MLX doesn't use the neural engine still right? I still wish they would abandon that unit and just center everything around metal and tensor units on the GPU.
The ANE is for very low power, very specific inference tasks. There is no universe where Apple abandons it, and it's super weird how much anti-ANE rhetoric there is on this site, as if there can only be one tool for an infinite selection of needs. The ANE is how your iPhone extracts every bit of text from images and subject matter information from photos with little fanfare or heat, or without destroying your battery, among many other uses. It is extremely useful for what it does.
>tensor units on the GPU
The M5 / A19 Pro are the first chips with so-called tensor units. e.g. matmul on the GPU. The ANE used to be the only tensor-like thing on the system, albeit as mentioned designed to be super efficient and for very specific purposes. That doesn't mean Apple is going to abandon the ANE, and instead they made it faster and more capable again.
What work product? Who is running models on Apple hardware in prod?
You don't have to believe this. I could not care less if you don't.
Have a great day.
If you had a source to cite then it would remove all doubt pretty quickly here. But your assumptions don't seem to align with how iOS users actually use their phone.
You seem set on MLX and apparently on your narrow view of what models are. This discussion was about ANE vs "tensor" units on the GPU, and someone happened to mention MLX in that context. I clarified the role of MLX, but that from an inference perspective most deployments are CoreML, which will automatically use ANE if the model or some subset fits (which is actually fairly rare as it's a very limited -- albeit speedy and power efficient -- bit of hardware). These are basic facts.
>how iOS users actually use their phone.
What does this even mean? Do you think I mean people are running Qwen3-Embedding-4B in pytorch on their device or something? Loads of apps, including mobile games, have models in them now. This is not rare, and most users are blissfully unaware.
correct and non-controversial
> An enormous number of people and products [use CoreML on Apple platforms]
non-sequitur
EDIT: i see people are not aware of
That seems like a strange comment. I've remarked in this thread (and other threads on this site) about what's known re: low-level ANE capabilities, and it seems to have significant potential overall, even for some part of LLM processing. I'm not expecting it to be best-in-class at everything, though. Just like most other NPUs that are also showing up on recent laptop hardware.
I would hope that the Foundation Models (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundationmodels) use the neural engine.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...
AMD is likely to back away from this IP relatively soon.