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Whoa. M3 instead of M4. I wonder if this was basically binning, but I thought that I had read somewhere that the interposer that enabled this for the M1 chips w
by InTheArena 2y ago
Whoa. M3 instead of M4. I wonder if this was basically binning, but I thought that I had read somewhere that the interposer that enabled this for the M1 chips where not available.
That Said, 512GB of unified ram with access to the NPU is absolutely a game changer. My guess is that Apple developed this chip for their internal AI efforts, and are now at the point where they are releasing it publicly for others to use. They really need a 2U rack form for this though.
This hardware is really being held back by the operating system at this point.
- klausa 2y ago>I had read somewhere that the interposer that enabled this for the M1 chips where not available. With all my love and respect for "Apple rumors" writers; this was always "I read five blogposts about CPU design and now I'm an expert!" territory. The speculation was based on the M3 Maxes die shots not having the interposer visible, which... implies basically nothing whether that _could have_ been supported in an M3 Ultra configuration; as evidenced by the announcement today.
- sroussey 2y agoI’m guessing it’s not really a M3. No M3 has thunderbolt 5. This is a new chip with M3 marketing. I’d expect this from Intel, not Apple.
- klausa 2y agoBaseline M4 doesn't have Thunderbolt 5 either; only the Pro/Max variants do. The press-release even calls TB5 out: >Each Thunderbolt 5 port is supported by its own custom-designed controller directly on the chip. Given that they're doing the same on A-series chips (A18 Pro with 10Gbps USB-C; A18 with USB 2.0); I imagine it's just relatively simple to swap the I/O blocks around and they're doing this for cost and/or product segmentation reasons.
- sroussey 2y agoWhich means this is a whole new chip. It may be M3 based, but with added interposer support and new thunderbolt stuff. Which, at this point, why not just use M4 as a base?
- kridsdale1 2y agoCould be that M4 requires a different TSMC fab that is at full production doing iPhones.
- operatingthetan 2y agoOr they are saving the M4 Ultra name for later on ...
- klausa 2y ago>Which, at this point, why not just use M4 as a base? I imagine that making those chips is quite a bit more involved than just taking the files for M3 Max, and copy-pasting them twice into a new project. I imagine it just takes more time to design/verify/produce them; especially given they're not selling very many of them, so they're probably not super-high-priority projects.
- hinkley 2y agoTB 5 seems like the sort of thing you could 'slap on' to a beefy enough chip. Or the sort of thing you put onto a successor when you had your fingers crossed that the spec and hardware would finalize in time for your product launch but the fucking committee went into paralysis again at the last moment and now your product has to ship 4 months before you can put TB 5 hardware on shelves. So you put your TB4 circuitry on a chip that has the bandwidth to handle TB5 and you wait for the sequel.
- kridsdale1 2y agoSounds like you’ve seen some things.
- hinkley 2y agoThe world is full of features that didn't make the cutoff for launch date. I believe there's one or two of these publicly known in Apple's history, but it's an old tale.
- jagged-chisel 2y ago> This hardware is really being held back by the operating system at this point. Please elucidate.
- diggan 2y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075 ("Apple's Software Quality Crisis" - 1134 comments) ^ has a lot of elaborations on this subject
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- internetter 2y agoThis is more about "average" end user software, not the type of software that would be running on a machine like this. Yes their applications fell off, but if you're paying for 512gb of RAM apple notes being slow isn't the bottleneck
- diggan 2y agoLack of focus on quality of software affects all types of workloads, not just consumer-oriented or professional-oriented in isolation.
- gjsman-1000 2y agoNah, if I ever wrote an article about the software crisis on the Linux desktop, there’d be flames here making Apple’s issues look small.
- diggan 2y agoIt'd be an interesting flame war in the comments, if nothing else, go for it! I'm happy to give plenty of concrete evidence why Linux is more suitable for professionals than macOS is in 2025 :)
- behnamoh 2y ago> My guess is that Apple developed this chip for their internal AI efforts what internal AI efforts? Apple Intelligence is bunkers, and Apple MLX framework remains a hobby project for Apple
- layer8 2y agohttps://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compute https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu... https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/11/apple-reportedly-developing-ai-server-chip-with-broadcom/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/11/apple-reportedly-developin... https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/24/apple-commits-500b-to-us-manufacturing-including-a-new-ai-server-facility-in-houston/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/24/apple-commits-500b-to-us-m...
- InTheArena 2y agoApple stated that they were deploying their own hardware for next generation Siri. My thesis is that this is the hardware they developed. If so, this is hardly a hobby project. It may not be effective, but there is serious cash behind this.
- gatienboquet 2y agoThey use their own M chips for IA. They are far more advanced on AI than the majority of company. They are using OpenAI for now but in couple months they will own the full chain of value.
- behnamoh 2y agowe’ve heard that claim for the past three years, but every effort by them points to the opposite. don’t get me wrong, I would love for Apple Intelligence to be smart enough on my iPhone and on my Mac, but honestly, the current version is a complete disappointment.
- DrBenCarson 2y ago
- Teever 2y agoFTFA > Apple’s custom-built UltraFusion packaging technology uses an embedded silicon interposer that connects two M3 Max dies across more than 10,000 signals, providing over 2.5TB/s of low-latency interprocessor bandwidth, and making M3 Ultra appear as a single chip to software.
- InTheArena 2y agoI RTFA, RMFP The comment was that the press had reported that the interposer wasn't available. This obviously uses some form of interposer, so the question is if the press missed it, or Apple has something new.
- nsteel 2y ago> uses an _embedded_ silicon interposer It sounds like they're using TSMC's new LSI (Local Si Interconnect) technology, which is their version of Intel's EMIB. It's essentially small islands of silicon, just around the inter-chip connections, embedded within the organic substrate. This gives the advantages of silicon interconnect, without the cost and size restrictions of a silicon interposer. It would not be visible from just looking at the package. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16031/tsmcs-version-of-emib-lsi-3dfabric https://www.anandtech.com/show/16031/tsmcs-version-of-emib-l... https://semianalysis.com/2022/01/06/advanced-packaging-part-2-review/ https://semianalysis.com/2022/01/06/advanced-packaging-part-...
- darthrupert 2y agoYeah, if only Apple at least semi-supported Linux, their computers would have no competition.
- dwedge 2y agoI've been buying and using MBP for 6 or 7 years now, and just assumed I could run Linux on one if I wanted to. I just spent a couple of days trying to get a 2018 MBP working with Linux and found out [edit to clarify] that my other ARM MBP basically won't work. I just want a break from MacOS, I'll be buying a Thinkpad and will probably never come back. This isn't my moaning, I understand it's their market, but if their hardware supported Linux (especially dual booting) or Docker native, I'd probably be buying Apple for the next decade and now I just won't be.
- _2d30 2y ago> trying to get a 2018 MBP working with Linux and found out ARM basically doesn't work. Since the M series of ARM processors didn’t come out until 2020, that would make a lot of sense.
- dwedge 2y agoTwo separate laptops, I could have been clearer. I have an old 2018 I wanted to try it on, and my daily is M2 that would have been next.
- dghlsakjg 2y agoA 2018 MacBook would be an intel x86 chip. It’s incredibly easy to get Linux running on that machine.
- dwedge 2y agoGetting Linux running wasn't difficult. But Mint lost audio (everything else worked), the specialised Mint kernel lost both audio and wifi, and Arch lost both wifi and the onboard keyboard. I'm sure with tinkering I could eventually get it working, but I'm well past the point of wanting to tinker with hardware and drivers to get Linux working.
- kokada 2y ago> This hardware is really being held back by the operating system at this point. Apple could either create a 2U rack hardware and support Linux (and I mean Apple supporting it, not hobbysts), or have a build of Darwin headless that could run on that hardware. But in the later case, we probably wouldn't have much software available (though I am sure people would eventually starting porting software to it, there is already MacPorts and Homebrew and I am sure they could be adapted to eventually run in that platform). But Apple is also not interested in that market, so this will probably never happen.
- naikrovek 2y ago> But Apple is also not interested in that market, so this will probably never happen. they're just a tiny company with shareholders who are really tired of never earning back their investments. give 'em a break. I mean they're still so small that they must protect themselves by requiring that macs be used for publishing iPhone and iPad applications.
- hnaccount_rng 2y agoNot to get in the way of good snark or anything. But.. Apple isn't _requiring_ that everyone uses MacOS on their systems. But you have to bring your own engineering effort to actually make another OS run. And so far Asahi is the only effort that I'm aware of (there were alternatives in the very beginning, but they didn't even get to M2 right?)
- thesuitonym 2y ago> But you have to bring your own engineering effort to actually make another OS run. I mean, that's usually how it works though. When IBM launched the PS/2, they didn't support anything other than PC-DOS and OS/2, Microsoft had to make MS-DOS work for it (I mean... they did get support from IBM, but not really), the 386BSD and Linux communities brought the engineering effort without IBM's involvement. When Apple was making Motorola Macs, they may have given Be a little help, but didn't support any other OSes that appeared. Same with PowerPC. All of the support for alternative OSes has always come from the community, whether that's volunteers or a commercial interest with cash to burn. Why should that change for Apple silicon?
- AlchemistCamp 2y agoKeep in mind the minimum configuration that has 512GB of unified RAM is $9,499.
- BoredPositron 2y agoStill cheap if the only thing you look for is vram.
- adgjlsfhk1 2y agoThis chip has 0GB vram. It has 8 channel lpddr5.
- BoredPositron 2y agoFun at parties and stuff.
- imatrix 2y agoThis is not correct. It is like VRAM, not like normal PC RAM. Lowest latency of DDR5-6400 on normal PC starting at 60ns+ Lowest latency of VRAM on GeForce RTX 4090 starting at 14 ns Lowest latency of Apple M1 Memory starting at 5 ns, its more like L3 cache And on Apple M chip, this ultrafast memory is available for CPU, GPU and NPU. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... https://chipsandcheese.com/p/microbenchmarking-nvidias-rtx-4090 https://chipsandcheese.com/p/microbenchmarking-nvidias-rtx-4...
- adgjlsfhk1 2y agoYou are misreading that chart. 5ns is the L2 latency. The ram latency from your source is 111 ms (once the size gets bigger than the size of the cache). The ram on a 4090 is 240 ns https://chipsandcheese.com/p/microbenchmarking-nvidias-rtx-4090 https://chipsandcheese.com/p/microbenchmarking-nvidias-rtx-4...
- nsteel 2y ago
- exabrial 2y agoIf Apple supported Linux (headless) natively, and we could rack m4 pros, I absolutely would use them in our Colo. The CPUs have zero competition in terms of speed, memory bandwidth. Still blown away no other company has been able to produce Arm server chips that can compete.
- notpushkin 2y agoAsahi is a thing. For headless usage it’s pretty much ready to go already.
- criddell 2y agoThe Asahi maintainer resigned recently. What that means for the future only time will tell. I probably wouldn't want to make a big investment in it right now.
- seabrookmx 2y agoYour wording makes it sound like it was a one-man show. Asahi has a really strong contributor base, new leadership[1], and the backing of Fedora via the Asahi Fedora Remix. While Hector resigning is a loss, I don't think it's a death knell for the project. [1]: https://asahilinux.org/2025/02/passing-the-torch/ https://asahilinux.org/2025/02/passing-the-torch/
- hoppp 2y agoHe was the lead developer and very prominent figure. I think it probably boils down to funding the new developments.
- whimsicalism 2y agoit was pretty close to a one man show
- skyyler 2y agoBy what grounds do you make this statement? My understanding is there are dozens of people working on it.
- stego-tech 2y ago> This hardware is really being held back by the operating system at this point. It really is. Even if they themselves won't bring back their old XServe OS variant, I'd really appreciate it if they at least partnered with a Linux or BSD (good callout, ryao) dev to bring a server OS to the hardware stack. The consumer OS, while still better (to my subjective tastes) than Windows, is increasingly hampered by bloat and cruft that make it untenable for production server workloads, at least to my subjective standards. A server OS that just treats the underlying hardware like a hypervisor would, making the various components attachable or shareable to VMs and Containers on top, would make these things incredibly valuable in smaller datacenters or Edge use cases. Having an on-prem NPU with that much RAM would be a godsend for local AI acceleration among a shared userbase on the LAN.
- ryao 2y agoGiven shared heritage, I would expect to see Apple work with FreeBSD before I would expect Apple to work with Linux.
- stego-tech 2y agoYou are technically correct (the best kind of correct). I’m just a filthy heathen who lumps the BSDs and Linux distros under “Linux” as an incredibly incorrect catchall for casual discourse.
- hedora 2y agoI heard OpenBSD has been working for a while. I’m continually surprised Apple doesn’t just donate something like 0.1% of their software development budget to proton and the asahi projects. It’d give them a big chunk of the gaming and server markets pretty much overnight. I guess they’re too busy adding dark patterns that re-enable siri and apple intelligence instead.
- ryao 2y agoThe server markets want ECC and Apple has largely stopped shipping ECC. I don’t recall seeing any assurances that the ARM Mac Pro had ECC.
- jmyeet 2y agoI've been looking at the potential for Apple to make really interesting LLM hardware. Their unified memory model could be a real game-changer because NVidia really forces market segmentation by limiting memory. It's worth adding the M3 Ultra has 819GB/s memory bandwidth [1]. For comparison the RTX 5090 is 1800GB/s [2]. That's still less but the M4 Mac Minis have 120-300GB/s and this will limit token throughput so 819GB/s is a vast improvement. For $9500 you can buy a M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 512GB of unified memory. I think that has massive potential. [1]: https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/specs/ https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/specs/ [2]: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/50-series/rtx-5090/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/50-serie...
- hedora 2y agoOther than the NPU, it’s not really a game changer; here’s a 512GB AMD deepseek build for $2000: https://digitalspaceport.com/how-to-run-deepseek-r1-671b-fully-locally-on-2000-epyc-rig/ https://digitalspaceport.com/how-to-run-deepseek-r1-671b-ful...
- flakiness 2y agoThe low energy use can be a game changer if you live in a crappy apartment with limited power capacity. I gave up my big GPU box dream because of that.
- aurareturn 2y agobetween 4.25 to 3.5 TPS (tokens per second) on the Q4 671b full model. 3.5 - 4.25 tokens/s. You're torturing yourself. Especially with a reasoning model. This will run it at 40 tokens/s based on rough calculation. Q4 quant. 37b active parameters. 5x higher price for 10x higher performance.
- hinkley 2y agoAlso you don't have to deal with Windows. Which people who do not understand Apple are very skilled at not noticing. If you've ever used git, svn, or an IDE side by side on corporate Windows versus Apple I don't know why you would ever go back.
- hatthew 2y agoIs there a reason one couldn't use linux?
- bigyabai 2y agoThe PC doesn't have to run Windows either. Strictly speaking, professional applications see MacOS support as an Apple-sanctioned detriment. > If you've ever used git, svn, or an IDE side by side I still reach for Windows, even though it's a dogshit OS. I would rather use WSL to write and deploy a single app, as opposed to doing my work in a Linux VM or (god forbid) writing and debugging multiple versions just to support my development runtime. If I'm going to use an ad-encumbered commercial service-slop OS, I might as well pick the one that doesn't actively block my work.
- intrasight 2y agoIt certainly is held back and that is unfortunate. But if you can run your workloads on this amazing machine, then that's a lot of compute for the buck. I assume that there's a community of developers focusing on leveraging this hardware instead of complaining about the operating system.
- hinkley 2y agoGiven that the M1 Ultra and M2 Ultra also exist, I'd expect either straight binning, or two designs that use mostly the same designs for the cores but more of them and a few extra features. I love Apple but they love to speak in half truths in product launches. Are they saying the M3 Ultra is their first Thunderbolt 5 computer? I don't recall seeing any previous announcements.
- kridsdale1 2y agoM4 Pro MacBook and Mini have TB5.
- hinkley 2y agoSo it's lying by omission. Sounds about right. (NB: I've been long on AAPL since $7 a share but I'm also allergic to bullshit)
- hajile 2y agoOne of the leakers who got this Mac Studio right claims Apple is reserving the M4 ultra for the Mac Pro to differentiate the products a bit more.
- GeekyBear 2y agoI also wondered about binning, so I pulled together how heavily Apple's Max chips were binned in shipping configurations. M1 Max - 24 to 32 GPU cores M2 Max - 30 to 38 GPU cores M3 Max - 30 to 40 GPU cores M4 Max - 32 to 40 GPU cores I also looked up the announcement dates for the Max and the Ultra variant in each generation. M1 Max - October 18, 2021 M1 Ultra - March 8, 2022 M2 Max - January 17, 2023 M2 Ultra - June 5, 2023 M3 Max - October 30, 2023 M3 Ultra - March 12, 2025 M4 Max - October 30, 2024 > My guess is that Apple developed this chip for their internal AI efforts As good a guess as any, given the additional delay between the M3 Max and Ultra being made available to the public.
- jonplackett 2y agoI’m missing the point. What is it you’re concluding from these dates?
- GeekyBear 2y agoI was referring to the additional year of delay between the M3 Max and M3 Ultra announcements when compared to the M1 and M2 generations. The theory that the M3 Ultra was being produced, but diverted for internal use makes as much sense as any theory I've seen. It makes at least as much sense as the "TSMC had difficulty producing enough defect free M3 Max chips" theory.
- jonplackett 2y agoGotcha. Thanks!