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CPU Hardware Acceleration

  • Book Excerpt from "Generative AI in C++"
  • by David Spuler, Ph.D.

CPU Hardware Acceleration

Many of the major CPU chips offer builtin hardware acceleration.

  • x86/x64 (Intel/AMD) — AVX SIMD instructions (including AVX-2, AVX-512, and AVX-10)
  • ARM — Neon SIMD instructions (e.g. on phones)
  • Apple M1/M2/M3 — ARM Neon, Apple AMX instructions, or Apple Neural Engine (ANE).

AVX intrinsics are the topic of the next chapter. These can be used on x86/x64 platforms with Microsoft MSVS or GCC/Clang C++ compilers to run CPU data crunching in parallel.

The ARM Neon is a hardware acceleration processor. ARM-based architectures can run the Neon acceleration opcodes, which are 128-bit SIMD instructions that can parallelize both integer and floating-point computations. At the time of writing, the current version is based on Armv8. Notably, the Apple iPhone platform is based on ARM silicon and has Neon acceleration capabilities.

Apple M1/M2/M3 chips are based on ARM, so the ARM Neon acceleration works. There are also some additional Apple-specific hardware accelerations such as Apple AMX and Apple Neural Engine (ANE).

 

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