Don’t all of the M series chips contain neural cores?

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.

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astrange 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

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

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mrheosuper 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I thought 1 of the reason we do ML on GPU is fast Matrix multiplication ?

So the new engine is accelerator for matmul accelerator ?

	▲	wtallis 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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cchance 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

These are different these are built into the GPU Cores