Comment by llm_nerd

"We might hope that macOS would process AI tasks using the CPU and GPU rather than the neural engine, when running in a VM."

That specific Geekbench test is to measure the ANE performance, which they did by setting the CoreML run to cpuAndNeuralEngine. They could have set it to all and it would use any hardware available, but that would be counterproductive to a test that hopes to measure the ANE, no?

And note that there is no "just ANE" option. In this case it is probably the virtualized CPU side of the equation that's yielding the massive slowdowns for int8 and quantized runs.

The ANE isn't the problem here.

https://dennisforbes.ca/blog/microblog/2026/02/apple-neural-...