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Apple has been stingy with RAM in consumer hardware. RAM prices will continue escalating, some analysts say into 2030, and this will make it more difficult to b
by N_Lens 1mo ago
Apple has been stingy with RAM in consumer hardware. RAM prices will continue escalating, some analysts say into 2030, and this will make it more difficult to build next generation phones with sufficient memory for meaningful ML workloads.
I hope there's some kind of inversion in the current chip economics, because I love distributed/democratized/private compute, but currently cloud based LLM inference seems to be much more viable. I don't see local llms meaningfully viable for the general usecase in the near future.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- bb123 1mo agoI'm not sure about that. I can run Qwen 3.8 27B at acceptable speed on an M1 MacBook Pro from 5 years ago. Thats Opus 4.6 Quality, on 5 year old consumer hardware. I think the trend is the opposite - smaller models that can run on hardware people already have are getting better and better.
- sidpatil 1mo agoHow much RAM does your system have?
- cousinbryce 1mo agoThere’s something I’d don’t understand about this. Apple’s RAM is on their own die. Is the price of RAM an indicator for the cost of die space in general?
- dgacmu 1mo agoNo - DRAM is made on a different process than compute. Apple uses dram made by the usual dram manufacturers. The dram shortage is a combination of high demand + shifting manufacturing to HBM, which consumes more wafer capacity than DDR5
- fc417fc802 1mo agoSoC RAM is on a separate die in the same package. With modern chiplet architectures even the CPU itself isn't on a single die.