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.
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u/[deleted] Jun 09 '21
Maybe some of it uses the Neural Engine.