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

341–350 of 396 posts

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

#341

Post by hajile »

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…

M1 released 6 years ago, but AMD/Intel still can't get close to ARM cores in IPC. Anandtech was observing that Apple had better IPC in their phone chips YEARS before M1. Lots of people discredited it as "apples and oranges" because the ISAs were different, but investigative teams from Intel and AMD absolutely HAD to know the truth.

This has both a technical and human component.

On the human side, top x86 execs refused to see any threat coming. They must have thought Apple couldn't overcome the x86 software moat, thought the chips were for servers, consoles, or some other non-PC device, or perhaps they simply couldn't believe what their investigative teams told them.

At the same time, we're 6 years post-launch. The proof of ARM's capability is clear. x86 server marketshare is about to hit just 50% and Microsoft is pushing ARM hard as a replacement for x86. Either all the x86 engineers are completely incompetent and incapable of learning from years of ARM designs or there are aspects of x86 that makes copying those designs infeasible.

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

#342

Post by zerohp »

waffletower wrote: post #340
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.

They'll sell more $20-25k Macs when Goldman green lights Apple Card credit limits that will fit one of them.

Apple Card already offers credit limits high enough for it

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

#343

Post by surgical_fire »

sheepscreek wrote: post #321
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…

The message I’m getting is that Apple will never compromise on its healthy margins. If something becomes basically unaffordable for their target market, they’d cut the production and even discontinue the product, than take a hit on margins. Their business model is refreshingly simple.

I actually think Apple is right in increasing prices, and in fact should have increased it more.

Their target market is composed of people that would pay for it nonetheless. They should have tightened the screws a bit more.

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

#344

Post by bigyabai »

matt-p wrote: post #279
porphyra wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A very good idea, the Mac Pro also had a rack mount option didn't it? That would be the kind of thing you could sell as many as you could make.

> That would be the kind of thing you could sell as many as you could make.

People said that about the M1 Ultra Mac Pro, a few years before it was discontinued. I don't think there are many HPC customers looking at Apple hardware.

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

#345

Post by s1artibartfast »

nok22kon wrote: post #263
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is very interesting to me. How do you come up with the kwh/token for your setup?

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

#346

Post by drnick1 »

dainiusse wrote: post #167
drnick1 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider this. One of the smallest Qwen models (4B parameters) powers my home automation voice assistant, and runs on CPU alone at >20 tok/s. It is enough for that use case, and could be made even better/faster with a modest GPU. It isn't as smart as some cloud-connected thingamajig, but I would never allow a literal Google or Amazon bug in my home. Huge SOTA models aren't relevant everywhere. Most people use LLMs fo…

Curious, what exactly does it do for you? I has bad luck with these small models to do anything useful tbh.

It's a voice assistant that can respond to commands such as "turn on the light," or explain things (within the abilities of the small model).

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

#347

Post by bigyabai »

hajile wrote: post #341
marmarama wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

M1 released 6 years ago, but AMD/Intel still can't get close to ARM cores in IPC. Anandtech was observing that Apple had better IPC in their phone chips YEARS before M1. Lots of people discredited it as "apples and oranges" because the ISAs were different, but investigative teams from Intel and AMD absolutely HAD to know the truth. This has both a technical and human component. On the human side, top x86 execs refuse…

> M1 released 6 years ago, but AMD/Intel still can't get close to ARM cores in IPC.

> teams from Intel and AMD absolutely HAD to know the truth.

These people are professionals that acknowledge IPC is a stupid metric. If you switch your statement to SIMD throughput, now ARM NEON has the lower IPC and x86 looks like space age technology. They're optimized for different workloads.

x86 vendors recognized that they could recoup the majority of efficiency that Apple Silicon has without buying an architectural license for ARM. Intel invested early on big.LITTLE, and AMD drilled down on denser nodes for their preexisting designs. As both businesses converge on each other's ideas, their SOCs have adapted most of ARMs' greatest mobile innovations. Even before that, x86 hardware was always usable - AMD was shipping faster integrated GPUs than the M1 Pro before the M1 ever hit shelves.

All of this makes sense, nothing objectively prevents the x86 architecture from being power-efficient. Arm LTD. would have gouged any of those vendors for their IP, and even with an architectural license it's not like AMD or Intel would get usable core designs from Arm. There was no reason to pivot to ARM for either company, they both saw Qualcomm and could read the writing on the wall.

> x86 server marketshare is about to hit just 50% and Microsoft is pushing ARM hard as a replacement for x86

That's Nvidia's work, no credit is due to Microsoft or Apple for reshaping the server market. Apple's early ARM hardware was outright ignored for server/HPC applications, leading to the discontinuation of the Mac Pro. Apple was entirely incapable of pivoting their mobile chipsets to the server scale, surprising nobody that had paid attention to Apple's godawful raster/GPGPU acceleration stack. The Ultra hardware looked like a dog's dinner compared to x86 arches like CDNA.

The Graviton and Grace chips that displaced x86 servers did it because they are slower, cheaper and less feature-dense. Graviton for the bare minimum of Raspberry Pi-tier web serving, and Grace for the high-end of "we need CUDA and enough bandwidth for Infiniband" that made trillions in the HPC market.

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

#348

Post by nyantaro1 »

htsh wrote: post #315
spwa4 wrote: post #312

So the big question: Is this an excuse to save on memory costs and delaying stuff like the M5 Ultra, M6 Max, etc until 2027 when memory prices come back down?

Is it safe to assume they will come down in 2027?

I think it is safe to assume they won't come down in 2027

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

#349

Post by Schiendelman »

bel8 wrote: post #60
Schiendelman wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's likely the capacity they have reserved can be in different combinations.

Note that this reserved capacity now has competition from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Meta, Microsoft, Chinese data centers and so on, all willing to pay premium. If comapnies keep spending half a macbook neo worth of subscription on AI plans monthly per person, Apple is going to have a hard time competing.

That's part of why Apple is building on 18A from Intel next year.

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

#350

Post by ethbr1 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #316
spwa4 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

If 8GB sticks of registered DDR5-6400 even exist, they're not common.

That was because memory used to be cheap. Will be curious if smaller capacities come back en vogue as a cost cutting mechanism.
Post reply on HN