Neural Engine
Definition
Dedicated hardware in modern processors optimized for running neural network computations efficiently.
A neural engine is a specialized coprocessor designed specifically for the matrix multiplications and tensor operations that neural networks require. Apple's Neural Engine, found in Apple Silicon chips (M1, M2, M3, M4), can perform up to 38 trillion operations per second while consuming far less power than running the same computations on the CPU or GPU.
The neural engine enables high-quality on-device speech recognition and other ML tasks that would otherwise require cloud processing. When Ummless uses Apple's speech recognition framework, the audio processing and model inference run on the Neural Engine, providing fast transcription without draining the battery or requiring an internet connection.