What is aned?

aned and aneuserd manage the Neural Engine on Apple Silicon Macs.

What is aned?

It stands for Apple Neural Engine daemon. The Neural Engine is a dedicated chip built into Apple Silicon for machine learning tasks. aned controls access to this hardware at the system level.

What is aneuserd?

It is the user-level counterpart. While aned manages the hardware, aneuserd handles requests from your apps.

What uses the Neural Engine?

Many macOS features rely on it:

• Photos: face recognition, object detection, scene sorting
• Camera: Portrait mode, Centre Stage
• Siri: speech recognition and language processing
• Live Text: reading text in images
• Visual Look Up: identifying objects, landmarks, plants, animals
• Dictation: turning speech into text on your device
• Sound Recognition: spotting sounds in your surroundings
• Third-party apps that use Core ML

Why a separate chip?

Machine learning involves huge numbers of simple sums that can run side by side. The Neural Engine is built for exactly this kind of work. It is faster and uses less power than doing the same job on the main processor or graphics chip.

Does it use many resources?

aned itself is light. The Neural Engine hardware does the heavy work. You may notice activity when Photos is sorting a large library or when several machine learning features are active at once.

Should you worry?

No. It is a core part of Apple Silicon that powers many of the smart features in macOS.

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