u-he on Apple silicon (Updated)

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16-core Neural Engine
The dedicated 16-core Neural Engine in the M1 chip can execute up to a staggering 11 trillion operations per second, powering workflows you couldn’t imagine before — like enabling the djay Pro AI app to isolate instrumentals and vocals of any song in real time.
Could this Neural Engine power be used by u-he plugins?

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No idea. I'm not familiar with machine learning and stuff.

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Those neural engine cores exist on iOS devices and are quite hard to access, I heard. So, unlikely?

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Neural engine was not available for non apple apps afaik. May be it has changed but originally it was this way.
Murderous duck!

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Not quite true: djay Pro AI is rewritten to use the Mac neural engine and Pixelmator Pro is mentioned by Apple on their website as using it too.

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So they got privileged access then.

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(I personally don't care much about that... KI does not excite me...)

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There is a public api: https://developer.apple.com/documentati ... guage=objc. Don't know what the relationship of this to the underlying hardware is, though

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EvilDragon wrote: Fri Nov 13, 2020 8:16 pm So they got privileged access then.
Core ML has been around since 2017. Apple has gone well out of their way to make it easy to target, executing on CPU / GPU / Neural Engine resources depending on the hardware at hand.

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Urs wrote: Wed Nov 11, 2020 11:05 am We're ordering M1 Macs today. I'll let you guys know asap.

Our builds for Arm are coming along nicely, too, I'm sure we'll soon see betas and releases including native support for Apple Silicon.
Which M1 Macs did you order?
I'm especially interested if the Air with it's passive cooling is fast enough for smaller audio projects (2-3 u-he plugins) and how long it can keep it's max performance until throttling. The iPad Pro proves that throttling isn't that much of a problem with Apple's ARM chips, but it might be different with the M1.

If you do your benchmarks, I would also be quite interested between the plugin performance of native ARM and intel via Rosetta 2 :) I hope Rosetta is fast enough.

Thanks :)

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We didn't order the Air... we ordered an MBP and a Mini.

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Awesome, curios about this!

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Last edited by tslays on Fri May 15, 2026 2:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

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tslays wrote: Mon Nov 16, 2020 8:29 am I would be curious to know if you expect that the M1 will handle u-he synths better then a current gen i9.

The first benchmarks look fantastic and especially single core performance is brutal.
I've been a PC guy my whole life, been looking for a laptop than can handle moderate audio work (my current one cannot) and for the first time, I'm seriously considering trying out one of these new Macbooks. Seems like these aren't wildly expensive and if the performance is solid and throttling isn't a concern, they're certainly very attractive. So yeah, I'm very interested in hearing how the U-he synths run on these.

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Funkybot's Evil Twin wrote: Mon Nov 16, 2020 7:24 pm I've been a PC guy my whole life, been looking for a laptop than can handle moderate audio work (my current one cannot) and for the first time, I'm seriously considering trying out one of these new Macbooks. Seems like these aren't wildly expensive and if the performance is solid and throttling isn't a concern, they're certainly very attractive. So yeah, I'm very interested in hearing how the U-he synths run on these.
Depends on definition of "moderate". If you want to run Ableton and several instances of Diva don't even look at low performance laptops YMMV of course.
Murderous duck!

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