Inside the M4 Apple Neural Engine, Part 1: Reverse Engineering
Summary
The post is Part 1 of a series that reverse engineers Apple's M4 Neural Engine (ANE), arguing that CoreML is not the only way to interact with the ANE. It outlines the software stack from CoreML down to hardware, introduces direct ANE access via private APIs, and describes MIL and E5 binaries, in-memory model paths, and IOSurface-based I/O, setting up benchmarks for Part 2 and training in Part 3.