The Motorola 68000 CPU had no floating point instructions, so Apple introduced SANE, then went on to the PowerPC Velocity Engine, and its Accelerate framework, and more.
AMX
A matrix multiplication test appears to be run on the AMX matrix co-processor, and behaves differently from in-core tests. And what Power modes really do.
How the NEON vector processor, neural engine, matrix co-processor, and GPU all deliver high performance with low power and energy use.
In a wide range of in-core tests, CPU performance in VMs is close to that of code running native on the host, and M3 VMs are faster than M1 native. With one significant exception.
There’s more to getting best performance and energy efficiency on Apple silicon. These vary greatly depending on how apps are coded, as shown here.
If Apple offered to do much of the hard work of coding your app for you for free, and to optimise it for different Mac hardware, how could you refuse?
How to compare an undocumented if not secret co-processor? Using different tests that use very high power, and can result in strange patterns of core allocation. So how does the M3 Pro fare here?
Comparison with M1 variants, energy use with comparison between M3 Pro and Max, virtualisation, Game Mode, vector processing and matrix co-processing – all in summary.
Assessing throughput using tests of fast Fourier transforms and sparse Cholesky factorisation from the Accelerate library. Is there an AMX there?
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