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

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 frontier labs.

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 budget would be in desktop format.

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 square pane of virtual desktops and .. made it a SONY strip. One variable: sideways.

So here we are being told AI is the future. Apple seems to be saying "yes but it will run local" which might be a safe bet if AI comes true but I wonder how many of us want the AI outcome, which is morally speaking the 3D immersive GUI cube here: what if we don't want that?

Well, I guess this is the silver lining to the price increases. I'd been thinking about an M5 128GB for local inference (eg DS4), probably off the table now given that it jumped $2k overnight. But I was on the fence about it for a long time given that even the M5 is not that good compared to even a 4090. It would have been good, but not "omg" good.

If they are pulling out all the stops to make the M7 more competitive.. guess I can wait for that?

Former AnandTech editor Gavin Bonshor had reports that the M7 would be manufactured on Intel's 18A node.

https://bontechlabs.com/news/apple-is-reportedly-using-intel...

Given the risks involved in establishing Apple Silicon designs with a new fab, I would expect early M7 parts to be in test production right now.

The fundamental M7 design is already set in stone.

Mark Gurman's Bloomberg article does not mention fabrication partners or processes.

Seems like a made-up distinction that shouldn't be necessary since M6 has not even released. I suspect this is a marketing ploy to meant to drive up both interest while also increasing prices for the next generation of Mac hardware.

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 the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine.

This shift eliminates the need for silicon interposers and substrates, thereby enhancing signal integrity, improving thermal dissipation, and facilitating faster memory access with lower latency. The benefits? Better multitasking, smoother AI processing (hello, Apple Intelligence), improved battery life, and potentially a smaller chip footprint—freeing up space for other components.

https://hwbusters.com/news/apples-a20-chip-ushers-in-a-new-e...

It's entirely possible that TSMC is ramping up more slowly than expected.

  The M7 Pro and M7 Max are scheduled for as early as the end of 2027, while the M7 Ultra is on track for 2028.

This means there won't be a redesigned MBP this year since there won't be M6 Pro/Max chips. People were expecting a redesigned slimmer MBP with OLED display later this year, myself included.

I was holding out for one until I decided to switch from an M1 Pro 16" MBP to an M5 Air 15" due to the expected price increase. I think many M1 Pro/Max generation people were waiting to upgrade this year.