tenthousandthings

davidjbradshaw said:

Given how these model names work, [...]

Here's the identifiers (different from model numbers) since M2, when they began using "Mac" for all of them:

Mac4mac said:

It’s funny how Apple (TSMC) has been making M4 chips for months now, and only the iPad has been released that is using it…. Why? 

My guess is that Apple is using the M4 chips that it’s making and putting them into the specialised hardware that is to run  Apple Intelligence in their Datacentres. 

It’s the only plausible explanation for such a gap. 

This being the (likely) case, it must be a Golden chip!!

Early M4 production is a rounding error in relation to the A18 inventory buildup for iPhone 16. It’s good for working the kinks out for M4 Pro/Max production, but the vast majority of the first six months or so of volume production on a new process node is reserved for the A-series. 

neilm said:

The key question is: what will be the device hardware requirements for AI aided services?

For instance my iPhone XS is the oldest that can run the current iOS 17, so it may well not be supported by iOS 18. While my XS still works well — even the original battery! — and does everything I want it to, I may be prodded to upgrade by the availability of useful AI.

I think the worst case is it will be A14/M1 and above. That’s when they introduced the 16-core Apple Neural Engine NPU. But maybe the cutoff will be an 8-core NPU, which was introduced with the A12/A12X, so your XS might be okay? One last hurrah before it gets left behind next year?

blastdoor said:

I recently bought a refurbished m2pro Mac mini because I gave up on an m3 mini being released. I also would not be surprised if the studio skips m3 too. 

With regard to the Mini and the iMac refresh cadences, whatever. It’s fine. But if Apple skips the M3 Ultra, they need to explain what they are doing with the silicon. It raises a lot of questions, not all of which are (how shall I put it?) strategic.

It’s not enough to just say it’s all product-driven, and they only build the silicon their products need. Everyone understands why Apple doesn’t talk about unreleased products. But expectations need to be managed.

Marketing and management needs to wake up and realize the architects and engineers need to be allowed to explain more than what is currently being explained.

nubus said:

godofbiscuitssf said:

Apple has been doing ML integrations for years.  Marketing-speak changed “ML” to “AI” and you’re buying into it.  

As for this article, Apple’s been updating the Neural Engine every time in the silicon, sometimes obviously with the number of cores, sometimes by stating so, with giant performance increases, and other times by changing the architecture of the core.  

Apple has indeed been delivering a Neural Processing Unit for years. However, even M3 Max is only delivering the ML performance of iPhone 14 Pro (17-18 TOPS). Intel is doing 34 TOPS with their 2023 laptop CPUs (combined NPU+GPU) and Lunar Lake will launch this year with 100 TOPS performance for laptops. Standing still is why the stock is dropping.

Something will need to change. I would have killed M3 Ultra and asked the entire team to work on M4 or refocused M3 Ultra on ML at any cost to show at WWDC.

The presentation on this at WWDC will be interesting. I can't find it right now, but I read somewhere there is no difference between the NPU in the A17 Pro and the M3, and the 35 trillion versus 18 trillion numbers reflect two different standards for measuring it. So one number is for the mobile industry, the other for the computer industry. Apple didn't double the peak NPU ops/sec in the A17 Pro versus the A16 Bionic. Instead, the competition changed to a different standard that provided better-sounding numbers, and Apple was forced to adopt that for the A17 Pro and the iPhone 15 Pro without comment, but they kept the old standard for the M3, to avoid appearing to claim an astounding leap forward in the NPU relative to the M1 and M2, when in reality it is incremental.

I'll try to find it, it wasn't an anonymous internet commenter or anything, it described the change, but it was only like two sentences and now I can't find it.