undefined

points

[-]

Sure, I directly and explicitly talked about Apple's version of tensor cores in the GPU. But the ANE is by every definition a neural accelerator. Yes, I'm aware of Apple's weird branding for their tensor cores.

"In fact MLX does not even support ANE yet"

I didn't say otherwise. The ANE is a fantastic unit for small, power-efficient models, like extracting text from images, doing depth modelling, etc. It's not made for LLMs, or the other sorts of experimental stuff MLX is intended for. Though note that MLX's author's reason for not supporting the ANE is that it has a "closed-source" API (https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx/issues/18#issuecomment-184...), making it unsuitable for an open-source project, and given that MLX didn't want to just lean on CoreML. But anyways, the ANE is fantastically fast at what it does, while sipping juice.

In any case, the code change shown should have zero impact on the running of MLX on an iPhone 16 Pro. MLX tries to really leverage platform optimizations so maybe another bifucation is making the wrong choice.

by zozbot2346 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

The change's effects are dependent on what each SKU reports as its Metal architecture, both as identifying string (the equivalent to running 'metal-arch' in the Mac CLI) and as generation 'gen' number. Most likely you're misinterpreting the change as not affecting the iPhone 16 Pro, where in fact it does.

The MLX folks have various rationales for not supporting the ANE (at least as of yet), but one of them is that any real support requires implementing explicit splits in the graph of computations, where ANE-suitable portions are to be dispatched to the ANE and everything else goes back to the GPUs. That's not necessarily trivial.