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zozbot234last Thursday at 11:44 PM5 repliesview on HN

> Neural accelerators to get prompt prefill time down.

Apple Neural Engine is a thing already, with support for multiply-accumulate on INT8 and FP16. AI inference frameworks need to add support for it.

> this setup can support up to 4 Mac devices because each Mac must be connected to every other Mac!!

Do you really need a fully connected mesh? Doesn't Thunderbolt just show up as a network connection that RDMA is ran on top of?


Replies

pdpiyesterday at 12:52 AM

> Do you really need a fully connected mesh? Doesn't Thunderbolt just show up as a network connection that RDMA is ran on top of?

If you daisy chain four nodes, then traffic between nodes #1 and #4 eat up all of nodes #2 and #3's bandwidth, and you eat a big latency penalty. So, absent a switch, the fully connected mesh is the only way to have fast access to all the memory.

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fooblasterlast Thursday at 11:54 PM

Might be helpful if they actually provided a programming model for ANE that isn't onnx. ANE not having a native development model just means software support will not be great.

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liuliuyesterday at 12:14 AM

They were talking about neural accelerators (a silicon piece on GPU): https://releases.drawthings.ai/p/metal-flashattention-v25-w-...

csdreamer7yesterday at 12:21 AM

> Apple Neural Engine is a thing already, with support for multiply-accumulate on INT8 and FP16. AI inference frameworks need to add support for it.

Or, Apple could pay for the engineers to add it.

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solarkraftyesterday at 4:12 AM

How much of an improvement can be expected here? It seems to me that in general most potential is pretty quickly realized on Apple platforms.