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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

#211

Post by nok22kon »

colechristensen wrote: post #153
bitwize wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

better rule: exponentials are overlapping S-curves

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

#212

Post by rbanffy »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #183
rjzzleep wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it hyperbolic though? One of the best things about the compute and memory shortage is that people are going to insane lengths to optimize things to run on lower memory / lower compute devices. If we keep this up for a while and then ramp up memory and local compute production, that AI inflection point may actually come. Of course, these are a lot of ifs.

If we advance just 2x in hardware plus 2x in software, all coding can be done on local hardware imho.

That’s about 4 years in hardware cadence alone. There is a lot of room to improve memory bandwidth, and performance is a given with every process node. IBM has shown yesterday they can do limited runs on 0.7nm (density equivalent).

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

#213

Post by nok22kon »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #177
ramesh31 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>" After a lot of researched I was quite surprised that the mac was the cheapest option. So not always an Apple tax." Apple has always been the most cost effective choice for the value you get going all the way back to the Apple II, it's just that the floor of that cost has always been high. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a just a fanboy one way or the other.

That's true only for the entry level macs. My M4 Mac Mini has the best Performance/value. But my workstation laptop with 32 cores, 96GB DDR5, Nvidia GPU costs lesser than Macs with lesser performance; not to mention I upgraded the RAM post purchase.

RAM upgrade possibility has a downside though - very low RAM bandwidth, which is highly relevant today if you want to run local LLMs

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

#214

Post by interludead »

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…

I think this is right but it also depends on what "compete" means

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

#215

Post by kinnth »

marci wrote: post #176
drnick1 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider this. One of the smallest Qwen models (4B parameters) powers my home automation voice assistant, and runs on CPU alone at >20 tok/s. It is enough for that use case, and could be made even better/faster with a modest GPU. It isn't as smart as some cloud-connected thingamajig, but I would never allow a literal Google or Amazon bug in my home. Huge SOTA models aren't relevant everywhere. Most people use LLMs fo…

But with Apple's AFM 3 architecture, we might end up with huge SOTA adjacent on devices with limited RAM. They use a technique where you only load between 1B and 4B of a 20B dense model for an entire prompt run, not token by token like a MoE, and use mostly the low power ANE instead of GPU cores. Now, imagine if/when they scale up to 100B or more? On a chip using 2W?

I think we're also ignoring a potential innovative move in how models work.

If someone could splinter or fragment the models into more specific tasks i.e "spellchecker AI" and get these working as well as Sonnet 4.6-4.8 on those tasks on a personal laptop. You then question the $100 a month fee.

Bear in mind these laptops are likely to be $5000 or so because of the memory, HDD and M7 chip they likely need.

It feels to me like the beginning of the inflection point but software updates not hardware updates will be the accelerant.

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

#216

Post by nok22kon »

airstrike wrote: post #75
bel8 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that this reserved capacity now has competition from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Meta, Microsoft, Chinese data centers and so on, all willing to pay premium. If comapnies keep spending half a macbook neo worth of subscription on AI plans monthly per person, Apple is going to have a hard time competing.

That's a very big if, though. There's been extensive news coverage about companies increasingly trying to move away from tokenmaxxing

but they move from tokenmaxxing to tokenmidding, not to tokenzero

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

#217

Post by interludead »

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…

I agree with the general direction but I'm a little skeptical of the "just add a few more TB of RAM and the frontier moves local" version of it

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

#218

Post by rbanffy »

wisty wrote: post #184
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…

I'm not paying for a super computer to do my taxes if a cheap pc can do it for free. So yeah, commercially it might be a death knell. Yes there's still a market for super computers, but would your rather own Apple or Cray?

> would your rather own Apple or Cray?

I would consider an HPE tower server with a processor on the same league as an M6 or M7 under the Cray brand.

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

#219

Post by friendzis »

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…

In between flat material-ish (hehe) design windows and 3d compiz cube with burn effects we have settled on transparency and blur effects with a bit of visual planes thrown in. It's highly unlikely we will end up tokenmaxxing everything, it's highly unlikely the genie can lose enough weight to fit back into the bottle. We will end up somewhere in between that strikes a balance between nice, productive and cost effective.
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