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Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

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Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't understand that the AI driven memory boom has totally broken the cycle you are going to lose a lot of money. There is infinite demand for Intelligence and that translates directly to chips.

Sounds like you are telling us it’s a new paradigm? https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter3/transportat...

"If you don't understand that the AI driven memory boom has totally broken the cycle you are going to lose a lot of money."

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#432
post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading Infinite Games, they tell an anecdote about a Microsoft exec on a flight telling an Apple exec that the Zune was a way better portable music player than the iPod. The Apple exec was just “yup, you’re probably right” and then soon after the iPhone dropped

Actually, Microsoft came with "modern" smart phone much sooner. Actually too soon, technology wasn't there (price, computing power, size, weight, battery life). Apple never came first ... but often just at the right moment and had marketing skills to make it a new trend.

Years after the first iPhone release, Microsoft had a dogshit mobile OS, and every single device using it was dogshit. Before Android, the industry's answer to iOS and iPhone was a resistive touch screen and stylus because, other than the launcher, absolutely nothing was adapted to fingers. That was if you were lucky; some didn't include a stylus, reducing usefulness for making calls. It was like running regular Windows applications scaled down to a smartphone screen.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems most computer companies are still boasting that they can beat the M1 and it's like...congrats on beating a 6 year old chipset?

I still have zero urgency in upgrading from my M1 MBP.

Same. My personal laptop is an M1 Air and I also have an M1 Studio desktop. My work machine is an M4, and in "regular" use I can't tell the difference between them.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#434
post #16

Apple Studio with maxed out M5 Ultra, 256GB RAM and 16TB storage is 18,299$. The 512GB RAM version apparently is coming in October, considering that the difference between 96GB and 256GB is priced at 4000$, the 512GB upgrade must be eye watering. So, on the mini the RAM upgrade runs at 25$ per GB on all tiers, the same as the Studio therefore the upgrade to 512 will probably cost 6400$. The fully maxed out Apple Stud…

The trick are tax deductions.

I wouldn’t recommend buying any bare metal unless money is a second thought or you can fully deduct the price.

Most often in the end you pay half the price then. Depending on the write offs you could even make some bucks out of it.

Or buy and lease. Under certain circumstances the hardware costs you nothing.

But you need money to save money. And a company.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#436
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's some mental inertia around what a computer is and what it's worth. This thing can build custom software for you, mostly autonomously. It can monitor things happening on the internet that are relevant to you, in a holistic and flexible way. We have one crawling the web for local events we'll like, and it judges them based on what it knows about us, and it tells us about the best matches every weekend,…

Could you share what you did to find events to do? That sounds really cool

Sure, it’s pretty dumb/naive implementation, would need to be a lot more efficient to scale. Basically had Claude write polite/low touch dumb crawlers for a bunch of local sites (library, local events spaces, luma, theaters, maker spaces) and whip up a little frontend to let our family and friends manage a little text description of what their family members like, constraints, that sort of thing. Once a week, the crawlers look for new events, add to a db, and then run through the list and ask our local LLM to grade each event, given the text description and constraints. Take the top 20ish for the following two weekends and email out. It’s been super helpful, lowers the activation energy to go to more local events.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M6 doubled the neural engine from 16 to 32 cores. I would expect that the M7 doubles that again to 64 from 32? That would make sense. I believe that the CPUs are actually limited by ram bandwidth more than the neural engine right when it comes to LLM processing? Maybe the M7 introduces something new to get around the current ram bandwidth problems on the non-Ultra chips.

Apple's biggest bottleneck for real-world inference is prefill processing. They need a better GPGPU architecture, which is what I'm expecting M7 to reveal.

Agreed, seems like the M5 has already made steps in that direction, with 4x prompt processing / prefill performance vs. M4. [1] And token generation also got a 10% boost. The data below is only for Pro & Max but I think the base M5 got the same relative boosts vs. M4 base.

    Chip         BW (GB/s)   GPU Cores   Q4_0 Prompt   Q4_0 Gen
    M4 Pro (20c)    273         20          439.78        50.74
    M4 Max (40c)    546         40          885.68        83.06
    M5 Pro (20c)    307         20      ~1500 to 1700    ~56
    M5 Max (40c)    614         40      ~3000 to 3500    ~92
[1] https://www.hardware-corner.net/m5-pro-m5-max-local-llm-4x-f...

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading Infinite Games, they tell an anecdote about a Microsoft exec on a flight telling an Apple exec that the Zune was a way better portable music player than the iPod. The Apple exec was just “yup, you’re probably right” and then soon after the iPhone dropped

To be fair, the Zune actually was a better media player than the ipod in almost every way. That wasn't a false statement. The issue was the abysmal marketing and "me too" attitude Microsoft had (and still has).

Never had a zune, but I did have an iPod. I am willing to accept Zune was superior. But its just an example that, yea, often times the superior solution doesn't actually win. There is a huge list of better technology that lost out to worst technology. Which is why I find it funny the claim that the market is optimal in choosing winners and loosers.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#440
So I had just bought from Amazon in July an M4 mini, brand new, for a lucky post-hike price of 832 CA$ (682 USD); it was the very last unit at that price and I snatched it the morning it listed on the Apple/Amazon.ca official vendor. So far I've been using it for a month and it's been great (switching back from a Windows desktop for a decade).

Today I entered this new M4 mini's serial as a trade in for the M6 base mini, and the retail price went from $1249 CAD to $824 "once trade-in received". That's the automatic estimate, so basically I'd be paying twice for an upgrade...

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