Neural Engine: What it is and what it is for

The so-called Neural Engine has been part of Apple products for a long time. If you are an Apple fan and follow the presentation of individual products, then you have certainly not missed this term, on the contrary. When presenting news, the Cupertino giant likes to focus on the Neural Engine and emphasize its possible improvements, which they talk about alongside the processor (CPU) and graphics processor (GPU). But the truth is that the Neural Engine is slightly forgotten. Apple fans simply ignore its importance and significance, despite the fact that it is one of the most important elements of modern devices from Apple.

In this article, we will therefore focus on what the Neural Engine actually is, what it is used for and how important a role it plays in the case of apple products. In fact, it stands for much more than you might have expected.

What is Neural Engine

Now let's move on to the topic itself. The Neural Engine first appeared in 2017 when Apple introduced the iPhone 8 and iPhone X with the Apple A11 Bionic chip. Specifically, it is a separate processor that is part of the entire chip and plays an important role in working with artificial intelligence. As Apple already presented at the time, the processor is used to drive facial recognition algorithms to unlock the iPhone, or when processing Animoji and the like. Although it was an interesting novelty, from today's point of view it was not a very capable piece. It offered only two cores and the ability to process up to 600 billion operations per second. However, over time, the Neural Engine began to continuously improve.

The M1 chip and its main components

In subsequent generations, it therefore came with 8 cores and then up to 16 cores, which Apple more or less sticks to today. The only exception is the M1 Ultra chip with a 32-core Neural Engine, which takes care of up to 22 trillion operations per second. At the same time, one more piece of information follows from this. This processor is no longer the prerogative of apple phones and tablets. With the advent of Apple Silicon, Apple began using it for its Macs as well. So, if we were to summarize it, the Neural Engine is a rather practical processor that is part of the Apple chip and is used for working with machine learning. But that doesn't tell us much. Let's therefore move into practice and shed light on what it actually stands for.

This is how Apple introduced Mac Studio

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What is it used for

As we already mentioned in the very introduction, the Neural Engine is often underestimated in the eyes of apple users, while it plays a vital role in the running of the device itself. In short, it can be said that it serves to accelerate tasks associated with machine learning. But what does this mean in practice? In fact, iOS uses it for a number of tasks. For example, when the system automatically reads the text in your photos, when Siri tries to launch a specific application at a certain time, when segmenting the scene when taking photos, Face ID, when recognizing faces and objects in Photos, when isolating audio and many others. As we indicated above, the capabilities of the Neural Engine are strongly integrated with the operating system itself.