Open Source Apple iPhone Neural Network Libraries

ncnn is a high-performance neural network inference computing framework designed specifically for mobile platforms. It brings artificial intelligence right at your fingertips with no third-party dependencies, and speeds faster than all other known open source frameworks for mobile phone cpu. ncnn allows developers to easily deploy deep learning algorithm models to the mobile platform and create intelligent APPs. It is cross-platform and supports most commonly used CNN networks, including Classical CNN (VGG AlexNet GoogleNet Inception), Face Detection (MTCNN RetinaFace), Segmentation (FCN PSPNet UNet YOLACT), and more. ncnn is currently being used in a number of Tencent applications, namely: QQ, Qzone, WeChat, and Pitu.

XNNPACK is a highly optimized, low-level neural network inference library developed by Google for accelerating deep learning workloads across a variety of hardware architectures, including ARM, x86, WebAssembly, and RISC-V. Rather than serving as a standalone ML framework, XNNPACK provides high-performance computational primitives—such as convolutions, pooling, activation functions, and arithmetic operations—that are integrated into higher-level frameworks like TensorFlow Lite, PyTorch Mobile, ONNX Runtime, TensorFlow.js, and MediaPipe. The library is written in C/C++ and designed for maximum portability, efficiency, and performance, leveraging platform-specific instruction sets (e.g., NEON, AVX, SIMD) for optimized execution. It supports NHWC tensor layouts and allows flexible striding along the channel dimension to efficiently handle channel-split and concatenation operations without additional cost.

TNN, a high-performance, lightweight neural network inference framework open sourced by Tencent Youtu Lab. It also has many outstanding advantages such as cross-platform, high performance, model compression, and code tailoring. The TNN framework further strengthens the support and performance optimization of mobile devices on the basis of the original Rapidnet and ncnn frameworks. At the same time, it refers to the high performance and good scalability characteristics of the industry's mainstream open source frameworks, and expands the support for X86 and NV GPUs. On the mobile phone, TNN has been used by many applications such as mobile QQ, weishi, and Pitu. As a basic acceleration framework for Tencent Cloud AI, TNN has provided acceleration support for the implementation of many businesses. Everyone is welcome to participate in the collaborative construction to promote the further improvement of the TNN inference framework.