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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

#301

Post by mrngld »

andy_ppp wrote: post #288
petercooper wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could treat the extreme spec machines separately from the prosumer ones, like they did with the Xserve. Let business customers spec up to 768GB (say) who are prepared for a $20-25k price tag, while keeping them away from the stores and usual consumer supply chains (Amazon et al). It may not be a big enough market segment for them to care about anymore, though.

Honestly you're still looking at (from my understanding) ~3 minutes prefill (TTFT) even with architectural improvements and so on with a 32k context window (against a large model). How is this going to be competitive with Nvidia and all of the tricks massive scale get's you to parallelise context across many machines?

Is it supposed to be? I think the point with some of these Macs is you get the capability in something the size of a heatsink from Intel's Netburst architecture era, or a Macbook light enough to stick in a backpack and take with you to lunch.

If you're talking about chaining together multiple GPUs you're talking about a different game -- I suspect, anyway. Seems like a high-spec Mac would be good for development and testing. Arrays of GPUs, better aimed at production use.

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

#302

Post by brianwawok »

nok22kon wrote: post #230
manarth wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's assuming consumption pricing remains as-is. There has been a lot of market-subsidy in AI which is starting to fade away: e.g. the copilot quotas/pricing. When VC switches from investing to wanting a return, the price equation is likely to change.

There is no subsidy on most OpenRouter providers, they are profitable today. You buy a big GPU, you serve LLMs, you print money.

And if you skip open router and go direct you save another 5%

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

#303

Post by subarctic »

npunt wrote: post #103
GeekyBear wrote: post #56

Apple isn't just transitioning to TSMC's 2nm node, they are also transitioning to a chiplet based design using TSMC's advanced packaging. > What sets the A20 apart isn’t just the node shrink—it’s the revolution in packaging. Apple is transitioning to Wafer-Level Multi-Chip Module (WLCM) integration, meaning that RAM will no longer be situated beside the chip, but rather on the chip wafer itself, integrated alongside…

A kind request - please try to write HN replies without AI, but if you're going to, please at least edit out any "it's not X its Y" or "isn't just X, but also Y" AI tics. A lot of us come here to get away from talking to AIs all day.

The comment you're replying to doesn't sound like AI to me

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

#304

Post by Mashimo »

realusername wrote: post #291
Mashimo wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, me neither. Fast enough for me on CPU.

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

#305

Post by chris_money202 »

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 you’re truly serious about local AI you’re not using a Mac. A Mac is for people who want the best of both worlds, GPUs are much faster if memory is equal.

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

#306

Post by calgoo »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #235
mikestorrent wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider also that right now LLMs run slowly enough you can watch them think. I've seen a demo of an LLM running at an absurdly high speed and it reminds me of when I moved from a 2400 baud modem to a 14.4 - BBS screens that I could watch draw were all of a sudden nigh-interactive. Faster-than-realtime video generation is also coming, and will also continue to require huge hardware for a long while yet. I love local…

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/

Yea, is almost "scary fast" in a sense... the amount of compute you can do in parallel one one of those chips is amazing. hopefully they get their next chip completed as that will be a lot more useful for general workloads. I think the current one is based on llama3.

*corrected llama version to 3

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

#307

Post by SXX »

KaiserPro wrote: post #290
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…

Forward planning though. They are assuming that they are able to get ram in the future, once the AI bubble either dissipates or pops. Its far easier to build something you planned for 3 years ago, than crash build it in 3 months.

Of course if RAM prices crash Apple might of bring high RAM options back. We just cant bet on it as consumers.

Right now RAM shortages are bad to the point where likely even Apple have to decide what products they make and what they discontinue.

There been short time where M3 Ultra with 256GB / 512GB been best offet on market because Apple lagged with price increase. Now HN crowd expect Apple of all companies jump into price war with Nvidia and to subsidize their inference hardware.

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

#308

Post by aurareturn »

harrouet wrote: post #282
aurareturn wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see why people would want a more powerful machine but as someone who moves around a lot, the 16" MBP weight is a pain. The 14" MBP screen is not big enough.

Get a 15" MBA...

I did!

The actual laptop I want is an Air 15" with 120hz OLED screen.

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

#309

Post by oblio »

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…

> Google isn't

Google sold (will sell?) about $70bn worth of Google shares to fund AI infrastructure build outs. It's also issued bonds (=debt; I forget the number, $30bn?) to pay for more infrastructure. Fairly sure it also has established a shadow company, a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) to stash away unpleasant financial things it doesn't want to show, also for the AI build out.

Amazon, Google, Meta, Oracle are overstretching at the moment. They are predicted to become cash flow negative (more money going out than coming in) if they keep going at this rate, some time in 2027 or 2028.

Now, they won't go bankrupt but it's possible they will be hit by huge restructuring waves once the dust settles.

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

#310

Post by spwa4 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #299
matt-p wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but even using 16GB sticks, 24x16GB is already 384GB.

Question: you need 16GB sticks because they're the smallest doublesided ones, which you need for maximum BW, right? Otherwise why not 8G?

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