Apple Neural Engine in M1 SoC Shows Incredible Performance in Prediction

Practical comparison with discrete GPUs: AMD Radeon Pro 560 in MacBook Pro 15, and nVidia Titan RTX in a Windows PC

Introduction

There are enormous articles showing benchmarks of Apple’s M1 SoC. The results indicate its potential not only as a CPU but also as a GPU and a neural processor.

An M1 MacBook Air was delivered to my desk in the second week of December 2020. Before saying welcome to this newcomer, I’d like to see its performance by myself using my research work, semantic segmentation of computed tomography images.

Machines and Methods

I compared its performance with the following machines:

• MacBook Pro 15 inch with AMD Radeon Pro 560
• Hewlett-Packard workstation with nVidia Titan RTX

MacBook Pro 15 inch is a product in 2017 with a quad-core Intel Core i7 and AMD Radeon Pro 560 (4 GB VRAM). I use it for my document works, medical image analysis, Xcode programming, massive dataset creation for deep learning, movie editing, family things, and so on. The Windows PC is a Hewlett-Packard workstation made in 2011. The system is really old but…