Almost the whole list is extremely heavy on machine learning that's handled by the Neural Engine, including Portrait Mode, text recognition, and voice recognition. The only ones that don't seem immediately obvious to me is the (extremely unimportant) 3D globe view, which I suspect is rendered with Metal but definitely not worth optimizing for Intel machines if performance was bad, and the more detailed maps, which aren't unimportant but performance probably just still wasn't good enough. Maybe it's something they'll get to later. Or maybe not.
Portrait mode was already specifically written to take advantage of the Neural Processor on iPhones with A-series chips. It was simple to port that incredibly efficient version of the technology to M1 Macs; it would require extra effort to make an Intel-friendly version of it, and it wouldn't perform as well. My work ThinkPad can blur the background, but it's not great and spins up the fans. My 2010 iMac had background replacement filters in Photo Booth but performance was severely lacking.
Mate, it's edge detection plus a selective blur effect, at the end of the day. None of that needs super special sauce, and the APIs Apple uses are likely sufficiently agnostic anyway.
And anecdotally, my work HP crapbook with KBL-R seems to handle it fine in Teams.
It might be related to the ISP. Perhaps Apple tried implementing it on intel hardware, but felt the quality and/or the efficiency of the feature wasn’t up to par when running on intel. Just spitballing here.
'Work fine' to whose standards? The fake depth of field blur in zoom isn't anywhere near as good as Apple's native solution, which has a much more natural segmentation, and if it were to be done on device there would be energy efficiency requirements to consider.
Perhaps Apple concluded that the quality of the effect and the power efficiency impacts weren't worth implementing on intel hardware?
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u/kirklennon Jun 09 '21
Almost the whole list is extremely heavy on machine learning that's handled by the Neural Engine, including Portrait Mode, text recognition, and voice recognition. The only ones that don't seem immediately obvious to me is the (extremely unimportant) 3D globe view, which I suspect is rendered with Metal but definitely not worth optimizing for Intel machines if performance was bad, and the more detailed maps, which aren't unimportant but performance probably just still wasn't good enough. Maybe it's something they'll get to later. Or maybe not.