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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

#231

Post by throw1234567891 »

aurareturn wrote: post #17
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…

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…

> The M3 Ultra with 512GB was around $8k before Apple discontinued it

The base model was $9k, that much RAM got you into $14k range.

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

#232

Post by romanovcode »

khurs wrote: post #199
habosa wrote: post #141

In the long run I truly believe local AI will win and Apple will be the world's most important AI company because of these chips. Imagine something like today's Opus running for free and in complete privacy on your local machine with a beautiful Apple UX on top. For most tasks for most people, that's a much better proposition than a frontier model in the cloud you have to pay for and send all your data to and that on…

>In the long run I truly believe local AI will win What do you mean by 'win'? For a normal coder/person's use cases, yes. But AI companies are becoming more specialised in different fields and these tailored models will be leagues ahead in those niches.

The way I see it - Opus 4.8 xhigh can do any programming task with a programmer instructing it. If Apple releases local model together with a device that can run said model it would render OpenAI/Anthropic useless for vast majority of usecases.

And if a local mcahine can run something like Opus 4.8, who is to say that those "specialized" models would just not come at a later date, or even loading open models wouldn't be an option with something like M7-verified flag from huggingface that would make it extremely easy for any consumer to just play around.

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

#233

Post by mcintyre1994 »

bel8 wrote: post #60
Schiendelman wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's likely the capacity they have reserved can be in different combinations.

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.

Companies are spending even more than that if they’re using the $200 subscription worth of tokens on the enterprise plans too.

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

#234

Post by oblio »

9dev wrote: post #174
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's plausible but is the Apple Tax for a 1TB memory machine on top of current memory prices really worth it? I paid around $4000 for 4090m laptop with 16GB VRAM back in 2023, it's great but DoA for even quantized LLMs. I can run SLMs and fine tune it but that's it. We need one of those specialized inference chip startups to succeed and a PC manufacturer willing to bet on them against Nvidia for the local AI to find…

> I paid around $4000 for 4090m laptop That's how much many developers currently spend on tokens - every day. Whatever "Apple Tax" applies to a device that can run a capable model offline will amortise itself in a blink.

In what sustainable world outside of Bay Area jobs do devs spend 120k on tokens monthly?

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

#235

Post by KoolKat23 »

mikestorrent wrote: post #165
overfeed wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Consider also that right now LLMs run slowly enough you can watch them think. I've seen a demo of an LLM running at an absurdly high speed and it reminds me of when I moved from a 2400 baud modem to a 14.4 - BBS screens that I could watch draw were all of a sudden nigh-interactive. Faster-than-realtime video generation is also coming, and will also continue to require huge hardware for a long while yet. I love local…

If anyone wishes to see the future. A fast LLM is quite eye-opening. I think chatjimmy uses Talaas' chips where models are hardcoded into the silicon.

https://chatjimmy.ai/

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

#236

Post by khurs »

romanovcode wrote: post #232
khurs wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In the long run I truly believe local AI will win What do you mean by 'win'? For a normal coder/person's use cases, yes. But AI companies are becoming more specialised in different fields and these tailored models will be leagues ahead in those niches.

The way I see it - Opus 4.8 xhigh can do any programming task with a programmer instructing it. If Apple releases local model together with a device that can run said model it would render OpenAI/Anthropic useless for vast majority of usecases. And if a local mcahine can run something like Opus 4.8, who is to say that those "specialized" models would just not come at a later date, or even loading open models wouldn't…

But most private buyer and most business buyers don't get anything more than base models.

As of yet no indication that small models that can fit in 8gb/16gb can be fully relied upon?

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

#237

Post by oblio »

rbanffy wrote: post #228
interludead wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't actually want to manage models, updates, context limits, quantization, etc. They just want the thing to work everywhere

Once one person figures that out and writes a blog post, everybody else can do it.

Yes, just like 90% of regular users set up NASes instead of just using Dropbox or Google Drive.

https://xkcd.com/2501/

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

#238

Post by oblio »

interludead wrote: post #208
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…

I'm not sure it's a death knell for frontier labs so much as a narrowing of what people need them for

When you've raised hundreds of billions in funding, every result except "to the moon" is a death knell.

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

#239

Post by SXX »

768GB RAM pipe dreams make no sense to Apple. By discontinuing 256GB / 512GB M3 Ultra and raising prices $5000 -> $7000 on Macbook pro with 128GB they basically confirmed how badly RAM shortage affecting them.

768GB is 64-times of 12GB which is rumored to be amount of RAM in new iPhones. Imagine what profit margin 768GB Mac Studio gonna need in order to justify making one instead of 64 iPhones.

Apple is the company that is okay about selling microfiber cloth for $100 and wheels for $700. Imagine how bad price hike for M3 Ultra 256GB / 512GB had to be in order for them to just discontinue them instead of getting free money out of desperate local AI folks.

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

#240

Post by olalonde »

LtWorf wrote: post #155
olalonde wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It has at the current subsidised prices.

I doubt inference costs will scale up significantly, but even if they do, it simply strengthens the strategic case for Apple's focus on local inference.
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