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

371–380 of 396 posts

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

#371

Post by mikestorrent »

ChickeNES wrote: post #188
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…

What does your local setup look like?

1650 watts of liquid cooled Risc-V

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

#372

Post by jltsiren »

Grombobulous wrote: post #355
jltsiren wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a planned economy failing the way planned economies often do: the central planner failed to predict the demand correctly. Instead of trying to secure additional stock from the market at spot prices, they are simply waiting for the next batches they had planned for.

I don’t think that represents the scenario at all, not to mention the fact that it’s literally not a planned economy (but also not very analogous to one, either). What’s really happening is that the effort of securing additional stock isn’t worth it because the price is so high that there aren’t enough buyers. If ground beef were to suddenly cost $50/pound, McDonald’s doesn’t raise the price of the Big Mac to $25 and…

Businesses are usually planned economies, and supply chain management is literal central planning.

Apple failed to predict the demand for Mac Studios. Many other companies in its supply chain likely failed to predict that Apple would come back asking for more. There is no excess stock for some key components or the spare capacity to make them on demand. Apple would have to scour them from the market, likely paying much higher prices than it will pay for scheduled deliveries.

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

#373

Post by aurareturn »

bigyabai wrote: post #365
aurareturn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And 6090 will have 48GB of RAM compared to something like an M7 Max that might have 192GB or an M7 Ultra that might have 768GB.

The M7 Max and M7 Ultra will likely prefill-bottlenecked at 100GB+ scale inference. Layered 6090s would not be.

Neural Accelerators in M5 are already 4x faster than M4 at prefill. With M7, especially if they focus on AI like this article claims, it likely will have excellent prefill compute.

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

#375

Post by watersb »

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 think that people are still underestimating the technical merits of Intel's 18A fabrication process.

I haven't seen any competitor even try to address the backside power delivery of 18A. I suspect that Samsung,TSMC have something similar and doesn't talk about it.

The design rules for the standard cell (sort of corresponding to the die area required by a transistor) for the Intel 18A seem to target dense, high performance designs. That's not a particularly meaningful insight - of course Intel wants to have the highest performance of all the fabs.

Intel's packaging expertise used to be a generation ahead, and indeed their server chips currently use a mad mix of chiplets and through-silicon visas for direct stacking, all heaped onto a reticule-limited monster interposer die. All of this expensive complexity might be sustainable as long as Intel can keep its enterprise customers happy. That hasn't turned out too well for them.

AMD has found a mass-market winner with mainstream gaming CPU with extra level 3 cache die stacked on top. Compared to Intel servers, it's brutally simple. But extremely effective in its consumer market.

But the Intel chiplets and packaging could be a great toolbox for M7 generation of Apple Silicon. Now that the M5 Pro and Max are multi chip packages, they more resemble the Intel and AMD designs, with chiplets dedicated to I/O or GPU.

(Speculation and dreams. That's all I got, and I'm writing it in the face of an absolutely psychotic autocorrect on a tablet.)

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

#376

Post by LtWorf »

airstrike wrote: post #361
LtWorf wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you have a hole in your screen you must make your OS aware of it and put the menus around it?

It's literally not an issue

And when it is, it's the user's fault. We're going in circles.

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

#377

Post by roncinephile »

LtWorf wrote: post #154
enos_feedler wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me AI is on par with the internet and what made it so powerful was piracy and porn and just the wide spectrum of things that are possible when you connect machines together. We are going to need the same thing again. Freedom to use any model that does any thing we want.

If it happens it's because of china but it will be forbidden in USA.

Looking to China as a purveyor of laissez faire freedom to do whatever you want is so nonsensical as to be a joke. Both US government and the Chinese government want this newfound power to be on a tight leash.

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

#378

Post by jpc0 »

rbanffy wrote: post #223
rjzzleep wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half a year ago you could get a AI max 395+ with 128GB ram in mobile form factor for ~$2200. The same thing costs $3700. Same SoC, same memory.

10TB is about 80 times that, 200K in today’s money. A lot of capacity is coming online in the next 5 years and it’s reasonable to think we can get there with better process and stacking (the latter does little for pricing, but enables shorter latencies).

> A lot of capacity is coming online in the next 5 years

Is this true though? I don't really have time to do the research and have no dog in the race but I'm sceptical...

But then again I'm not there one making our profiting from the claims that there is billions being invested into infra...

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

#379

Post by nok22kon »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #345
nok22kon wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I know how many tokens per second my computer generates, and I have a wall power meter which measures how many watts my computer is using when generating.

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

#380

Post by oblio »

jmyeet wrote: post #367
oblio wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://s.yimg.com/lo/mysterio/api/619866B692DE6F8A91F783066... > Google has a market cap over $4 trillion For the purposes of most financial discussions, the market cap can be ignored. It tells almost nothing about the business fundamentals. > and it's 2025 financials were $130 billion profit on $400 billion revenue, which was something like 15% Y/Y growth. Most of that growth, which has re-accelerated, is AI driven…

> For the purposes of most financial discussions, the market cap can be ignored. If you issue $70B in stock, which was your point btw, market cap absolutely matters. $70B is less than 2% new shares issued. If it was a $100B company, it would be 70%. That's why market cap matters. > All your financial alarm bells should start ringing. Only if you start with the premise of "Google is imploding" and then go looking for…

I love how you completely side stepped the cash flow comment AND the graph.

It's all right, I spent years arguing against cryptocurrency boosters. I'll probably have to wait a few more years for AI boosters to be gone into the nether.

Post reply on HN