/ml-ane-transformers — Apple’s own reference implementation of transformers optimized for ANE, confirming design patterns like channel-first layout and 1×1 conv preference.
If only they could fix the iOS autocomplete, which is getting worse with every iteration.
The future is bright for software engineers.
The big takeaway isn't reverse engineering the ANE per se, but what Manjeet could do with his software engineering skills when accelerated by AI.
This is a good example of the present state of software engineering. Not future state - present state.
Reverse Engineering with AI is only going to get better. I have seen some crazy things friends of mine have done with Claude alone. Let's just says SaaS isn't the only industry that could one day suffer.
I never realized just how much hardware engineering Apple dedicated to enabling people to type faster with their thumbs!
I have always wondered if the neural engine could be used for training - pretty excited for part 3 of this to see if the juice is actually worth the squeeze
In principle most if not all inference hardware should be usable for training.
Efficiency is the question.
Tangential: Is anyone doing something similar to accelerate the support matrix of Linux on anything higher than M2?
I remember the good old days when Apple was desperate for developers and produced great documentation and there were a lot of great 3rd-party books too. You can't just give out awards in hopes that someone will make that great app.
Yeah, the Inside Macintosh guides were epic.
> human intuition driving the exploration
This, a thousand times this.
For me, what AI brings is augmented humans. Just as we don't calculate on paper anymore, what is the reason of doing things by hand when a machine in X times better.
Want to code by hand, as artisans of old? Suit yourself.
I, for one, love the smell of burning chrome.
If "AI" were doing anything more than repeating content from the web without attribution, I might agree with you.
Unreadable Claude slop
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Genuine question, not trying to throw a shade or anything, but are those cores actually useful with the state of apple intelligence being what it is?
They are also used by ML models that are deeply integrated in macos and ios without you knowing. Like object and text detection in images.
And help in Photos, Final Cut Pro, and other apps.
I wish they would (or wouldn't if they are) hook it up to the ios keyboard.
If you strip away the branding, Apple has and continues to ship a ton of algorithms that likely use the ANE and end users can use CoreML to do the same.
Just some things that people will likely take for granted that IIRC Apple have said use the ANE or at least would likely benefit from it: object recognition, subject extraction from images and video, content analysis, ARKit, spam detection, audio transcription.
Don’t forget FaceID and many of the image manipulation.
And while everyone else went to more powerful giant LLMs, Apple moved most of Siri from the cloud to your device. Though they do use both (which you can see when Siri corrects itself during transcription—you get the local Siri version corrected later by the cloud version).
Apple's OSes run a lot of local ML models for many tasks that aren't branded as Apple Intelligence, and they have done so for many years now.
https://dennisforbes.ca/blog/microblog/2026/02/apple-neural-...
This is a nice article. Thanks for sharing.
You can convert your own ML models to MLX to use them; Apple Intelligence is not the only application.
MLX does not run on NPUs AFAIK; just gpu and cpu. You have to use CoreML to officially run code on the neural engine.
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