Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 396 posts

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

#291

Post by realusername »

Mashimo wrote: post #258
realusername wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why you would need large AI models for Immich, the face detection is pretty cheap and will run on 10 year old hardware without a blip. I think the decision comes primarily on how much data you would like to store for Immich, if you want to go cheaply, a 100 bucks used laptop will do the job, if you have too much data, a NAS will be more suitable (and you are certainly not going to get a mac where you can…

Not for faces, but the CLIP model for the context search https://docs.immich.app/features/searching/ That needs to be in (v)ram for searches.

That can be yeah but personally I wouldn't pay 3 times the amount you would pay normally just for that feature in particular.

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

#292

Post by rbanffy »

oblio wrote: post #237
rbanffy wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once one person figures that out and writes a blog post, everybody else can do it.

Yes, just like 90% of regular users set up NASes instead of just using Dropbox or Google Drive. https://xkcd.com/2501/

The comparison is against your own computer, which is powerful enough, no need to add a box and set it up, and a very expensive cloud service. It’s nothing like setting up a NAS versus using iCloud (because we are talking Apple here).

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

#293

Post by throawayonthe »

Lio wrote: post #283
SXX wrote: post #239

768GB RAM pipe dreams make no sense to Apple. By discontinuing 256GB / 512GB M3 Ultra and raising prices $5000 -> $7000 on Macbook pro with 128GB they basically confirmed how badly RAM shortage affecting them. 768GB is 64-times of 12GB which is rumored to be amount of RAM in new iPhones. Imagine what profit margin 768GB Mac Studio gonna need in order to justify making one instead of 64 iPhones. Apple is the company t…

I think you have an excellent point and I'll bet someone at Apple has all this in spreadsheet and is making that case. However, I think without the very high end machines Apple is also seeding a lot of professional middle market too. If the choice is between, say, a Framework desktop vs nothing from Apple I'll obviously pick the Framework. If I get used to a Framework desktop running Linux then I'd probably stop buyi…

do you mean ceding that market?

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

#294

Post by lumost »

re-thc wrote: post #209
lumost wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big question for local LLMs is whether there is a 100 tok/s model which requires less than 16 GB of memory and is competitive on most tasks with the cloud models. There is some signal that this is possible through both hardware innovation and training/data improvements. Cloud models have their own constraints - I can’t have opus4.8 spend 4 hours on a deep research question I had in the shower without spending mon…

> The big question for local LLMs is whether there is a 100 tok/s model which requires less than 16 GB of memory and is competitive on most tasks with the cloud models. Benchmarks maybe? Real world, no. You just need the context otherwise. There's no way around it.

Context is more available locally. You can have the LLM operate for arbitrarily long periods, use your credentials to access services (if desired), store memory locally etc.

Whether such a model exists or not is a different question.

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

#295

Post by justincormack »

jimbokun wrote: post #113
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…

Without AI everyone’s computing needs were pretty well satisfied with current phones and laptops. LLMs are the one thing that could drive new demand if they can run locally.

Not software developers, they were already flocking to Apple M series machines with more RAM and cores before LLMs.

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

#296

Post by subarctic »

jmyeet wrote: post #264
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…

I find it very unlikely that nobody buys them, some people will definitely buy them to run giant open LLMS. But there's also not much risk to apple because those configs would probably be made to order

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

#297

Post by sajithdilshan »

SXX wrote: post #239

768GB RAM pipe dreams make no sense to Apple. By discontinuing 256GB / 512GB M3 Ultra and raising prices $5000 -> $7000 on Macbook pro with 128GB they basically confirmed how badly RAM shortage affecting them. 768GB is 64-times of 12GB which is rumored to be amount of RAM in new iPhones. Imagine what profit margin 768GB Mac Studio gonna need in order to justify making one instead of 64 iPhones. Apple is the company t…

[dead]

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

#298

Post by SXX »

Lio wrote: post #283
SXX wrote: post #239

768GB RAM pipe dreams make no sense to Apple. By discontinuing 256GB / 512GB M3 Ultra and raising prices $5000 -> $7000 on Macbook pro with 128GB they basically confirmed how badly RAM shortage affecting them. 768GB is 64-times of 12GB which is rumored to be amount of RAM in new iPhones. Imagine what profit margin 768GB Mac Studio gonna need in order to justify making one instead of 64 iPhones. Apple is the company t…

I think you have an excellent point and I'll bet someone at Apple has all this in spreadsheet and is making that case. However, I think without the very high end machines Apple is also seeding a lot of professional middle market too. If the choice is between, say, a Framework desktop vs nothing from Apple I'll obviously pick the Framework. If I get used to a Framework desktop running Linux then I'd probably stop buyi…

If they cared about local AI market they would price hike M3 Ultra instead of discontinuing them. After all they conviniently introduced RDMA just few months before that.

Initially when it happened everyone expected they did it because they planned to announce M5 Ultra shortly, but its not looks like this is happening.

Now IMHO its indicates they simply run out of RAM supply.

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

#299

Post by AnthonyMouse »

matt-p wrote: post #286
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that the same thing you can get from ordinary 2S Epyc/Xeon servers at a similar price that have 24 memory channels (when the M3 Ultra has the equivalent of 16)? And the reason people rarely use that for AI is that the enterprise GPUs from AMD and Nvidia are only moderately more expensive but are significantly faster because they use HBM instead of DDR5.

Yeah kind of, I think a 24 channels DDR5 works out approx 1TB/s, but the cost is astronomical, a M5 studio would probably beat that performance for around half the cost. You also get to use the GPU/NPU cores of the mac vs CPU only on the servers. M5 ultra studio with 128GB RAM could probably beat out a sever with a RTX 6000 pro at half the price.

24 channels of DDR5-6400 is 1.2TB/s, M3 ultra is 0.8TB/s. They both use DDR5-6400.

> a M5 studio would probably beat that performance for around half the cost.

A barebones 2S system with no CPUs or memory is ~$2000, a pair of 16 core CPUs another ~$1000 each, and then however much memory you want. The price seems pretty comparable. The "problem" with doing this is actually that 128GB is too little memory, because you want to populate all the channels, but even using 16GB sticks, 24x16GB is already 384GB.

> You also get to use the GPU/NPU cores of the mac vs CPU only on the servers.

You only need enough cores to make sure the bottleneck is memory bandwidth.

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

#300

Post by newsclues »

porphyra wrote: post #273
SXX wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can do it, but that gonna need to be different SKU not Mac Studio. Otherwise news will be full of discussions about Apple price hike from $8000 to $24,000 or who the hell knows $48,000. So yeah the only way I see them selling it is usual "call us" enterprise price tag. But since its not what Apple usually do its easier to sell 4x Mac Studio 256GB RAM boxes with interconnect for lets say $12,000 - $15,000 each.

Imagine if they bring back the Mac Pro with 768GB of ram to compete with the $100k DGX Station.

The timing of the demise of the Mac Pro has been about as bad as the Steam Machine launch timing.
Post reply on HN