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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

#151

Post by overfeed »

kennywinker wrote: post #127
overfeed wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 faste…

> If it can do 90% of the tasks the big boys do, at 50% speed

I want to live in this world too, but these numbers, as of today, are very aspirational and far removed from reality.

I'm no tokenmaxxer; I find my modest local setup useful, I also know the limitations, it's slow and it sucks (relatively) at high-level and/or long-context planning, compared to frontier models. Only a minority of my prompts are max-effort - its not all I do, but, it also means frontier labs aren't dying any time soon

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

#152

Post by rhdjcnfj373 »

rjrjrjrj wrote: post #111
seabrookmx wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with you, but technically speaking MacOS is still proprietary and Asahi is not compatible with the latest and greatest Apple devices. While they don't _prevent_ Asahi from doing what they're doing, they certainly don't go out of their way to make it easy for them.

I wasn't thinking of Asahi. Just pointing out that you can run all the standard unix/open source tools and apps on Mac OS (vi, git, qgis, blender, vsc, python, node, etc). With the advantage of higher quality hardware and generally less fiddling. But if you don't like it, switch. I don't see vendor lock-in.

A lot of convenient things come with the lock-in if you have >1 device

Notes sync, Copy/Paste would be hard to give up and took zero effort

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

#153

Post by colechristensen »

bitwize wrote: post #147
overfeed wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Indeed. Local models becoming available and halfway decent don't obviate the laws of scale. And because there's no ceiling to what scaling more will buy you in terms of capability, there's no reason not to scale more, there's no incentive for billionaires not to grab all the fab capacity they can. Enjoy paying $1000 or more for a little 4 GiB cloud terminal that connects you to all your online accounts where all your…

>there's no ceiling to what scaling more will buy you in terms of capability

This is highly doubtful.

Rule of thumb: everything people think is exponential is actually an S curve.

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

#154

Post by LtWorf »

enos_feedler wrote: post #131
atonse wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#155

Post by LtWorf »

olalonde wrote: post #71
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…

AI already has massive, growing adoption, whereas "3D immersive GUI cubes" never really had any.

It has at the current subsidised prices.

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

#156

Post by moomoo11 »

fhn wrote: post #121
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 poin…

i wonder, what about the manhattan project? they were able to do that very secretly, i understand it was a different time.

but can the gov not just fast track this as a "national security" or something?

i think the usa should be the one who make 1nm or smaller chips on demand, even if it takes 5-10. years to do.

and yes i realize i might sound dumb here but i'm the one suffering from high hardware prices!!

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

#157

Post by Culonavirus »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #137
overfeed wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 1080ti is out there for almost 10 years now. It has 11GB of VRAM. A 5090 has 32GB.

SOCs with unified memory have shifted this a bit forward, but they're also expensive as shit.

10TB ram in a consumer device is simply not happening in the next 10 years.

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

#159

Post by nxtfari »

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"

they’re doing m7 on the intel 18a fab, which is exactly that

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

#160

Post by LtWorf »

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

People care more about price. Price them decently and they will sell… which means they need to not be apple.
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