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

bloomberg.com

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

#121

Post by fhn »

moomoo11 wrote: post #105

really stupid question, but why doesn't the US gov work with someone like apple to build a american fab with like 1 trillion dollars budget? some kind of private-public partnership sorry if thats already happening in some capacity, like i said - "stupid question"

because America can't compete. Build a fab in the US, labor unions, labor costs, regulations, land, energy, taxes, government, water, etc all make this not economical. Everything would cost twice as much and you'd rather buy the cheaper product and it'll be bankrupt. There were reasons why all the manufacturing went overseas to Asia. You're right, the demand right now is HUGE but it won't always be huge. At this point, we don't have the talent or the knowledge to do it well anyway which is why we needed TSMC and Samsung to bring employees over to train people. https://www.cppionline.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/The-De...

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

#122

Post by brikym »

an0malous wrote: post #81
brikym wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will have a massive phone and you will be happy.

No one buys the smaller phones because people care more about battery life than ergonomics

Yip but come on Apple it's time to solve that problem and sell some more phones. Each new iPhone is just a different color.

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

#123

Post by khalic »

moomoo11 wrote: post #105

really stupid question, but why doesn't the US gov work with someone like apple to build a american fab with like 1 trillion dollars budget? some kind of private-public partnership sorry if thats already happening in some capacity, like i said - "stupid question"

À fab takes a good decade to build, then another one to become profitable

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

#124

Post by helloplanets »

UltraSane wrote: post #29
vessenes wrote: post #7

The article says base M7 memory bandwidth is targeted at 240GB/s. M1 had 70 GB/s, M1 Pro: 200, M1 Max 400, M1 Ultra 800. Modern RTX 6000: ~1,600 or so. If we get a 1,200-1,500 GB/s bandwidth M7 variant in late 2027 with 512GB of RAM, that will be a very interesting chip. Tracking LLM size and performance improvements, I can imagine that being a sort of inflection point for local inference. I wonder what the power bud…

That would cost as much as a new car.

Maxed out 2019 Mac Pro was $50k+. The wheels on that thing were $400. This is a bargain compared to that.

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

#125

Post by ant6n »

john_minsk wrote: post #73
Schiendelman wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notch does not matter at all, you will forget it's there.

Well… your menu items will disappear behind it still in 2026. You would need an extra app for that… But in terms of “noticing it” you are correct. You won’t pay attention after a day or two. EDIT: this menu managing app will need permissios to make screen captures. So much for the privacy. Forgot to mention.

There’s so many annoying bugs in Mac OS (like the screwed up window management and alt-tab not working properly), that the notch seems like an odd complaint at this point. The OS is fighting the user constantly, and there’s not much we can do…

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

#126

Post by zombot »

NuclearPM wrote: post #33
aurareturn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hypothetical M7 Ultra with LPDDR6 14.4Gbps memory would be 1.85 Tb/s. You're look at about 100 tokens/s for a 1T MoE 37B active 4bit model. It'd probably cost $30k or more I'm guessing if memory prices do not come down. Even at $30k, it could still be a relative bargain since an RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell 96GB card costs $12k today. The M3 Ultra with 512GB was around $8k before Apple discontinued it. I expect an M7 Ult…

An ‘ypothetical!

In what neck of the woods? English pronunciation never gets boring.

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

#127

Post by kennywinker »

overfeed wrote: post #114
MisterKent wrote: post #57

Apple is actually interesting. They are one of the few companies with a chip / PC play with real power AND basically no play I'm the hyperscalar market. That means they're actually incentivized at least short term, to benefit PCs becoming strong enough to do local LLMs. Which makes this play make even more sense. Though, I've been saying for a while that the local AI inflectiom point is the death knell for these fron…

> Though, I've been saying for a while that the local AI inflectiom point is the death knell for these frontier labs. "Death knell" is a touch hyperbolic. Hardware that can only run quantized models that take up GBs in VRAM falls short of even an A100 (by almost an order of magnitude[0]), which in turn falls short of what an 8xH100 cluster can do (also by another order of magnitude[0]). I'm an avid believer in local…

Doesn’t need to be a winner head to head. If it can do 90% of the tasks the big boys do, at 50% speed, for virtually no extra overhead cost save for the power consumed by a prompt - that’s gonna work for a lot of people. And that’s also basically where we’re at today. Qwen3.6 35b running quantized on 10 year old hardware solves basically all of my uses cases for agents except for coding.

The frontier models are faster, and better at coding, but not so much that i’ll pay $200/month for them.

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

#128

Post by GeekyBear »

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.

Is there anything less interesting on this site than baseless claims that other people's posts are AI?

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

#129

Post by croes »

rjrjrjrj wrote: post #94
AgentElement wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some folks like to have a computing environment free of proprietary influences and extremely strong vendor lock-in. I cannot claim to posses any apple devices.

How does the Mac have extremely strong vendor lock-in? Sure, you can use the App Store and use all the stuff that integrates with iPhone, iCloud, etc But you can also just treat it as Linux for Laptops (that actually works), and roll with all the standard open source tools.

Apple is also iOS
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