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Apple introduces M4 chip

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Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#811

Post by m463 »

andsoitis wrote: post #539
rsp1984 wrote: post #457

Together with next-generation ML accelerators in the CPU, the high-performance GPU, and higher-bandwidth unified memory, the Neural Engine makes M4 an outrageously powerful chip for AI. In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices. This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending dat…

> In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices. This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending data up to the cloud for processing). Their primary business goal is to sell hardware. Yes, they’ve diversified into services and being a shopping mall for all, but it is about selling lu…

> The promise of privacy

I have very little faith in apple in this respect.

For clarity, just install little snitch on your machine, and watch what happens with your system. Even without being signed in with an apple id and everything turned off, apple phones home all the time.

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#812

Post by the_king »

tweetle_beetle wrote: post #645
rsp1984 wrote: post #457

Together with next-generation ML accelerators in the CPU, the high-performance GPU, and higher-bandwidth unified memory, the Neural Engine makes M4 an outrageously powerful chip for AI. In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices. This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending dat…

I wonder if BYOE (bring your own electricity) also plays a part in their long term vision? Data centres are expensive in terms of hardware, staffing and energy. Externalising this cost to customers saves money, but also helps to paint a green(washing) narrative. It's more meaningful to more people to say they've cut their energy consumption by x than to say they have a better server obselesence strategy, for example.

It makes sense for desktops but not for devices with batteries. I think Apple should introduce a new device for $5-10k that has 400GB of VRAM that all Macs on the network use for ML.

If you're on battery, you don't want to do LLM inference on a laptop. Hell, you don't really want to do transcription inference for that long - but would be nice not to have to send it to a data center.

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#813

Post by ChuckMcM »

rsp1984 wrote: post #457

Together with next-generation ML accelerators in the CPU, the high-performance GPU, and higher-bandwidth unified memory, the Neural Engine makes M4 an outrageously powerful chip for AI. In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices. This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending dat…

Something they should be able to do now, but do not seem to, is to allow you to train Siri to recognize exactly your voice and accent. Which is to say, to take the speech-to-text model that is listening and putting it into the Siri integration API, to both be 99.99% accurate for your speech and to recognize you and only you when it comes to invoking voice commands.

It could, if it chose to, continue to recognize all voices but at the same time limit the things the non-owner could ask for based on owner preferences.

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#814

Post by jilijeanlouis »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #813
rsp1984 wrote: post #457

Together with next-generation ML accelerators in the CPU, the high-performance GPU, and higher-bandwidth unified memory, the Neural Engine makes M4 an outrageously powerful chip for AI. In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices. This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending dat…

Something they should be able to do now, but do not seem to, is to allow you to train Siri to recognize exactly your voice and accent. Which is to say, to take the speech-to-text model that is listening and putting it into the Siri integration API, to both be 99.99% accurate for your speech and to recognize you and only you when it comes to invoking voice commands. It could, if it chose to, continue to recognize all…

This is really easy to do: it's just an embedding of your voice. So typically like 10/30 sec max of your voice to configure this. You already do a similar setup for faceId. I agree with you, I don't understand why they don't do it.

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#815

Post by transpute »

m463 wrote: post #811
andsoitis wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices. This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending data up to the cloud for processing). Their primary business goal is to sell hardware. Yes, they’ve diversified into services and being a shopping mall for all, but it is about selling lu…

> The promise of privacy I have very little faith in apple in this respect. For clarity, just install little snitch on your machine, and watch what happens with your system. Even without being signed in with an apple id and everything turned off, apple phones home all the time.

You can block 17.0.0.0 at the router, opening up only the notification servers. CDNs are a bit harder, but can be done with dnsmasq allow/deny of wildcard domains. Apple has documentation on network traffic from their devices, https://support.apple.com/en-us/101555

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#816

Post by transpute »

MBCook wrote: post #324
bombcar wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't it relatively well known that the M3 is on an expensive process and quickly getting to an M4 on a cheaper/higher yield process would be worth it?

Yes but Apple has never gone iPad first on a new chip either, so I was with him in that I assumed it wouldn’t be what they would do. “Let’s make all our Macs look slower for a while!” So I was surprised as well.

Nuvia/Qualcomm Elite X aspires to beat M3 and launches in 2 weeks.

Now Apple can keep their crown with this early M4 launch.

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#817

Post by eru »

rsp1984 wrote: post #457

Together with next-generation ML accelerators in the CPU, the high-performance GPU, and higher-bandwidth unified memory, the Neural Engine makes M4 an outrageously powerful chip for AI. In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices. This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending dat…

> Processing data at the edge also makes for the best possible user experience because of the complete independence of network connectivity and hence minimal latency.

That's one particular set of trade-offs, but not necessarily the best. Eg if your network connection and server processing speed is sufficiently faster than your local processing speed, the latency would be higher for doing it locally.

Local inference can also use more battery power. And you need a more beefy device, all else being equal.

Re: Apple introduces M4 chip

#819

Post by transpute »

marinhero wrote: post #318

I get frustrated seeing this go into the iPad and knowing that we can't get a shell, and run our own binaries there. Not even as a VM like [UserLAnd]( https://userland.tech ). I could effectively travel with one device less in my backpack but instead I have to carry two M chips, two displays, batteries, and so on... It's great to see this tech moving forward but it's frustrating to not see it translate into a more si…

> Not even as a VM

WWDC is next month. There's still a chance of iPadOS 18 including a Hypervisor API for macOS/Linux VMs on M4 iPads.

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