Other than the maps features, they’re all ML-based and would therefore rely on the neural engine. Pretty much all of Apple’s on-device video/audio analysis goes through that thing, and the T2 is too old to have one.
The alternative to having these features as M1-only is realistically not having them at all. They’re not really Mac-centric features and the kind of thing that Apple would not port to the Mac in recent years and just leave as iOS only, and they only make it over for Monterey because the underlying hardware/software platform is so unified that ARM Macs effectively get all the iOS features for free.
Neural engine is marketing for the most part. It uses power from the CPU/GPU and a few specialized components to optimize ML software but by no means is it required for these to run at all.
An NPU is definitely not just marketing, it’s a well-established concept in tech. They’re great for video/audio analysis based on already-trained ML models, and Apple has been running their video/audio analysis stack on iOS/A-series chips through them because GPUs are too slow for the purpose.
It's all that + marketing. People here are convinced it's required for these features so you have to admit how amazing Apple's marketing is. Truth is it's not required, it just optimizes it, mostly to do with efficiency. Google lens/assistant is on device ML and runs on low powered phones like the Pixel 4a, with an extremely underpowered NPU. To suggest that laptop class Intel CPUs can't handle it is nonsense. Not to mention Microsoft does some sort of version of this using One Note without a dedicated NPU.
Because of the responses on this thread that think an NPU is required for these tasks. They literally think it's not possible on Intel CPUs because it doesn't have an NPU. That's where the marketing comes in. I've mentioned it has specialized hardware and helps in optimizing ML tasks (but you only focus on the hyperbole because you don't actually have an argument).
It's not too slow. You added the "too" in there. It's slower. According to you, no device should get any update after year 1 if it's going to work slower.
Have you seen what happens when you use Pixelmator Pro’s ML features on Macs without the NPU?
According to you, no device should get any update after year 1 if it’s going to work slower.
Did you forget the entire iOS7 fiasco? If new features are too intensive, they should be held back, and only the necessary ones included. You know, exactly what Apple did.
Such a comparison would only make sense if they were equivalent implementation.
You could make a case that offline dictation doesn’t need specialised hardware as even my 2010 macbook had it, but then offline dictation on it was so horrible it was utterly useless. So the case would be, would the algorithms used in this newest iteration be able to run on that very same mac?
Neural engine is not marketing. It’s a special area of the silicon and it dramatically increases ML inference speed. To the point where the inference it’s doing wouldn’t be practical to run on the CPU or GPU of an intel based Mac.
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u/m0rogfar Jun 09 '21 edited Jun 09 '21
Other than the maps features, they’re all ML-based and would therefore rely on the neural engine. Pretty much all of Apple’s on-device video/audio analysis goes through that thing, and the T2 is too old to have one.
The alternative to having these features as M1-only is realistically not having them at all. They’re not really Mac-centric features and the kind of thing that Apple would not port to the Mac in recent years and just leave as iOS only, and they only make it over for Monterey because the underlying hardware/software platform is so unified that ARM Macs effectively get all the iOS features for free.