Apple was the first company to put a dedicated neural accelerator into a phone at scale. The Neural Engine arrived with the A11 Bionic in 2017 and has shipped in every A-series and M-series chip since, which means Apple has more NPUs in active use than any other designer on earth.
It is also the most opaque. Apple has never stated a numeric precision for any Neural Engine performance figure, and after the M4 in May 2024 it stopped publishing absolute numbers altogether — every generation since has been described only as a multiple of the one before. The widely-quoted 35 TOPS for the A17 Pro is not an Apple figure.
None of this silicon is for sale. Apple designs chips exclusively for Apple products, which makes it the largest captive silicon programme in consumer technology.