UL Procyon AI Inference now available on macOS

Last month, we committed to further developing our AI Inference Benchmarks offering with the release of our AI Image Generation Benchmark, complementing our AI Computer Vision Benchmark. Today, we’re adding support for the Core ML AI inference engine to our AI Computer Vision Benchmark. With this update, UL Procyon can now be used to measure the AI Inference performance of computers running macOS on Apple Silicon.

The UL Procyon AI Computer Vision Benchmark provides insights into how AI inference engines perform, helping you decide which engines to support to achieve the best performance on the hardware and platforms you are looking to implement. The benchmark supports several leading AI inference engines, with benchmark scores reflecting the performance of on-device inferencing operations.

Running the Computer Vision Benchmark on macOS using Core ML performs the same AI Inference workload as on Windows and is run using the command line. The benchmark on macOS gives you four combinations of accelerators to run the workload:

• CPU
• CPU + GPU
• CPU + Neural Engine
• All (CPU + GPU + Neural Engine)

Currently, all operators of the AI models in the AI Computer Vision Benchmark are supported by the Neural Engine and GPU found in current generation Mac hardware.

While comparing inference engines, it’s also important to consider accuracy in addition to raw performance. There are notable trade-offs and differences between inference precision and performance, especially when comparing between results from FP16 and INT inference engines. We’ve run our own tests measuring the accuracy of inference engines supported by the Procyon AI Inference Benchmarks. For more information, please see this page on the UL Solutions Benchmarks site.

This is a free update to all UL Procyon customers with a valid annual license for UL Procyon AI Inference Benchmarks. You only need to update to the latest version of UL Procyon to access it.

You can read more about the UL Procyon AI Computer Vision Benchmark on our website.