Apple Silicon gets massive AI training speed boost with this new project

An image generated with Image Creator from Microsoft Designer

A new project to improve the processing speed of neural networks on Apple Silicon is potentially able to speed up training on large datasets by up to ten times.

One of the problems of creating a machine learning project is training the model on large datasets. This relies on a lot of computing power to chew through the data, but improvements here can help speed up training, and potentially improve the models.

A new project from PHD student Tristan Bilot, Francesco Farina, and the MLX team, mlx-graphs is a library intended to help Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to run more efficiently on Apple Silicon. GNNs are used to make predictions of nodes, edges, and in performing graph-based tasks, with a particular usefulness in computer vision.

Based on MLX, the mlx-graphs project has been released as a Graph Neural Network library specifically for Apple Silicon. To researchers in the field, the project aims to provide a considerable performance boost.

Bilot claims that initial benchmarks for the library can run at up to ten times the speed of frameworks such as PyTorch Geometric and DGL when training on large graph datasets. It does so by using dedicated kernels designed to parallelize GNN computations running directly on the M-series chip's GPU.

Apple's work on Mlx-graphs is still in the early days

The project is still in its early days, having only been worked on for a few weeks, with Bilot admitting that there is "still plenty of room for major contributions." This could be a hint that more speed gains could be found with further development.

The mlx-graphs library is available on GitHub to download and install. Bilot has offered an invitation for others to explore and test the library, provide feedback, and to submit implementations via pull requests.

The project is part of a wave of interest in machine learning and generative AI, a field that can massively transform the creation of content, and the serving of information to users.

In the case of Apple, researchers within the company have created a generative AI tool for animating images. Additionally, other projects are testing the use of AI in Xcode tools.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has also spoken about the massive effort put into AI features that Apple will be rolling out to users later in 2024.

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7 Comments

blastdoor 3302 comments · 15 Years

About 2 months ago

Nvidia makes crazy high profit margins on their GPUs. Apple is well positioned with their control of the “full stack” to compete, albeit indirectly, with Nvidia.

No, I don’t mean Apple selling GPUs. I mean Apple selling AI computation, from mobile to cloud. I’d love to see racks of M-based systems training models rather than racks of Nvidia systems.

ForumPost 68 comments · 6 Years

About 2 months ago

blastdoor said:

Nvidia makes crazy high profit margins on their GPUs. Apple is well positioned with their control of the “full stack” to compete, albeit indirectly, with Nvidia.
No, I don’t mean Apple selling GPUs. I mean Apple selling AI computation, from mobile to cloud. I’d love to see racks of M-based systems training models rather than racks of Nvidia systems.

More like Apple place these training sessions and computations on each Apple silicon devices out there in the wild. You know, background crunching whilst you’re asleep

mpantone 2032 comments · 18 Years

About 2 months ago

blastdoor said:

Nvidia makes crazy high profit margins on their GPUs. Apple is well positioned with their control of the “full stack” to compete, albeit indirectly, with Nvidia.
No, I don’t mean Apple selling GPUs. I mean Apple selling AI computation, from mobile to cloud. I’d love to see racks of M-based systems training models rather than racks of Nvidia systems.

Not going to happen.

Apple is not in the B2B cloud service arena. If they were or wanted to be, they could have stuck a bunch of A-series or M-series SoCs in racks and sold the CPU/GPU compute power years ago. Don't forget: they ditched the Xserve, got rid of most of their high-end software offerings, and threw the OS X Server code tree into the rubbish bin.

If Apple wants to put their silicon into AI/ML cloud computing, they will do it for their own customers: iPhone users, Mac users, Apple Watch users, Apple TV users, Apple Music subscribers, etc. Their M.O. is to deploy new technologies that benefit a wide swath of their customer base and create a competitive advantage over other companies' users.

And where Apple would come ahead would be performance-per-watt, the metric that Johny Sroudji pounds home relentlessly. If Apple ran some sort of AI cloud facility, someone else could probably do the same with Nvidia hardware. They would just be pouring more dollars into Nvidia's wallets and feeding more dollars to the utility company. And they would still lack the seamless vertical integration that Apple can design.

mattinoz 2314 comments · 9 Years

About 2 months ago

mpantone said:

blastdoor said:

Nvidia makes crazy high profit margins on their GPUs. Apple is well positioned with their control of the “full stack” to compete, albeit indirectly, with Nvidia.
No, I don’t mean Apple selling GPUs. I mean Apple selling AI computation, from mobile to cloud. I’d love to see racks of M-based systems training models rather than racks of Nvidia systems.

Not going to happen.

Apple is not in the B2B cloud service arena. If they were or wanted to be, they could have stuck a bunch of A-series or M-series SoCs in racks and sold the CPU/GPU compute power years ago. Don't forget: they ditched the Xserve, got rid of most of their high-end software offerings, and threw the OS X Server code tree into the rubbish bin.

If Apple wants to put their silicon into AI/ML cloud computing, they will do it for their own customers: iPhone users, Mac users, Apple Watch users, Apple TV users, Apple Music subscribers, etc. Their M.O. is to deploy new technologies that benefit a wide swath of their customer base and create a competitive advantage over other companies' users.

And where Apple would come ahead would be performance-per-watt, the metric that Johny Sroudji pounds home relentlessly. If Apple ran some sort of AI cloud facility, someone else could probably do the same with Nvidia hardware. They would just be pouring more dollars into Nvidia's wallets and feeding more dollars to the utility company. And they would still lack the seamless vertical integration that Apple can design.

If it helps build public-facing apps, then why wouldn't we offer this as an xCodeCloud service?
Sure outside of maybe a single line on the developer site and 15mins at each WWDC mid week session they aren't going to make a public fuss about it, still they could make a system that pays for itself in subscriptions and benefit themselves from the 3rd people working on the optimisation.