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dougallj
applegpu
HTML2021–2024
dougallj / applegpu

applegpu

Apple G13 GPU architecture docs and tools

3Distinct people
3Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
726GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Apple G13 GPU architecture docs and tools

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year3 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2021-03-09 16:54:49 UTC to 2024-12-25 17:26:10 UTC.

012021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

3 sources
You can help with the reverse engineering of Apple Silicon done by a dozen people worldwide, that is how we find out the GPU and NPU instructions[1-4]. There is over 43 trillion float operations per second to unlock at 8 terabit per second 'unified' memory bandwidth and 270 gigabits per second networking (less on the smaller chips).... [1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/gpu [2] https://github.com/dougallj/applegpu [3] https://github.com/antgroup-skyward/ANETools/tree/main/ANEDi... [4] https://github.com/hollance/neural-engine You can use a high level APIs like MLX, Metal or CoreML to compute other things on the GPU and NPU. Shadama [5] is an example programming language that translates (with Ometa) matrix calculations into WebGPU or WebGL APIs (I forget which). You can do exactly the same with the MLX, Metal or CoreML APIs and only pay ar
Read the rest
ound 3% overhead going through the translation stages. [5] https://github.com/yoshikiohshima/Shadama I estimate it will cost around $22K at my hourly rate to completely reverse engineer the latest A16 and M4 CPU (ARMV9), GPU and NPU instruction sets. I think I am halfway on the reverse engineering, the debugging part is the hardest problem. You would however not be able to sell software with it on the APP Store as Apple forbids undocumented API's or bare metal instructions.
In Ask HN: Resources for general purpose GPU development on Apple's M* chips?
The most complete documentation is in the applegpu repo[1] by dougallj showing a great deal of recent activity (including by alyssarosenzweig). Last I checked, the documentation of barrier instructions wasn't complete enough to tell whether these device-scoped barriers are possible. (Note: on RDNA2, they're accomplished by DLC and GLC flags on memory accesses, combined with cache flush instructions such as S_GL1_INV). There's also a lot of great material, accessibly written, on Alyssa's blog[2], see in particular the posts titled "Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part ${I}". [1]: https://github.com/dougallj/applegpu [2]: https://rosenzweig.io/
In Metal shader converter and the missing device-scoped barrier

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