3 ms·

LOL, you can get 5x - 10x computational power (including AI if needed) for the same price from other vendors. Unless they overshot production and have stock of

LOL, you can get 5x - 10x computational power (including AI if needed) for the same price from other vendors. Unless they overshot production and have stock of unsold M2s they're willing to sell at 90% discount.

fsociety 2y ago
Apple doesn’t pay consumer prices for their own chips.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  Sure but they also don't have a profit margin of like 800%. And there's power consumption to think about. I expect it's about control and Apple's philosophy that they have to do everything themselves.
LordKeren 2y ago
Apple is not becoming a third party cloud service provider. This is hardware for their own internal uses
swatcoder 2y ago
They don't pay retail for their own vertically integrated products, they likely would have inventory surplus as new retail products move to other chips, and they mature production pipelines primed to efficiently squeeze out additional volume for a new application like this. Your comment doesn't make much sense to me.
cayleyh 2y ago
I wondered about this too. One thing that did make sense to me was that these are for supporting features as-is on older devices by offloading on-device workloads to the cloud. If you're releasing a bunch of new ML-powered features that are setup to run on-device, you have to have a cutoff for what generation of device is required. Apple has indicated with recent OpenELM model releases that they're targeting different levels of device capability. But you can only go so far. For older devices, you can offload those tasks to the cloud, but then you have to maintain 2 different software stacks and there are potential compatibility issues. If you have a bunch of M2Us in the cloud though, you have the exact same hardware that you're developing on-device for. If you package up the core software components as frameworks, you can run on device or in the cloud, and it MAYBE simplifies keeping the results and output in sync between the two. Otherwise, it makes no sense from a pure performance perspective vs. just deploying racks of H100s...

fsociety 2y ago

Apple doesn’t pay consumer prices for their own chips.

IshKebab 2y ago
Sure but they also don't have a profit margin of like 800%. And there's power consumption to think about. I expect it's about control and Apple's philosophy that they have to do everything themselves.

LordKeren 2y ago

Apple is not becoming a third party cloud service provider. This is hardware for their own internal uses

swatcoder 2y ago

They don't pay retail for their own vertically integrated products, they likely would have inventory surplus as new retail products move to other chips, and they mature production pipelines primed to efficiently squeeze out additional volume for a new application like this. Your comment doesn't make much sense to me.

cayleyh 2y ago

I wondered about this too. One thing that did make sense to me was that these are for supporting features as-is on older devices by offloading on-device workloads to the cloud. If you're releasing a bunch of new ML-powered features that are setup to run on-device, you have to have a cutoff for what generation of device is required. Apple has indicated with recent OpenELM model releases that they're targeting different levels of device capability. But you can only go so far. For older devices, you can offload those tasks to the cloud, but then you have to maintain 2 different software stacks and there are potential compatibility issues. If you have a bunch of M2Us in the cloud though, you have the exact same hardware that you're developing on-device for. If you package up the core software components as frameworks, you can run on device or in the cloud, and it MAYBE simplifies keeping the results and output in sync between the two. Otherwise, it makes no sense from a pure performance perspective vs. just deploying racks of H100s...