Your Mac Has an AI Chip That Ollama Doesn’t Even Use

Is the Apple Neural Engine about to become Apple’s CUDA? Pull requests adding Apple Neural Engine (ANE) support on GitHub went from 134 in March to 421 in August, more than triple in five months. The chip has been in every iPhone since 2017 and in every Apple Silicon Mac since the M1, and most people have never used it on purpose. This summer Apple released Core AI at WWDC, which finally makes it practical for developers to run their models on the ANE. In this video: • What the ANE actually is, explained with a factory analogy: the CPU is the manager, the GPU is a big crew of flexible workers, and the ANE is an assembly line • A real test on a base M4 Mac mini: moving the right parts of the workload to the ANE made it 1.8× faster, but pushing more work onto it made it slower again • Why the ANE keeps running at full speed while the GPU is busy, and why that matters more than peak speed • Other community results: Qwen on an M3 Ultra, MiniMax H3 on an M4 mini, ANE Forge on an M5 Pro • How this compares to the CUDA playbook (hardware first, software later, then the ecosystem), and where the comparison breaks down • Why always-on, low-power, private background AI could become the ANE’s territory The ANE isn’t magic, and it won’t replace the GPU. But Apple has spent almost ten years putting it into everything, and AI coding tools are making it much cheaper to optimize for unusual hardware. If this showed you a part of your Mac you didn’t know you had, hit like and subscribe for more breakdowns like this. #appleneuralengine #applesilicon #localai #ai #macmini #npu #cuda