Apple’s ‘Minions’ tech turns idle Macs into an AI data center

If your business has lots of Macs, what do you do with them at night? And how much money do you spend on AI inferencing? What if the computational power of those Macs could be used to handle some inferencing tasks? A new white paper from Apple’s machine learning team tells us it’s possible. Apple’s teams have developed an internal technology for distributed processing they call “Minions,” which effectively creates a virtual GPU cloud from connected Macs. While it’s not available outside Apple at this time, it seems a pretty good candidate to turn Macs into a distributed AI data center, cutting the cost of AI inferencing and making it easier for enterprises to safely analyze company data by ensuring the information stays in the company. Meet Apple’s Minions This exciting approach is described in a newly published white paper, ‘Minions: A Dynamic and Distributed Virtual GPU Cloud Built on Idle Apple Silicon Devices.” In it, the researchers explain how constrained GPU resources delay access to inference tasks and increase costs — even while powerful Macs running Apple silicon chips may sit idle. They’ve developed an approach to use that power. It’s based on three components: a Minion…

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