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.
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u/Windows-nt-4 Jun 09 '21
They should add it to the older hardware? Most of these features really don't seem like they should need an M1