Exploring the scalable matrix extension of the Apple M4 processor

60 times faster could mean 2 minutes instead of 2 hours, or 2 seconds instead of 2 minutes. How is that not mind blowing, or at least very useful (for specific uses)?

Apple should mostly care about power-efficient inference I think, right? Not training. Spinning up a GPU seems like something to avoid.

I mean, I wonder how this thing compares to a gemm using all the cores in a cpu cluster. They might be ok with not even meeting that performance, if the accelerator can not hog all the cores and power.

At least that’s what my uninformed gut says. The workload for these things is like: little AI enhancements inside conventional apps, I think.

IIUC this the cpu in an iPad. The pro/max versions would be more appropriate to compare against the Zen when they are released.

They're not constant even within a generation. The M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max are each monolithic SoCs of different sizes (no chiplets) with different CPU cluster configurations, and the phone chip of the same generation is yet another configuration.

I think a bit in the first sentence in your first post is key.

They don't want devs to think as Macs and iDevices as separate targets, but rather as one big platform. They don't Mac ports, they want Apple platform ports.

It makes some amount of sense. App Store revenue split aside, iDevices massively outnumber Macs and the gap in graphics horsepower between Macs and iDevices shrinks every year.

Devs and to a lesser extent users don't really think that way though.

Apple dropped support for 32-bit Mac applications five years ago; recent only by comparison to Microsoft's theoretical backwards compatibility. Apple dropped support for 32-bit Mac hardware, firmware, and drivers in 2012, so there was a period of seven years where game developers had every reason to make their Mac releases 64-bit, but to a disappointingly large degree they didn't.

This was probably due in large part to a lack of pressure on the Windows side. It was absolutely absurd that even a big budget (and memory-hungry) game like Skyrim was released in 2011 as a 32-bit only game, and didn't get a 64-bit release until 2016.

I didn't enjoy macOS killing compatibility with so much of my Steam library either, but I do at least respect that Apple had some solid reasons, and save some of my ire for the game devs that shipped outdated binaries.

That must be for preserving the compatibility with the older software versions.

The same happens in x86, where there are hundreds of obsolete instructions, which have been replaced by better instructions, but which are still supported to allow the execution of old programs.

Both the new Arm SME instructions and the old Apple AMX instructions are executed by the same hardware matrix operation accelerator.

Previously Arm has extended the Aarch64 ISA with the SVE instructions, in order to support the Fujitsu supercomputer.

Then they were not satisfied with the original SVE and they have extended it into SVE2.

I suppose that something similar has happened with SME. Apple must have negotiated with Arm the inclusion of matrix and vector operations implemented by a separate shared accelerator. The result was SME, which differs from the original AMX either because Apple has thought some improvements based on the experience with the first instruction set or because Arm has desired some changes from the Apple proposal.

It depends on the application.

16bit is enough for representation.

24bit is enough for recording (some leeway because recording levels won't be ideal).

FP32 for processing with simple effects (e.g. mixer, some EQs). If that's enough for your needs, you can SIMD/GPU to your heart's content.

FP64 for high Q filters, phasors, LU decompositions.

##### Is 16 bits good enough?

Amp models need all the precision they can get. The effective range of output signals is greatly compressed because the signal is soft-clipped by the amplifier's non-linear response. Real guitar amplifiers have significant levels of noise in their output signals; digital guitar simulations of guitar amplifiers are typically even more sensitive to noise in their input signals. Currently, probably the easiest way to tell the difference between recordings of real guitar amps and neural model simulations of guitar amps: how they respond to signal noise in their inputs.

A really good ADC may have a 24-bit representation, but it will only have an 18 to 20 bit signal to noise ratio. Cheap audio adapters (pretty much all the audio adapters costing less than $100) will happily deliver you an input signal in 24-bit (or even 32-bit) representation, but will have less than 16 bits of signal above the noise floor.

For example, I have an M-AUDIO Fast Track usb audio adapter ($50) that provides 24-bit input but only has 12 bits of signal above the noise floor, even with levels meticulously set. Guitar amp models sound horrible when using this device. But when I use my MOTU-M2 (~$200) which probably provides a full 20 bits of signal above the noise floor, the same models sound faaabulous!

Those extra bits of SN/R are precious. An amp simulation of an input signal on a cheap ADC sounds noticeably "fizzier" than an amp simulation of the same input signal on an ADC with 19 actual significant bits of actual signal above the noise floor.

So 16 bits is not good enough. And 24 bits does make a difference (even if it's only 19 bits of actual difference)

##### Would FP64 be better?

Currently, Machine Learning models of guitar amps use FP32, because they are extremely compute-intensive when running in realtime (and extremely compute intensive when training the model in realtime).

Would FP64 calculations improve the quality of amp simulations? That would depend on how much precision gets lost while performing ML simulation. Probably a fair bit of precision does gets lost, between the massive matrix multiplies that are involved, and the calculation of non-linear activation functions (typically atan functions in current ML guitar models).

Roughly, I think the answer goes like this. We have an input signal with 19 bits of precision. And the 19th bit seems to make a difference. FP32 provides 24 bits of precision -- 5 extra bits of precision -- to avoid rounding errors while calculation massive matrix multiplies, and at least two rounds of atan activation functions (some of which are in a feedback loop). Are those five extra bits of guard precision being consumed during processing? Heck yes!

I'm almost certain that the quality of amp models would improve if the models were trained in FP64, and am reasonably certain that quality would improve if realtime calculations were performed in FP64 as well.

But on a Raspberry Pi (and probably on a x64 device as well), neural models cannot be run with FP64 precision in realtime. An ML-based amp model consumes bout 45% of available CPU bandwidth running with FP32 precision. Running with FP64 precious would add least quadruple that.

As a point of interest, matrix multiplies running on a Raspberry Pi 4 Arm Cortex A72 are almost completely limited by memory bandwidth to L2 cache and main memory. And that performance is (mostly) constrained by the tile size used in the matrix multiples, which (when using A72 neon registers) is constrained by the number of neon registers available. I believe that performance would roughly increase linearly as a function of available tile size. Whether it's linear or not depends a bit on how well matrix units deal with Nx1 matrices (vectors). Although the to perform NxM matrix multiples dominates, a significant amount of execution time also gets spent doing Nx1 and/or vector processing. Whether the corresponding performance boost is good enough to allow realtime audio processing at FP64.... the only way to find out would be to do it.

* Results based on extensive optimization and profiling of Toob ML and TooB Neural Amp Modeler guitar effects hosted by [PiPedal](https://rerdavies.github.io/pipedal/)