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Posted by zdw 1 day ago

Inside the M4 Apple Neural Engine, Part 1: Reverse Engineering(maderix.substack.com)
220 points | 55 commentspage 2
mattlangston 8 hours ago|
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.

giancarlostoro 6 hours ago||
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.
mayhemducks 6 hours ago||
I never realized just how much hardware engineering Apple dedicated to enabling people to type faster with their thumbs!
kamranjon 8 hours ago||
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
juancn 6 hours ago|
In principle most if not all inference hardware should be usable for training.

Efficiency is the question.

daoistmonk 7 hours ago||
Tangential: Is anyone doing something similar to accelerate the support matrix of Linux on anything higher than M2?
msie 6 hours ago||
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.
pstuart 5 hours ago|
Yeah, the Inside Macintosh guides were epic.
ericol 4 hours ago||
> 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.

pklausler 4 hours ago|
If "AI" were doing anything more than repeating content from the web without attribution, I might agree with you.
FL33TW00D 6 hours ago||
Unreadable Claude slop
techpulse_x 8 hours ago||
[dead]
poszlem 9 hours ago|
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?
rahkiin 9 hours ago||
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.
geerlingguy 8 hours ago|||
And help in Photos, Final Cut Pro, and other apps.
willis936 7 hours ago|||
I wish they would (or wouldn't if they are) hook it up to the ios keyboard.
dagmx 8 hours ago|||
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.

sroussey 7 hours ago||
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).

stetrain 8 hours ago|||
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.
llm_nerd 9 hours ago|||
https://dennisforbes.ca/blog/microblog/2026/02/apple-neural-...
malshe 5 hours ago||
This is a nice article. Thanks for sharing.
esafak 9 hours ago||
You can convert your own ML models to MLX to use them; Apple Intelligence is not the only application.
nullstyle 8 hours ago||
MLX does not run on NPUs AFAIK; just gpu and cpu. You have to use CoreML to officially run code on the neural engine.
mirsadm 8 hours ago||
Even then there is no transparency on how it decides what runs on the ANE/GPU etc
sroussey 7 hours ago||
Correct. OS level stuff get first priority, so you can’t count on using it.
znagengast 5 hours ago||
Turns out third party actually gets priority for ANE