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Comment by akshayt | Hacker News Reader

They are referring to integrated npus in current cpus like in the intel cote ultra.

They explicitly mentioned in the event that the industry refers to the neural engine as a NPU

But the word they used isn't "NPU" or "neural engine" but "AI PC"??? If I build a PC with a ton of GPU power with the intention of using that compute for machine learning then that's an "AI PC"

On paper you’re absolutely correct. AI PC is marketing rubbish out of Wintel. Apple’s doing a direct comparison to that marketing rubbish and just accepting that they’ll probably have to play along with it.

So going by the intended usage of this marketing rubbish, the comparison Apple is making isn’t to GPUs. It’s to Intel’s chips that like Apple’s, integrate, CPU, GPU, and NPU. They just don’t name drop Intel anymore when they don’t have to.

If they literally just said that the iPad's NPU is faster than the NPU of any other computer it'd be fine, I would have no issue with it (though it makes you wonder, maybe that wouldn't have been true? Maybe Qualcomm or Rockchip have SoCs with faster NPUs, so the "fastest of any AI PC" qualifier is necessary to exclude those?)

"AI PC" is a specific marketing term from Intel and Microsoft. I don't think their specs include dual RTX 4090s.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-shares...

An AI PC is a PC suited to be used for AI... Dual 4090 is very suited for small scale AI.

It might be a marketing term by Microsoft, but that is just dumb, and has nothing to do with what Apple says. If this was in relation to Microsofts "AI PC" then Apple should have written "Slower than ANY AI PC." instead, as the minimum requirements for "AI PC by Microsoft" seems to be 45 TOPS, and the M4 is too slow to qualify by the Microsoft definition.

Are you heavily invested in Apple stock or somehting? When a company clearly lies and tries to mislead people, call them out on it, don't defend them. Companies are not your friend. Wtf.

> Are you heavily invested in Apple stock or somehting? When a company clearly lies and tries to mislead people, call them out on it, don't defend them. Companies are not your friend. Wtf.

I don't own any Apple stock, at least not directly. I'm not defending Apple, just trying to understand what their claim is. Apple does plenty of consumer un-friendly things but they aren't dumb and they have good lawyers so they tend not to directly lie about things in product claims.

Fair enough. You are correct that Apple aren't dumb, but they do mislead as much as they can in marketing, and by their own words from previous court cases you're not a reasonable person if you think it's facts.

In this case they do straight up lie, without a question. There is no reasonable explanation for the claim. If they had some absurd meaning behind it then they should have put a footnote on it.

> Are you heavily invested in Apple stock or somehting?

This isn't a nice thing to say.

Microsoft/Intel are trying to push this "AI-enabled PC" or whatever for few months, to obsolete laptops without NPU stuffed in unused I/O die space of CPU. Apple weaponized that in this instance.

1: https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/what_is_an_ai_pc/

“AI PC” is what Microsoft and the industry has deemed SoCs that have an NPU in it. It’s not a term that Apple made up. It’s what the industry is using.

Of course, Apple has had an NPU in their SoC since the first iPhone with FaceID.

when they made up that term, they also made up a TOPS requirement that is higher than what the m4 has. It's not by much, but technically the m4 is not even fast enough to qualify as an AI PC.

The technicality they're operating on is that the "AI PC" doesn't have a "neural processing unit."

> faster than the neural processing unit of any AI PC today.

Ah. I guess you could argue that that's technically not directly false. That's an impressive level of being dishonest without being technically incorrect.

By comparing the non-existent neural engine in your typical AI PC, you could claim that the very first SoC with an "NPU" is infinitely faster than the typical AI PC

The phrase AI PC used by Intel and AMD is about having an NPU like in the Intel Ultra chips. These are ML only things, and can run without activating the GPU.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/14/23998215/intel-core-ultr...

The text clearly states faster than any AI PC, not that its faster than any NPUs integrated into a CPU.

They could have written it correctly, but that sounds way less impressive, so instead they make up shit to make it sound very impressive.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/americas-partner-blog/2024/0...

It’s the term Microsoft, Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm decided to rally around. No need to get upset at Apple for using the same term as reference for comparison.

Ps. Nvidia also doesn’t like the term because of precisely what you said. But it’s not Apple that decided to use this term.

If you want to adopt this new terminology, remember that Intel and Microsoft have a requirement of 40 TOPS for "AI PCs". How can the m4 be faster than any AI PC if it's too slow to even qualify as one?

Source? IIRC that 40 TOPS was just Microsoft saying that was the requirement for "next gen" AI PCs, not a requirement for any AI PC to be classed as one.

I’ve never heard anyone refer to an NPU before. I’ve heard of GPU and TPU. But in any case, I don’t know the right way to compare Apple’s hardware to a 4090.

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