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Macs to Get AI-Focused M4 Chips Starting in Late 2024
- glyphy177 3y ago[dead]
- roody15 3y agoWas looking at purchasing a PC laptop for a staff member today and was surprised just how much better Apple products are in the current M generation of devices. Better screens, no fans, better battery, better performance … surprising there is not much competition. If you take a Dell XPS and add OLED screen and higher resolutions … quickly find your self near $2,000 with a device that still has less battery life, runs hotter, and although may match or exceed raw numeric performance … is still arguably not as versatile or as good a machine.
- Rinzler89 3y agoExcuse me but what does this have to do with the next gen AI chips topic? Are there any threads left on HN that can be held on topic and not be invaded by the same ol' beaten to death "muh Apple M1 so good, PCs so bad" trope? It's been 4 years already since the M series launched, so unless people have been living under a rock, everyone already knows what they can do, what exactly were you bringing on this topic with your pointless shopping anecdote that has nothing to do with the topic? And FYI, not everyone is a web dev. Many many jobs will require you to use tools exclusive to Windows or Linux hence why the market for expensive PC laptops is still very large despite being worse on paper than MacBooks. MacOS doesn't solve everyone's needs no matter how good their chips are, if the SW you need doesn't run on it then it's useless, so Apple is no thereat to that market.
- lylejantzi3rd 3y agoHe's hoping for somebody to get a clue and build better PCs.
- Rinzler89 3y agoHow is his comment helping the Intel engineers build better CPUs? Does he think that Intel and AMD already solved the immense challenges on how to design and build a better CPU but they were just waiting for roody15's low efort comment to finally give the green light to ship them?
- lylejantzi3rd 3y ago> We vent online in pointless comments and poof, magic happens? More than you might think. You never know who's reading.
- Rinzler89 3y agoSo what if "they" read his comment? Do you think if Pat Gelsinger himself reads this, they'll just "engineer" faster now or what?
- lylejantzi3rd 3y agoApple seemed to manage just fine. You're saying there's nobody else out there that can do the same? And what's your solution? Suffer in silence? Or do you think yelling at other people on an online forum is somehow more productive?
- Rinzler89 3y ago>Suffer in silence? You must live in some coo-coo land of privileged entitlement if you think that not using Apple M laptops somehow equivalate to "suffering". Go out and get some perspective on what suffering actually feels like. I'm ending my talk with you here since your comments are of even lower quality.
- lylejantzi3rd 3y agoYou know that's not what I meant. What do you think you're accomplishing here?
- ReverseCold 3y agoYeah... hopefully the upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon X chips get integrated properly by someone so there's actual competition. Mobile data in my laptop also sounds like it would be pretty nice. Not holding my breath though, Microsoft may still mess it up on the Windows side :(
- wtallis 3y agoLenovo and/or Qualcomm managed to mess things up enough on the Thinkpad x13s that the cellular connectivity was provided by a M.2 card rather than the Snapdragon SoC.
- kingkongjaffa 3y agoThe battery life alone is worth kitting out your team with them to be honest. My windows work laptop is dead in under 2 hours. My m1 mbp will last all day 8/9 hours + under normal loads. The only app that eats the batter is football manager and even then it lasts 3-4 hours.
- a_wild_dandan 3y agoAlso, I can run Mixtral 8x22B right now on my MacBook. Highly capable, local, (preferably uncensored) models are phenomenal for my productivity. Nothing else comes close to matching Apple silicon's up to 192GB of VRAM for its price.
- helf 3y ago[dead]
- tails4e 3y agoModern zen4 based laptops can get 15 hours. My 2019 MBP was quoted as 10 hours but gets under 2.... Why? because it's more software than hardware that is the issue. My MBP runs out of battery quickly because outlook (or chrome) uses too much CPU and it drains quickly and runs hot. You get the 10 hours only if then SW lightly loads the CPU. This is the same for Zen and appple Mx CPUs. If you run exactly the same apps you will get similar performance.... The modern zen are very efficient CPUs. Usually for me the culprit for poor battery life is MS office apps, but under MacOS I've seen window manager consume 90% CPU regularly. Long story short, buggy SW dictates battery life on modern laptops, with very little between apple and zen (can't speak to modern Intel CPUs, i dont have a laptop with one)
- piva00 3y agoYour 2019 MBP is running Intel chips, not at all comparable to the 2020-onwards M processors. I also had a 2019 MBP kitted out as a work computer before and it barely lasted 3h on a normal workday (meetings, compiling code, running Docker, many, many tabs open on browsers, etc.); my work M1 Max lasts anywhere between 8-12h on a heavier workload than what I worked with in 2019 including all I mentioned in the parenthesis. So yes, software is the culprit but the M-series are much better at managing the same software (and even heavier ones) that I run, for the same job.
- modeless 3y agoI agree the lowest specced fanless MacBook Air is very appealing at its price point. But for laptops with fans, if you want to do gaming or AI the performance of a laptop with Nvidia will blow away anything from Apple, and the 2024 version of the ROG Zephyrus G14 looks pretty good.
- danielheath 3y agoFor gaming, absolutely; few enough games even run on OSX. For AI, unified memory is _way_ cheaper than high-ram GPUs.
- modeless 3y agoAnd catastrophically slower. I think a lot of people who are downloading llama.cpp to run on their M-series MacBook Pro or spending $$$ on high-RAM Mac Studios for AI are not actually aware that Nvidia GPUs are often literally ten times faster for the same applications. You'll almost always be better off either running on a local gaming GPU for things that fit or renting GPUs in the cloud for things that don't, just because the performance gap is so massive.
- andy99 3y agoMacs are better but absurdly expensive and I've only ever had an awful customer experience with them. For a daily development laptop, I don't think it's worth the extra money over Lenovo and I don't want to support Apple. I do think it would be cool to have an M_x chip to try and run ML stuff on.
- airstrike 3y agoFor a daily development laptop, I actually find Mac OS incredibly superior to the alternatives, but I guess ymmv
- ewoodrich 3y agoBut OLED isn't an option on any MacBook model currently?
- pokerface_86 3y agothe miniLED on the 14” and 16” is honestly better for laptop purposes anyway
- wil421 3y agoIs AI the new 3D monitor fad? Am I going to have to pay for AI in places I don’t care to? Such as Cars, Refrigerators, and Espresso machines?
- flir 3y agoWould you like some toast?
- lxgr 3y agoIf "computer" and "refrigerator" are on the same level of "places where people do the bulk of their computing on" to you, I suppose so.
- gutnor 3y agoIt is possible it is the next self-driving car, or nuclear fusion. A sudden exponential set of improvements that allowed everyone to dream that self-driving anything was around the corner. Actual promising real world result that show we are really no that far. But the last bridge to cross is actually extremely slow and what was around the corner, becomes a decade away. That said, it's not fruitless. AI is useful as it is today, and if does not go pick up your kids at school in the next 10 years, it would still be useful.
- rsynnott 3y agoI mean, self-driving cars were also an AI problem; they were the _previous_ AI bubble.
- curious_cat_163 3y ago> Apple also plans to add a much improved Neural Engine that has an increased number of cores for AI tasks. This makes total sense but does it? Does Apple really have an application roadmap to ultimately utilize these tensor cores? For all the M1, M2, M3s out there, Siri still sucks. We keep seeing latest arXiv papers [1] coming out of their research efforts hinting at potential improvements but there is not much in those papers that needs to wait for an M4 or M5... What gives? [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.20329 https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.20329
- apetresc 3y agoI mean, the rumours at this point are deafening that Siri is getting a complete rehaul (or an outright replacement, which probably amounts to the same thing) at WWDC in just two months, so I'd reserve judgment on Apple's AI deployment capabilities until then.
- Rinzler89 3y agoI think their main AI case will be photo and video editing or maybe some LLM bots to help your organize and search through files, but Siri feels really abandoned.
- knodi123 3y agoIf they just gave Siri an off-the-shelf LLM with a few extra capabilities that plugged into their ecosystem, it would be amazing.
- Art9681 3y agoThey recently published a paper where an on device model has UI awareness. https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.05719 https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.05719 Siri is about to get swole.
- Rinzler89 3y agoDamn, it seems then Google is really behind here. IIRC their Pixel 8 chips are so underpowered that they can't even run Google's smallest LLM models locally on device, so despite their whole AI hype sales pitch, everything on the Pixel 8 is still run in the cloud. How is Google so slow at this? At least the likes of Intel and Microsoft have an excuse, they're old and crusty corporations that move slow.
- JSDevOps 3y agoUgh! The price of M3s will hold their value as everyone won’t want this.
- lvl102 3y agoI guess they needed to support the stock today? This is just saying they will roll out M4 chips after M3. How prescient!
- highwaylights 3y agoI predict that, after that, they will roll out Macs with the M5 series of chips. Just a hunch.
- modeless 3y agoI'm surprised by the almost universally bearish opinion here so far. AI is going to change everything about how we interact with computers. A M4 with a terabyte of RAM will run GPT-4 level models locally. Forget Siri. You will be able to converse directly with your computer as if it was a person. Not only in text, but by voice and even video, and it will be incredibly responsive. The computer will see using the webcam and have conversations about objects you show it. It will read your screen and give you advice about what you're working on, and even perform tasks for you. It will browse the web for you, summarize content, and take actions on your behalf. It will create images of anything you describe, and compose personalized music in any style. It will render an avatar for itself and show emotions, and it will see and react to your facial expressions and gestures. This is not speculative. Almost all of this stuff is already shown to work, and it is all improving incredibly quickly as we speak! It just needs to be assembled into an actual product, which is exactly what Apple does best. With their silicon advantage they are best positioned to ship these kinds of features, and the best part is it can all run offline locally. No data sent to servers. No privacy concerns. Zero network latency.
- lettergram 3y ago[flagged]
- er4hn 3y agoI'm not a big proponent of AI, but running code locally is far far better for privacy than giving all your data to a remote service you don't control.
- jsheard 3y ago> A M4 with a terabyte of RAM will run GPT-4 level models locally. Perhaps, but a 1TB RAM upgrade would probably cost about as much as a new car. This is Apple we're talking about.
- sroussey 3y agoThe original 128kb Mac was about $7,300 (today's dollars). Apple's Lisa was about $30,000 (today's dollars)
- Loveaway 3y agoHope they can deliver. Right now Apple hardware is silly compared to PC+Nvidia if you wanna play around with GenAI. Both in price and performance. Worst case macs end up as thin-clients, all AI running on Nvidia in the cloud. Would eat into their competive advantage a lot I think.
- oidar 3y agoIf I wanted to build a PC today that could run the big models that were released recently (For example, Mixtral 8x22B and Command-R with as little quantization as possible) what would I buy?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wmf 3y agoRight now Apple hardware is silly compared to PC+Nvidia if you wanna play around with GenAI. You mean it's silly how far ahead Apple is since they offer 192 GB of VRAM while Nvidia only allows 24 GB for reasonable prices? Or do you mean it's silly to compare <$10K Macs with >$30K Nvidia setups in the first place?
- modeless 3y agoWhat would be silly is running a 192 GB ML model on a chip that slow. In practically every case you would be better off with a multi-GPU PC or a cloud GPU instance, simply because the performance gap is so enormously massive. You can buy a whole lot of cloud GPU hours for the price of 192 GB in a Mac, especially when you consider that you don't have to pay extra for the electricity and you don't need the very latest chips to far outperform Apple's best.
- sroussey 3y agoIf they ship the M4 this year, then they might be on a yearly schedule from here on out.
- russellbeattie 3y agoI predict Apple's launch events in the fall are going to be off the charts in terms of productizing AI. I'm not an Apple fanboy - I just think Apple as a company has been prepared and thinking about this stuff for literally decades. They set the bar for user friendly products. It won't be the first time that Apple is late to the market, but they've always redefined it when they arrive, becoming the new standard. It's what they do. I'm a firm believer in AI at the edge: Low latency, privacy, personalization, device integration and no need to invest in massive AI server farms. It's in Apple's best interest to bring AI computation to the masses. But we'll see if Tim can pull it off.
- a_wild_dandan 3y agoThe M-series is just so phenomenal for AI. Mixtral is my MacBook's daily driver, and will try the 8x22B variant soon. Being capable of that on a $3k-$4k laptop still blows my mind. I'm glad that Apple's leaning into AI. (Aside: Apple's MLX framework is showing nice performance gains over PyTorch on their silicon. I'm excited to see that project evolve.)