AI RESEARCH

Orion: Characterizing and Programming Apple's Neural Engine for LLM Training and Inference

arXiv CS.LG

ArXi:2603.06728v1 Announce Type: new Over two billion Apple devices ship with a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) - the Apple Neural Engine (ANE) - yet this accelerator remains largely unused for large language model workloads. CoreML, Apple's public ML framework, imposes opaque abstractions that prevent direct ANE programming and do not on-device