Apple has recently overhauled its entire M-Series chip plans, scrapping the launch of the M6 Pro and M6 Max processors and jumping straight to the M7 series. While the base M6 SoC is expected to launch, Apple is moving into the M7 series without the M6 Pro/Max variants, with plans to offer some...
Basically Apple will be building the perfect computers to run local LLMs.
I guess it depends on your definition of perfect - cheap, good or fast.
This thing is probably going to cost at least $20K USD.
Edit:
“Next year’s base M7 processor is expected to arrive in the first half of 2027 and will also upgrade memory bandwidth to about 240 GB/s.”
That’s…really fucking slow. What’s the goal here - CGI, engineering sims, game dev etc? 1.5TB is cool but at 240GB/s that will crawl for AI use.
Comparison: this is about $100K, for 7.2TB/s, 252GB VRAM (+500GB system ram, so closer to 750GB total)
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/products/workstations/dgx-station/
It’s likely wrong reporting, the m5 ultra gets 614 GB/s today. The m3 pro gets over 800. The rumored m5 pro is 1.2TB/s. Likely this will be 2.4 TB/s, but half the reason for high bandwidth in nvidia chips is somewhat offset in the unified scheme. Mlx needs a lot less copy data around when the gpu can just read it directly.
While Apple computers generally will have better support, they will be very slow due to unified memory itself. I’m not sure if this is actually the future.