Apple M5 Chip
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
apple.comTechstoryHigh profile
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Apple M5 ChipAI PerformanceHardware Upgrades
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Apple M5 Chip
AI Performance
Hardware Upgrades
Apple announced the M5 chip with improved AI performance and GPU capabilities, but the discussion revolves around its limitations, such as the lack of 'Pro' or 'Max' variants and restricted RAM configurations.
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I can easily imagine companies running Mac Studios in prod. Apple should release another Xserve.
I highly recommend Andrej Karpathy's videos if you want to learn details.
So if you have a 7B parameter model with 16-bit quantization, that means you'll have 14 GB/s of data coming in. If you only have 153 GB/sec of memory bandwidth, that means you'll cap out ~11 tokens/sec, regardless of how my processing power you have.
You can of course quantize to 8-bit or even 4-bit, or use a smaller model, but doing so makes your model dumber. There's a trade-off between performance and capability.
Models like Qwen 3 30B-A3B and GPT-OSS 20B, both quite decent, should be able to run at 30+ tokens/sec at typical (4-bit) quantizations.
Neither product actually qualifies for the task IMO, and that doesn't change just because two companies advertised them as such instead of just one. The absolute highest end Apple Silicon variants tend to be a bit more reasonable, but the price advantage goes out the window too.
"M5 is Apple’s next-generation system on a chip built for AI, resulting in a faster, more efficient, and more capable chip for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro."
It would take 48 channels of DDR5x-9600 to match a 3090's memory bandwidth, so the situation is unlikely to change for a couple of years when DDR6 arrives I guess
Also just noticed this:
"And now with M5, the new 14-inch MacBook Pro and iPad Pro benefit from dramatically accelerated processing for AI-driven workflows, such as running diffusion models in apps like Draw Things, or running large language models locally using platforms like webAI."
First time I've ever heard of webAI - I wonder how they got themselves that mention?
I wondered the same. Went into Crunchbase and found out Crunchbase are now fully paywalled (!), well saw that coming... Anyway, hit the webAI blog, apparently they were showcased at the M4 Macbook Air event in 2024 [1] [2]:
> During a demonstration, a 15-inch Air ran a webAI’s 22 billion parameter Companion large language model, rendered a 4K image using the Blender app, opened several productivity apps, and ran the game Wuthering Waves without any kind of slowdown.
My guess is this was the best LLM use-case Apple could dig-up for their local-first AI strategy. And Apple Silicon is the best hardware use-case webAI could dig-up for their local-first AI strategy. As for Apple, other examples would look too hacky, purely dev-oriented and depend on LLM behemoths from US or China. Ie "try your brand-new performant M5 chip with LM Studio loaded with China's Deepseek or Meta's Llama" is an Apple exec no-go.
1. https://www.webai.com/blog/why-apples-m4-macbook-air-is-a-mi...
2. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-updates-bestselling-mac...
Now that they own the SoC design pipeline, they’re really able to flex these muscles.
Very often the intel chips in macbooks were stellar, they were just seriously inhibited by Apples terrible cooling designs and so were permanently throttled.
They could never provide decent cooling for the chips coupled with their desire to make paper thin devices.
Curiously they managed to figure this out exactly when it became their silicon instead (M1 MacBook Pros were notably thicker and with more cooling capacity than the outgoing Intel ones)
But I have had 2 iMac power supply die one me, the grounding problem on a MBP and a major annoyance with power noise leaking from a Mac Mini (makes for some nasty audio output, hilarious when you consider they supposedly target creative who clearly need good audio output).
You always find people raving about Apple's engineering prowess but my experience is that it's mostly a smoke show, they make things look good, miniaturise/oversimplify beyond what is reasonable and you often end up with major hardware flaws that are just a pain to deal with.
They always managed to have good performance and a premium feeling package but I don't think their engineering tradeoffs are actually very good most of the time.
As far as I can tell, the new Mac Mini design still has grounding issues, and you will get humming issues, which is beyond stupid for a product of that caliber. At this point I don't care about having the power supply inside the dam box, just use a brick if you must to prevent that sort of problem. This is particularly infuriating since they made the iMac PSU external, which is beyond stupid for an AiO.
But common sense left Apple a long time ago and now they just chase specs benchmarks and fashionnable UIs above everything.
That is probably the least of reasons why people buy Apple - to many it's just a status symbol, and the OS is a secondary consideration.
https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+products+as+status+sym...
And this would eventually evolve into MacOS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep
EDIT: I seem to be getting downvoted, so I will just leave this here for people to see I am not lying:
https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-apple-is-not-a-hard...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEeyaAUCyZs
[1] They used that exact term, and it has stuck with me ever since.
Apple's product revenue in this fiscal year has been $233B, with a gross margin of $86B.
Their services revenue is $80B with $60B gross margin.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy2025-q3/FY25_Q3_Consol...
Look, I totally understand making an off-hand comment like you did based on a gut feeling. Nobody can fact-check everything they write, and everyone is wrong sometimes. But it is pretty lazy to demand a source when you were just making things up. When challenged with specific and verifiable nubmers, you should have checked the single obvious source for the financials of any public company. Their quarterly statements.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEeyaAUCyZs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEeyaAUCyZs
Regardless of revenue, Apple isn't a hardware company or a software company. It's a product company. The hardware doesn't exist merely to run the software, nor does the software exist merely to give functionality to the hardware. Both exist to create the product. Neither side is the "main" one, they're both parts of what ultimately ships.
Watch this and maybe you might change your mind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEeyaAUCyZs
Modern Apple is also quite a bit more integrated. A company designing their own highly competitive CPUs is more hardware-oriented than one that gets their CPUs off the shelf from Intel.
Yes, it's $70B a year from iPhones alone and $23B from the totality of the Services org. (including all app store / subscription proceeds). Significantly more than 50% of the company's total profits come from hardware sales.
We should be comparing profit on those departments not revenue. Do you have those figures?
It is well known that companies often sell the physicval devices at a loss, in order to make the real money from the services on top.
Apple is and always has been a HW company first.
Steve Jobs consistently made the point that Apples hardware is the same as everyone elses, what makes them different is they make the best software which enables the best user experience.
Here see this quote from Steve Jobs which shows that his attitude is the complete opposite of what you wrote.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEeyaAUCyZs
https://youtu.be/dEeyaAUCyZs
The above link is a video where he mentions that.
It is true that Apple’s major software products like iOS and MacOS are only available on Apple’s own hardware. But the Steve Jobs justification for this (which he said in a different interview I can’t find right now so I will paraphrase) is that he felt Apple made the best hardware and software in the world so he wanted Apple’s customers to experience the best software on the best hardware possible which he felt only Apple could provide. (I wish I could find the exact quote.)
Anyway according to Steve Jobs Apple is a software first company.
If you care about software you have to make your own hardware.
I'll allow that perhaps Apple considers hardware a means to an end. But what an end.
It was coherent, (relatively) bug free, and lacked the idiot level iOSification and nagging that is creeping in all over MacOS today.
I haven't had to restart Finder until recently, but now even that has trouble with things like network drives.
I'm positive there are many internals today that are far better than in Snow Leopard, but it's outweighed by user visible problems.
It shouldn't surprise you I think that Android Jelly Bean was the best phone OS ever made as well, and they went completely in the wrong direction after that.
Programs absolutely could have much more controllable auto save before for when it made sense.
Speaking of security it didn't have app sandboxing either.
This is what I mean about iOSification - it's trending towards being a non serious OS. Linux gets more attractive by the day, and it really is the absence of proper support of hardware in the class of the M series that prevents a critical mass of devs jumping ship.
being poor, I need to sell my Macbook to get money to pay of my 16e, then sell the 16e and use that money to but a Pixel 9, then probably a but a Thinkpad Carbon X1. Just saying all that to show you the lengths I am going through to boycott/battle the enshitification.
At least its open source and free I guess.
Adding extra features that aren't necessarily needed is enshittification, and very not-unix.
This, and while in this case it is specifically unwise on security terms, there are plenty of other example where the feature are completely cosmetic and deviates from the core user requirements/scenario.
That would be the end of open source, hobbyists and startup companies because you'd have to pay up just to have a basic C library (or hope some companies would have reasonable licensing and support fees).
Remember one of the first GNU projects was GCC because a compiler was an expensive, optional piece of software on the UNIX systems in those days.
It's not even about open source or closed source at this point. It's about feature creep.
Why parse whatever is in the logs, at all?
Imagine the same stuff in your SSH client, it would parse the content before sending them over because a functionality requires it to talk to some server somewhere, it's insanity.
There's also Krita, which artists love.
That this comment keeps oscillating between upvoted and downvoted (with significant spikes in both directions) is an interesting insight into the span of opinions on HN between the hustler types who hate the idea of software that doesn't turn a quick buck, and the crafters :-)
> Hardware and software both matter, and Apple’s history shows that there’s a good argument to be made for developing integrated hardware and software. But if you asked me which matters more, I wouldn’t hesitate to say software. All things considered I’d much prefer a PC running Mac OS X to a Mac running Windows.
https://daringfireball.net/2009/11/the_os_opportunity
At the time I'd only been a Mac user for a few years and I would have strongly agreed. But definitely things have shifted— I've been back on Windows/WSL for a number of years, and it's software quality/compatibility issues that are a lot of what keeps me from trying another Mac. Certainly I'm far more tempted by the hardware experience than I am the software, and it's not even really close.
It's a server or developer box first and a non-technical user second.
On Linux there is variety and choice, which some folks dislike.
But on the Mac I get whatever Apple gives me, and that is often subject to the limitations of corporate attention spans and development budgets.
And arbitrary turf wars like their war against web apis/apps causing more friction for devs and end users.
Should Emacs and Vim both be called "Editor" then?
To me, this is actually a great example of the problems with Linux as a community, that GUI applications seem to just be treated as placeholders (e.g., all word processors are the same?), but then its inconsistent by celebrating the unique differences between editors like Vim and Emacs. Photoshop, Excel, Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro are, in my opinion, crown jewels of what we've accomplished in computing, and by extension some of the greatest creations of the human race, democratizing tasks that in some cases would have cost millions of dollars before (e.g., a recording studio in your home). Relegating these to generic names like "spreadsheet", makes them sound interchangeable, when in my opinion they're each individual creations of great beauty that should wear their names with pride. They've helped improve the trajectory of the human race by facilitating many individuals to perform actions they never would have had the resources to do otherwise.
I've used some distributions in which they were. Tooltips and icons were provided to disambiguate. Worked for me.
Other distributions name applications explicitly, some place them in a folder together named "Editors".
None of the distributions I've used place either in a corporate branded subfolder as is typical on Windows and Mac.
Freedom of choice is wonderful.
But, to your point, even I'll admit the fact that the Photoshop is called "Adobe Photoshop 2025" is annoying lol.
If I close my laptop for a few days, I don't want significant battery drain. If I don't use it for two weeks, I want it to still have life left. And I don't want to write tens of gigabytes to disk every time I close the lid, either!
If you're talking about hardware interaction from the command line, that's very different and I don't think there's a fix.
I want good window management. Linux gives me a huge number of options. MacOS - not as much.
One can just hand wave "Apple must support Linux and all" but that is not going to get anything done.
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