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Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

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Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

#261

Post by nottorp »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #177
ramesh31 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>" After a lot of researched I was quite surprised that the mac was the cheapest option. So not always an Apple tax." Apple has always been the most cost effective choice for the value you get going all the way back to the Apple II, it's just that the floor of that cost has always been high. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a just a fanboy one way or the other.

That's true only for the entry level macs. My M4 Mac Mini has the best Performance/value. But my workstation laptop with 32 cores, 96GB DDR5, Nvidia GPU costs lesser than Macs with lesser performance; not to mention I upgraded the RAM post purchase.

It really depends what you factor in as value, because wintel laptops like you described tend to require noise canceling headphones when working on them.

Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

#262

Post by aurareturn »

throw1234567891 wrote: post #231
aurareturn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hypothetical M7 Ultra with LPDDR6 14.4Gbps memory would be 1.85 Tb/s. You're look at about 100 tokens/s for a 1T MoE 37B active 4bit model. It'd probably cost $30k or more I'm guessing if memory prices do not come down. Even at $30k, it could still be a relative bargain since an RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell 96GB card costs $12k today. The M3 Ultra with 512GB was around $8k before Apple discontinued it. I expect an M7 Ult…

> The M3 Ultra with 512GB was around $8k before Apple discontinued it The base model was $9k, that much RAM got you into $14k range.

512GB was around $9.5k. The $14k would be if you upgraded to 16TB SSD.

https://youtu.be/jSYobH9kr1E?si=hc1xUQ37_SEbkDkj&t=1242

Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

#263

Post by nok22kon »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #253
nok22kon wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you do the electricity math you'll see that you pay more on local models while getting less (local is more heavily quantized) compared with OpenRouter. I'm not talking local Gemma/Qwen vs cloud Opus, but against OpenRouter same Gemma/Qwen there are reasons to run local - privacy, availability, but cost is not one of them

> do the electricity math Could you give an example with real figures?

obviously depends on your location and GPU

for me it would be about $2 per day in electricity to generate 8 mil tok of Gemma4-26B at 4 bit quantization. this is excluding how much the GPU cost (no amortization)

ignoring the fact that I could get more free tokens per day for this model from Google/OpenRouter, it would cost $4 per day on OpenRouter if paid, but they would run it at full 16 bit precission

this would be the most "profitable" model for me

for Gemma4-31B I can generate only 1 mil tok per day, and so I pay more to get less quality than OpenRouter (ignoring that this model is also free on Google)

Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

#264

Post by jmyeet »

ggm wrote: post #67

What's their backup plan if the AI world doesn't pan out? What if it turns out people want base compute capability and lots of RAM for filestore cache and programs? Maybe this strategy works, even in that world. Remember when we all thought (were told we thought) the world was heading to 3D views of our 2D lived experience like a solid Cube of GUI we could rotate around and live inside? Well Apple took the simple 2D…

So I think it's fair to say that AI isn't going away. That doens't mean that SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic won't crash. But I've long believed that within 5 years we'll have access to relatively cheap hardware that can run sufficient but not cutting-edge models locally. You can buy a 5090 PC for So what happens? Nothing. If Apple make M7 Max/Ultra computes with 128-768GB of RAM and nobody buys them then... nobody buys them. Apple isn't betting the entire company on AI just like Google isn't. The rest of the internals are the same Macbook, Mac Mini or Mac Studio. You're just selling something with less RAM.

Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

#265

Post by harrouet »

vessenes wrote: post #7

The article says base M7 memory bandwidth is targeted at 240GB/s. M1 had 70 GB/s, M1 Pro: 200, M1 Max 400, M1 Ultra 800. Modern RTX 6000: ~1,600 or so. If we get a 1,200-1,500 GB/s bandwidth M7 variant in late 2027 with 512GB of RAM, that will be a very interesting chip. Tracking LLM size and performance improvements, I can imagine that being a sort of inflection point for local inference. I wonder what the power bud…

At this point and given the cost of memory, it will probably make sense to invest in faster SSD to allow for good performance with less memory

Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

#266

Post by swiftcoder »

marmarama wrote: post #246
swiftcoder wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ripping off designs from your own fab customers is a pretty sure way to crater your fab business, and get sued into the ground at the same time.

It's not so much ripping off the designs - nothing of what Apple Silicon is doing is particularly surprising and both x86 and Intel's microarchitectures are sufficiently different to Apple Silicon/ARM that knowledge of specific implementation approaches wouldn't be directly useful in most cases. The real advantage is knowing exactly what Apple is launching months or years in advance, because that can inform strategic…

> The real advantage is knowing exactly what Apple is launching months or years in advance, because that can inform strategic planning.

While I'm sure some level of internal leakage does take place, at least on paper the fab's planning needs to be firewalled off from their own chip roadmap.

I'm also not sure how much Apple actually cares, tbh. Yes, they currently have an edge in silicon, but it's heavily due to being willing to outspend everyone else, and their real superpower is vertical integration - which Intel isn't in a position to compete with.

Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

#267

Post by jmyeet »

watersb wrote: post #43

Former AnandTech editor Gavin Bonshor had reports that the M7 would be manufactured on Intel's 18A node. https://bontechlabs.com/news/apple-is-reportedly-using-intel... Given the risks involved in establishing Apple Silicon designs with a new fab, I would expect early M7 parts to be in test production right now. The fundamental M7 design is already set in stone. Mark Gurman's Bloomberg article does not mention fabric…

I find this rumor at least plausible.

As we all know, Intel used to be famous for their engineering and their ability to scale up a newer, smaller process with way earlier commercial viability. This all ended with the Sisyphean 10nm move that was years late and honestly Intel just don't seem to have recovered from it.

So Intel seemingly has underutilized fab capacity whereas the likes of TSMC and Samsung can probably produce every chip they make with demand to spare. Given the CHIPS Act that was passed under Biden, the Trump admin taking a stake in Intel and the environment of tariffs and a push for American manufacturing, everything seems to be lining up for someone to take advantage of Inte's physical fabs and American production and that could be Apple.

Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

#268

Post by msdz »

flyingjoe wrote: post #242
KoolKat23 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anyone wishes to see the future. A fast LLM is quite eye-opening. I think chatjimmy uses Talaas' chips where models are hardcoded into the silicon. https://chatjimmy.ai/

Thanks, I didn't know that one! Very impressive speed although quality seems very bad

> although quality seems very bad

The weights they “etched” into the FPGA card that’s used for the ChatJimmy demo are that of a Llama 3-something 8b model.

The actually impressive and novel thing is that Taalas’ve managed to automate that process (clearly – nobody transforms 8 billion numbers into a physical representation by hand).

So now, they can work on scaling this process up, and with low enough lead times (I’ll be convinced they have inside connections to TSMC if they can actually deliver on the promised mere 3-4 months delay), will be able to offer 30-100b+ parameter models under half a year after they’re released, at thousands of tokens per second while probably drawing less wattage (per token, not sure about overall).

Exciting times ahead, folks.

Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

#269

Post by marci »

kinnth wrote: post #215
marci wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But with Apple's AFM 3 architecture, we might end up with huge SOTA adjacent on devices with limited RAM. They use a technique where you only load between 1B and 4B of a 20B dense model for an entire prompt run, not token by token like a MoE, and use mostly the low power ANE instead of GPU cores. Now, imagine if/when they scale up to 100B or more? On a chip using 2W?

I think we're also ignoring a potential innovative move in how models work. If someone could splinter or fragment the models into more specific tasks i.e "spellchecker AI" and get these working as well as Sonnet 4.6-4.8 on those tasks on a personal laptop. You then question the $100 a month fee. Bear in mind these laptops are likely to be $5000 or so because of the memory, HDD and M7 chip they likely need. It feels t…

  "That’s where EMO comes in.

  We show that EMO – a 1B-active, 14B-total-parameter (8-expert active, 128-expert total) MoE trained on 1 trillion tokens – supports selective expert use: for a given task or domain, we can use only a small subset of experts (just 12.5% of total experts) while retaining near full-model performance."
https://allenai.org/blog/emo

Re: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line

#270

Post by jmyeet »

khurs wrote: post #199
habosa wrote: post #141

In the long run I truly believe local AI will win and Apple will be the world's most important AI company because of these chips. Imagine something like today's Opus running for free and in complete privacy on your local machine with a beautiful Apple UX on top. For most tasks for most people, that's a much better proposition than a frontier model in the cloud you have to pay for and send all your data to and that on…

>In the long run I truly believe local AI will win What do you mean by 'win'? For a normal coder/person's use cases, yes. But AI companies are becoming more specialised in different fields and these tailored models will be leagues ahead in those niches.

There is built-in demand for local LLMs. An obvious example is law firms where using remote AI tools may be breaking privilege [1]. Any medical applications may likewise run into legal issues.

The problem is basically that we can't have nice things. AI chat logs themselves become another commodity to sell and to train on. We recently had a story about how Chinese firms are reselling Claude tokens [2]. The chat logs are a commodity here.

The only way to avoid this is to run LLMs locally. Even if you trust someone like Anthropic or Google, case law simply hasn't been established that the chat logs aren't discoverable.

Add to that that a sub-$5000 PC with a 5090 can already run a 31B model at reasonable inference speeds. Not amazing but good enough for many applications. Obviously that can't compete with Mythos but it doesn't have to. It also shows where the trend line is going for hardware. A $10k Nvidia GPU from 10 years ago now sells for scrap. What a consumer-level computer in 5 years can run locally will probably shock a lot of people.

[1]: https://www.williamsmullen.com/insights/news/legal-news/ai-t...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48667495

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