HUGE! 4x speedup for anything parallelizable. This should bring around ~45GFlops out of the box in the iPhone browser, which isn't much but easily enough for basic neural networks (think object tracking, background segmentation, face feature tracking). For comparison, WebGPU would get that to ~1000GFlops
> Added WebRTC support for hardware AV1 decoding on supported device configurations.
Currently no Apple device has hardware AV1 decoding, so why support it in Safari iOS Beta? Perhaps next CPUs (A17 and M3) will have dedicated AV1-decoding hardware? Either way I think this is a hint it may be supported soon.
They may still be able to offer optimized decoding with hardware support on older devices. Not a full hardware path but a very well optimized CPU + hardware combo.
This is huge for the progress of WASM
> Added support for growable SharedArrayBuffer.
Not a headliner feature, but a pretty important one for JS/WASM interactions.
> Added support for AVIF on macOS Monterey and macOS Big Sur.
> Added support for the AV1 codec in the MediaCapabilities API.
> Added WebRTC support for hardware AV1 decoding on supported device configurations.
Could this be the first indication of Apple warming to AV1?
> Added support for the Notification API in dedicated workers.
> Added support for Service Workers and Shared Workers to the Permissions API.
> Added support for the termination of nested workers.
Nice to see web workers finally getting some love
> Added support for CSS Typed OM.
A great feature and should help with performance from not having to do constant number->string->number