Apple Silicon Neural Engine
On-device inference across Mac, iPhone and iPad.
Full Apple Silicon Neural Engine record →Head to head
Apple Silicon Neural Engine vs Google TPU Ironwood
Apple Silicon Neural Engine (Apple) and Google TPU Ironwood (Google) both sit in Chips & Compute. Apple Silicon Neural Engine is the cheaper entry point at Bundled with hardware. Google TPU Ironwood shipped more tracked changes in the last 30 days (11 vs 0). Every value below comes from the latest crawl of the vendors' own pages.
| Attribute | Apple Silicon Neural Engine Apple | Google TPU Ironwood |
|---|---|---|
| Segment | Chips & Compute | Chips & Compute |
| Version | M5 | 7th-generation (Ironwood) |
| Entry cost | Bundled with hardware | from $5.4/unit |
| Pricing tiers | — | On Demand (us-central1) $12 · DWS Flex-start (us-central1) $6 · DWS Calendar Mode (us-central1) $8.4 · 1-year Commitment (us-central1) $8.4 · 3-year Commitment (us-central1) $5.4 · On Demand (europe-west2) $13.2 · DWS Flex-start (europe-west2) $6 · DWS Calendar Mode (europe-west2) $8.4 |
| Model stack | Apple Foundation Models | Gemini · Google TPU Ironwood · Ironwood · Ironwood (TPU v7) · Ironwood TPU · Ironwood TPU (7th Generation) · TPU v7 · TPU7x · TPU7x (Ironwood) · XLA compiler |
| Context window | — | — |
| Public API | ||
| Routes models | ||
| Changes / 30d | 0 | 11 |
| Origin | Global | Global |
| Capabilities | Neural accelerators per GPU core, Unified memory, On-device LLM | 9,216-chip pods, inference optimised, liquid cooled, JAX + PyTorch/XLA, Large-scale training, Reasoning and inference, 9,216 liquid-cooled chips per pod, 42.5 ExaFlops performance |
Google TPU Ironwood
v7 TPU pods scaling to 9,216 chips, available through Google Cloud and used for Gemini.
Full Google TPU Ironwood record →