Genuine question, not trying to throw a shade or anything, but are those cores actually useful with the state of apple intelligence being what it is?

This article was clearly written by a human (and AI) but still has a few "LLMisms" such as:

- The key insight - [CoreML] doesn't XXX. It YYY.

With that being said, this is a highly informative article that I enjoyed thoroughly! :)

The article links to their own Github repo: https://github.com/maderix/ANE

The future is bright for software engineers.

The big takeaway isn't reverse engineering the ANE per se, but what Manjeet could do with his software engineering skills when accelerated by AI.

This is a good example of the present state of software engineering. Not future state - present state.

Part 2 has benchmarks: https://maderix.substack.com/p/inside-the-m4-apple-neural-en...

6.6 FLOPS/W, plus the ability to completely turn off when not in use, so 0W at idle.

I have always wondered if the neural engine could be used for training - pretty excited for part 3 of this to see if the juice is actually worth the squeeze

> Throughout this series, “we” refers to maderix (human) and Claude Opus 4.6 (by Anthropic) working as a pair. The reverse engineering, benchmarking, and training code were developed collaboratively

Sure, "collaboratively." Why would I ever trust a vibe coded analysis? How do I, a non expert in this niche, know that Opus isn't pulling a fast one on both of us? LLMs write convincing bullshit that even fools experts. Have you manually verified each fact in this piece? I doubt it. Thanks for the disclaimer, it saved me from having to read it.

I worked on the Xcode team for years and know the lengths Apple goes to make this stuff difficult to figure out.

I just wanted to say that you’ve done an excellent job and am looking forward to the 3rd installment.