Tip: llama.cpp Apple Neural Engine Backend — New PR Targets NPU on All Apple Silicon, Not Just M5 Neural Accelerator

r/LocalLLaMA / GitHub·medium signal

A new PR to llama.cpp adds an Apple Neural Engine (ANE) backend targeting the NPU present in all Apple Silicon chips (M1 through M5), distinct from the M5-only 'Neural Accelerator' GPU cores. Current limitations: ANE caps at 2048-4096 tokens and is designed for fixed-size neural networks, so it supplements rather than replaces Metal GPU inference. For builders with older Apple Silicon: this could offload smaller models or prefill operations to the NPU while GPU handles generation, improving multi-model local setups.