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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

#131

Post by enos_feedler »

atonse wrote: post #70
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…

I can't imagine any world where we put this AI stuff back in the box. It is simply too useful and too powerful. And as we start seeing all his upheaval where models are getting banned, etc, I can even see the appeal of on-device AI increasing for a lot of use cases. So I think Apple has the right instinct. In fact, I've had the thought multiple times that I really want a lot of workflows just running on my device. Wo…

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.

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

#134

Post by zombot »

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…

> what if we don't want that?

Do we have a choice? It's being forced upon us by folks who have the power to distort any market they want. Energy prices are rising, and the PC industry is about to be destroyed by component prices. It will be dumb clients that run the software our feudal overlords of the data centers will have the grace to grant us. And the government lets it happen because it furthers their interests.

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

#136

Post by gnabgib »

GeekyBear wrote: post #128
npunt wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There are certainly more interesting things than you failing to defending your recent AI looking posts (c/w all the hallmarks).

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

#137

Post by rubyn00bie »

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…

We'll likely see a transformation in how frontier models are trained as a result of a push towards local inference. While it seems unlikely now, given current pricing for RAM, in 10-15 years it's not unthinkable to assume we could see individual machines with 10-12TB (and well beyond that) of RAM which are accessible to the GPU. Min/max system RAM increased a LOT from 2010-2025 and largely because it was cheap. Once the hyperscalers aren't generating revenue for the RAM manufacturers, I wouldn't be surprised to see a massive push towards consumers in order to maintain gross profit. Not to mention new players who enter the market because the margins are measurably absurd right now.

At some point there will be diminishing returns towards the "just throw more RAM at it" approach the current frontier models are taking. Commoditization is just as inevitable as it ever was... and in doing so will enable actual leaps of what AI/ML is capable of. That's not to say there won't be a place for 99.999999% accurate vs 99.99999% but those cases will be limited and likely prime to disruption based on real innovation vs access to capital.

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

#138

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#139

Post by znpy »

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…

> 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?

I think reducing the die area dedicated to ai stuff is not going to be a problem.

And in fairness apple already has essentially ai-less hardware in the form of the MacBook neo and it’s been an astonishing success.

I have one and it’s a very good laptop, particularly for the price i paid it.

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

#140

Post by GeekyBear »

monocasa wrote: post #61
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…

Do we have any explanations of what WLCM means that are more industry focused? I couldn't find anything that didn't look like blogspam. And that explanation of the DRAM being on the same wafer doesn't really make sense. For one, at that point there's no "multi chip" part if you're integrating more onto the same die rather than less. And their explanation isn't really passing the smell test for me for other reasons, f…

You can start by reading up on TSMC's name for the tech (although there are many versions at TSMC and TSMC isn't the only company packaging chiplets and memory on top of a silicon interposer).

> CoWoS (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate)

https://semiwiki.com/wikis/industry-wikis/cowos-chip-on-wafe...

It's a more advanced update from their older InFO tech.

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