Seems like a made-up distinction that shouldn't be necessary since M6 has not even released. I suspect this is a marketing ploy to meant to drive up both interest while also increasing prices for the next generation of Mac hardware.
> Seems like a made-up distinction that shouldn't be necessary since M6 has not even released.
Why would it? Each generation of the M series has an architectural improvement on their chipsets. The difference between an M1 and an M1 Pro is the allocation and arrangement not the architecture. M6 to M7 presumably will have architectural changes.
This is no different than them skipping the “Ultra” chips on some generations. The only real difference is it going all the way down to skipping the “Pro” line. So, only the MacBook Air, low end MBP, and maybe the iPad Pro and Mac Mini get the M6.
Made up how? They'll do a refresh of lower end devices, but not the high core count versions.
It's the same thing as how the Mac Studio got an M4 Max refresh, but they didn't make an M4 Ultra so if you want the 28+ core CPU or 60+ core GPU, that's still using an M3 Ultra.
This time it'll be across all the Pro, Max, and Ultra versions, if you want those they'll stay at the previous generation for the M6 cycle.
Not that weird - Apple has a huge set of chips and hardware and software products. Putting every single thing on a fixed identical update cycle together won't always make sense.
Except that is not what's happening. The article clarifies something that is misleading if you interpret the headline in isolation: "high-end M6" means "the high-end variants of the M6 line", not "the entire M6 line".
What it's saying is that the M6 will be released, but not the M6 Pro or M6 Max. Instead, Apple will wait to release new Max/Pro chips for a future generation.
It's not simply marketing since the Pro/Max chips of a generation use the same cores as the regular version, just more of them or different combinations of performance and efficiency cores.
> Seems like a made-up distinction that shouldn't be necessary since M6 has not even released.
The claim is that M6 will be released, but the only variants will be lower end.
When they get to the M7 generation, they will make high end variants.
It's a real distinction because each generation of parts shares an architecture.
The article has an entire section speculating what the M6 parts will be, but says they'll top out around 200GB/s memory bandwidth and 12 graphics cores.
Whether it matters for the consumer (who only sees released and announced end results) or not is irrelevant.
It can still be a very real, not made-up distinction, if the actual facts on the ground are that Apple designed an M6 line, but then scrapped that design and asked the team to create a new design with emphasis on AI-focused specs.
It's not the name that's important (the M7 could still come out as M6), is them skipping a design, or cpu "Tick-Tock model" step.
Perhaps to support demand for the products with recent price hikes, and/or the upcoming Mac Studio with M5 Ultra, rather than have customers sit on the sidelines thinking they'll wait this generation out.
I am still skeptical that Apple intentionally leaked this because they normally are so tight-lipped, but there are reasons in favor of leaking this.
The article says base M7 memory bandwidth is targeted at 240GB/s.
M1 had 70 GB/s, M1 Pro: 200, M1 Max 400, M1 Ultra 800.
Modern RTX 6000: ~1,600 or so.
If we get a 1,200-1,500 GB/s bandwidth M7 variant in late 2027 with 512GB of RAM, that will be a very interesting chip. Tracking LLM size and performance improvements, I can imagine that being a sort of inflection point for local inference. I wonder what the power budget would be in desktop format.
Well yes. But similar to the Apple TSMC relationship, could Apple step in with large orders to established RAM makers such that the RAM makers can invest with stability?
No it isn't, DRAM is made with a different process and those are chiplets, perfectly possible to outsource, and the only possibility really as TSMC does not make DRAM.
Apple is finally going to realize Jobs vision where sand comes into the factory, is turned into RAM and CPU chips, then installed in a Mac or iPhone then shipped to a customer.
A hypothetical M7 Ultra with LPDDR6 14.4Gbps memory would be 1.85 Tb/s.
You're look at about 100 tokens/s for a 1T MoE 37B active 4bit model.
It'd probably cost $30k or more I'm guessing if memory prices do not come down. Even at $30k, it could still be a relative bargain since an RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell 96GB card costs $12k today. The M3 Ultra with 512GB was around $8k before Apple discontinued it. I expect an M7 Ultra to have 768GB or 1024GB.
Apple Silicon Macs were on their way to becoming cheap local LLM machines relative to professional GPUs before this memory crisis. It may still emerge as such in a few years.
Here's some interesting math: At 512GB, an Ultra chip could make 42 pro iPhones. Assume a 55% profit margins, and $1200 ASP, you're looking at $28,160 in profit from making iPhones instead. No wonder Apple discontinued the M3 Ultra 512GB. If they only have a limited supply of RAM for all their products, it makes no sense to produce an $8000 M3 Ultra 512GB when you can produce 42 pro iPhones. You can only configure an M3 Ultra up to 96GB today as of June 2026.
Apple would have to raise the price of a 512GB Ultra Mac to around $50k to match iPhone profits.
In British English the "an" is correct, even though most English dialects don't actually render the H as silent. It's a French-derived word that had a silent H originally, ergo we use "an".
> Assume a 55% profit margins, and $1200 ASP, you're looking at $28,160 in profit from making iPhones instead. No wonder Apple discontinued the M3 Ultra 512GB.
How would that work? They purchase 512GB from Samsung and then it doesn't matter if that's like 128x 4GB or 4x 128GB?
Note that this reserved capacity now has competition from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Meta, Microsoft, Chinese data centers and so on, all willing to pay premium.
If comapnies keep spending half a macbook neo worth of subscription on AI plans monthly per person, Apple is going to have a hard time competing.
I’d assume by next year the open weights models will be outlawed the way things are going nowadays :/
Edit: for those of you downvoting I don’t celebrate this prospect. I’m merely realistic about where things are going given the rapid vibe shift from the administration on AI since the start of June.
Come to think of it, modern cars have a lot of electronics such as touchscreens, cameras, and sensors. It wouldn’t surprise me if new car prices are not immune to what’s happening with RAM and storage prices.
I'm pretty sure the vision/hwa reqs for cars is much less than an LLM/genai in general so that doesn't quite work out. But it would be nice to have an AI server with wheels :p
Well yeah but NVidia just released a contender to their silicon and the M6 is probably already set in stone. Best to reshift resources to a great M7 than having a mediocre M6 and M7.
(This is assuming Apple will deliver, but this area is one of the biggest ones they have in AI, and they need the developer ecosystem to exist and survive)
192gb or 256gb of RAM would be enough ! We could run real time large MoE models, REAPed for our usage (e.g. english agentic coding), dynamic quant 2-4bits
Apple is very late to the AI party. By the time M7 is shipped, Nvidia will announce 6090 and people will be buying used (3|4|5)090 GPUs to run local models at much better performance than heat throttled M7.
I would prefer a Studio if it does a decent enough job even if throttles a bit under load, way less power usage and noise than those GPUs plus the PC you need to put those in.
Neural Accelerators in M5 are already 4x faster than M4 at prefill. With M7, especially if they focus on AI like this article claims, it likely will have excellent prefill compute.
RAM is a commodity and nvidia will be paying the same prices. The used market will reflect the cost of RAM. nvidia owns the top of the market but many of us don't need that.
What people? Are you seriously thinking the hundreds of millions of customers Apple have is going to be buying run-to-the-ground GPUs second hand and build local workstations for AI? Might as well ask them to self host email while you’re at it.
The difference between these two is that one of them is an unsolved research problem that we’ve all spent far too much time on, and the other is just running an LLM.
The M7 Pro and M7 Max are scheduled for as early as the end of 2027, while the M7 Ultra is on track for 2028.
This means there won't be a redesigned MBP this year since there won't be M6 Pro/Max chips. People were expecting a redesigned slimmer MBP with OLED display later this year, myself included.
I was holding out for one until I decided to switch from an M1 Pro 16" MBP to an M5 Air 15" due to the expected price increase. I think many M1 Pro/Max generation people were waiting to upgrade this year.
The optics and marketing is already fucked, the MBP goes to M5 Max, the Mini has the M4, the Studio has M2 or M3, the iMac apparently has two different kinds of M4s, it's all fucked.
Isn't that switch basically a downgrade? You get some more single core performance and some weight savings, but also a worse (and smaller) screen, less multicore performance, less GPU performance, less video encoding performance and a smaller battery? I'm on an M2 Max myself, and glad they introduced a larger form factor Air, but it seems like a long way from an upgrade.
M5 is faster than the M1 Pro in ST, MT, GPU. Not sure about video encoding as it's something I rarely use. It's a smaller battery but overall a battery life improvement since my 5 year old M1 Pro only had 79% battery capacity left.
Current MBPs are such a delight, I really don't want to think about a thinner MBP again, I just get shivers remembering the Ive butterfly keyboard models
I can see why people would want a more powerful machine but as someone who moves around a lot, the 16" MBP weight is a pain. The 14" MBP screen is not big enough.
Given that M6 will be on TSMC smaller 2nm node and the first smaller node size in 3-years, it seems like the oddest of all years for the high-end Macs to skip.
I am waiting till apple copies the "allocation" concept from high end car manufacturers. "Sure, buy the 25 iphones ans we will gladly put you on the waitlist."
And it's not like Apple hasn't dabbled in the luxury space, with utterly predictable results. Anyone remember the 24 carat gold plated Apple Watch Series 0, sold at ultra-high-end luxury boutiques?
It's not so much ripping off the designs - nothing of what Apple Silicon is doing is particularly surprising and both x86 and Intel's microarchitectures are sufficiently different to Apple Silicon/ARM that knowledge of specific implementation approaches wouldn't be directly useful in most cases.
The real advantage is knowing exactly what Apple is launching months or years in advance, because that can inform strategic planning.
> The real advantage is knowing exactly what Apple is launching months or years in advance, because that can inform strategic planning.
While I'm sure some level of internal leakage does take place, at least on paper the fab's planning needs to be firewalled off from their own chip roadmap.
I'm also not sure how much Apple actually cares, tbh. Yes, they currently have an edge in silicon, but it's heavily due to being willing to outspend everyone else, and their real superpower is vertical integration - which Intel isn't in a position to compete with.
I think Apple doesn't really have a choice. They've been very strongly encouraged by the current US government to move as much chip manufacturing to the US as possible, and particularly to make Intel Foundry work, or face... problems.
Also the AI boom means NVIDIA et al. can afford to buy TSMC's best processes at scale, which means less available capacity for Apple.
I'm sure given no other forces at work, Apple would prefer to stick with what they were doing previously, buying the lion's share of TSMC's best process.
I mean in the opposite sense. If Intel can glean enough from Apple's roadmap to close the performance/watt gap, great, but they still can't match the vertical integration Apple has
M1 released 6 years ago, but AMD/Intel still can't get close to ARM cores in IPC. Anandtech was observing that Apple had better IPC in their phone chips YEARS before M1. Lots of people discredited it as "apples and oranges" because the ISAs were different, but investigative teams from Intel and AMD absolutely HAD to know the truth.
This has both a technical and human component.
On the human side, top x86 execs refused to see any threat coming. They must have thought Apple couldn't overcome the x86 software moat, thought the chips were for servers, consoles, or some other non-PC device, or perhaps they simply couldn't believe what their investigative teams told them.
At the same time, we're 6 years post-launch. The proof of ARM's capability is clear. x86 server marketshare is about to hit just 50% and Microsoft is pushing ARM hard as a replacement for x86. Either all the x86 engineers are completely incompetent and incapable of learning from years of ARM designs or there are aspects of x86 that makes copying those designs infeasible.
> M1 released 6 years ago, but AMD/Intel still can't get close to ARM cores in IPC.
> teams from Intel and AMD absolutely HAD to know the truth.
These people are professionals that acknowledge IPC is a stupid metric. If you switch your statement to SIMD throughput, now ARM NEON has the lower IPC and x86 looks like space age technology. They're optimized for different workloads.
x86 vendors recognized that they could recoup the majority of efficiency that Apple Silicon has without buying an architectural license for ARM. Intel invested early on big.LITTLE, and AMD drilled down on denser nodes for their preexisting designs. As both businesses converge on each other's ideas, their SOCs have adapted most of ARMs' greatest mobile innovations. Even before that, x86 hardware was always usable - AMD was shipping faster integrated GPUs than the M1 Pro before the M1 ever hit shelves.
All of this makes sense, nothing objectively prevents the x86 architecture from being power-efficient. Arm LTD. would have gouged any of those vendors for their IP, and even with an architectural license it's not like AMD or Intel would get usable core designs from Arm. There was no reason to pivot to ARM for either company, they both saw Qualcomm and could read the writing on the wall.
> x86 server marketshare is about to hit just 50% and Microsoft is pushing ARM hard as a replacement for x86
That's Nvidia's work, no credit is due to Microsoft or Apple for reshaping the server market. Apple's early ARM hardware was outright ignored for server/HPC applications, leading to the discontinuation of the Mac Pro. Apple was entirely incapable of pivoting their mobile chipsets to the server scale, surprising nobody that had paid attention to Apple's godawful raster/GPGPU acceleration stack. The Ultra hardware looked like a dog's dinner compared to x86 arches like CDNA.
The Graviton and Grace chips that displaced x86 servers did it because they are slower, cheaper and less feature-dense. Graviton for the bare minimum of Raspberry Pi-tier web serving, and Grace for the high-end of "we need CUDA and enough bandwidth for Infiniband" that made trillions in the HPC market.
> These people are professionals that acknowledge IPC is a stupid metric.
Even if you think IPC is a stupid metric (it's not), ARM is still wiping the floor in total performance, performance per area, and performance per watt.
> If you switch your statement to SIMD throughput, now ARM NEON has the lower IPC and x86 looks like space age technology. They're optimized for different workloads.
Fujitsu also makes a 512-bit SIMD that has very good performance, but that large SIMD eats area and power while giving very little back to consumers. Honestly, SME co-processors or 6-wide SVE are much closer to "space age" than simply making a wider packed SIMD.
> x86 vendors recognized that they could recoup the majority of efficiency that Apple Silicon has without buying an architectural license for ARM.
AMD actually bought an architectural license and Intel used to have one too. They could (and should) undercut ARM entirely by making x86+RISC-V cores. You can talk about Intel's E-cores or AMD C-cores, but they still don't compare in the key metrics.
> AMD was shipping faster integrated GPUs than the M1 Pro before the M1 ever hit shelves.
Which GPUs are you talking about? 4800U (Vega 8) was around 50% slower than M1's GPU. 5700G released in April 2021 and also had the same Vega 8 GPU design. They didn't see a bump until RDNA2 in Rembrandt in 2022 (by which point Apple was already on M2).
> nothing objectively prevents the x86 architecture from being power-efficient.
Citation needed. This is like saying nothing prevents branch delay slots from being good or VLIW/EPIC/Itanium is just as good as anything else. uop cache, extra pipeline stages for decoding, and memory ordering prediction are enough by themselves to use more power when under load. If you have actual proof that x86 workarounds have absolutely ZERO energy/area/latency, then show it.
> That's Nvidia's work, no credit is due to Microsoft or Apple for reshaping the server market.
Linus Torvalds pointed out that ARM server wouldn't take off until devs could run ARM natively on their laptops. Apple provided those laptops.
MS claims Cobalt 200 lowers carbon footprint by 40% vs x86 (which should mostly reflect power consumption per unit of work). ARM accounted for over a third of Azure deployments in 2025 and should increase as C200 becomes available.
> The Graviton and Grace chips that displaced x86 servers did it because they are slower, cheaper and less feature-dense. Graviton for the bare minimum of Raspberry Pi-tier web serving
That hasn't been true for a long time now. Graviton5 in particular is a big deal. It removes the NUMA issues resulting in much lower latencies (and higher performance) for a lot of things. It gives 2.6x more cache per core and a general ~25% performance uplift (SAP said it was up to 60% for their workloads) which is more than the difference between graviton4 and Zen5 for most workloads. Graviton accounts for more than 50% of all new servers in AWS and basically all of their 1000 largest customers are using them.
> Apple was entirely incapable of pivoting their mobile chipsets to the server scale, surprising nobody that had paid attention to Apple's godawful raster/GPGPU acceleration stack. The Ultra hardware looked like a dog's dinner compared to x86 arches like CDNA.
Apple wasn't incapable -- they didn't want to because they aren't in the server market. That is the entire reason X-Elite/Nuvia exists. GPU stack is completely orthogonal to making server CPUs (you can make good CPUs without making good GPUs).
As we all know, Intel used to be famous for their engineering and their ability to scale up a newer, smaller process with way earlier commercial viability. This all ended with the Sisyphean 10nm move that was years late and honestly Intel just don't seem to have recovered from it.
So Intel seemingly has underutilized fab capacity whereas the likes of TSMC and Samsung can probably produce every chip they make with demand to spare. Given the CHIPS Act that was passed under Biden, the Trump admin taking a stake in Intel and the environment of tariffs and a push for American manufacturing, everything seems to be lining up for someone to take advantage of Inte's physical fabs and American production and that could be Apple.
I think that people are still underestimating the technical merits of Intel's 18A fabrication process.
I haven't seen any competitor even try to address the backside power delivery of 18A. I suspect that Samsung,TSMC have something similar and doesn't talk about it.
The design rules for the standard cell (sort of corresponding to the die area required by a transistor) for the Intel 18A seem to target dense, high performance designs. That's not a particularly meaningful insight - of course Intel wants to have the highest performance of all the fabs.
Intel's packaging expertise used to be a generation ahead, and indeed their server chips currently use a mad mix of chiplets and through-silicon visas for direct stacking, all heaped onto a reticule-limited monster interposer die. All of this expensive complexity might be sustainable as long as Intel can keep its enterprise customers happy. That hasn't turned out too well for them.
AMD has found a mass-market winner with mainstream gaming CPU with extra level 3 cache die stacked on top. Compared to Intel servers, it's brutally simple. But extremely effective in its consumer market.
But the Intel chiplets and packaging could be a great toolbox for M7 generation of Apple Silicon. Now that the M5 Pro and Max are multi chip packages, they more resemble the Intel and AMD designs, with chiplets dedicated to I/O or GPU.
(Speculation and dreams. That's all I got, and I'm writing it in the face of an absolutely psychotic autocorrect on a tablet.)
> I suspect that Samsung,TSMC have something similar and doesn't talk about it.
They do, just not as hyped up as Intel. TSMC will have it after 20A. Either 18A or 14A. GAA was supposed to be in 3nm but didn't happen due to multiple reasons. So it is now delayed to 20A. Backside delivery was supposed to be 20A and also got pushed back as well.
Well this kind of sucks. I've been waiting for the M6 MBPs because they're rumored (strong rumors, though) to finally remove the notch that has been a historic self-own. But it sounds like I might as well wait longer for the M7 lineup. Or maybe get a Framework Pro instead.
I guess it should be https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-25/apple-to-...
EDIT: gift link if paywalled (archive.is capture is truncated): https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-25/apple-to-...
Why would it? Each generation of the M series has an architectural improvement on their chipsets. The difference between an M1 and an M1 Pro is the allocation and arrangement not the architecture. M6 to M7 presumably will have architectural changes.
Or did this announcement also add an M6 chip, and they're just skipping pro?
It's the same thing as how the Mac Studio got an M4 Max refresh, but they didn't make an M4 Ultra so if you want the 28+ core CPU or 60+ core GPU, that's still using an M3 Ultra.
This time it'll be across all the Pro, Max, and Ultra versions, if you want those they'll stay at the previous generation for the M6 cycle.
Not that weird - Apple has a huge set of chips and hardware and software products. Putting every single thing on a fixed identical update cycle together won't always make sense.
It's not simply marketing since the Pro/Max chips of a generation use the same cores as the regular version, just more of them or different combinations of performance and efficiency cores.
The claim is that M6 will be released, but the only variants will be lower end.
When they get to the M7 generation, they will make high end variants.
It's a real distinction because each generation of parts shares an architecture.
The article has an entire section speculating what the M6 parts will be, but says they'll top out around 200GB/s memory bandwidth and 12 graphics cores.
It can still be a very real, not made-up distinction, if the actual facts on the ground are that Apple designed an M6 line, but then scrapped that design and asked the team to create a new design with emphasis on AI-focused specs.
It's not the name that's important (the M7 could still come out as M6), is them skipping a design, or cpu "Tick-Tock model" step.
Are you thinking Apple is leaking that there will be a long wait for much more expensive chips in order to… what?
I am still skeptical that Apple intentionally leaked this because they normally are so tight-lipped, but there are reasons in favor of leaking this.
M1 had 70 GB/s, M1 Pro: 200, M1 Max 400, M1 Ultra 800.
Modern RTX 6000: ~1,600 or so.
If we get a 1,200-1,500 GB/s bandwidth M7 variant in late 2027 with 512GB of RAM, that will be a very interesting chip. Tracking LLM size and performance improvements, I can imagine that being a sort of inflection point for local inference. I wonder what the power budget would be in desktop format.
You're look at about 100 tokens/s for a 1T MoE 37B active 4bit model.
It'd probably cost $30k or more I'm guessing if memory prices do not come down. Even at $30k, it could still be a relative bargain since an RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell 96GB card costs $12k today. The M3 Ultra with 512GB was around $8k before Apple discontinued it. I expect an M7 Ultra to have 768GB or 1024GB.
Apple Silicon Macs were on their way to becoming cheap local LLM machines relative to professional GPUs before this memory crisis. It may still emerge as such in a few years.
Here's some interesting math: At 512GB, an Ultra chip could make 42 pro iPhones. Assume a 55% profit margins, and $1200 ASP, you're looking at $28,160 in profit from making iPhones instead. No wonder Apple discontinued the M3 Ultra 512GB. If they only have a limited supply of RAM for all their products, it makes no sense to produce an $8000 M3 Ultra 512GB when you can produce 42 pro iPhones. You can only configure an M3 Ultra up to 96GB today as of June 2026.
Apple would have to raise the price of a 512GB Ultra Mac to around $50k to match iPhone profits.
How would that work? They purchase 512GB from Samsung and then it doesn't matter if that's like 128x 4GB or 4x 128GB?
If comapnies keep spending half a macbook neo worth of subscription on AI plans monthly per person, Apple is going to have a hard time competing.
Edit: for those of you downvoting I don’t celebrate this prospect. I’m merely realistic about where things are going given the rapid vibe shift from the administration on AI since the start of June.
That’s indeed very hypothetical considering that Apple silicon uses on-package HBM.
The base model was $9k, that much RAM got you into $14k range.
https://youtu.be/jSYobH9kr1E?si=hc1xUQ37_SEbkDkj&t=1242
(This is assuming Apple will deliver, but this area is one of the biggest ones they have in AI, and they need the developer ecosystem to exist and survive)
The article didn't state the M5 Ultra won't be released. It will probably provide 1228GB/s of memory bandwidth this year.
You'd probably get faster prefill speeds, as well as better drivers for accelerated transcode and gaming applications.
I was holding out for one until I decided to switch from an M1 Pro 16" MBP to an M5 Air 15" due to the expected price increase. I think many M1 Pro/Max generation people were waiting to upgrade this year.
They can release a redesigned MBP with the base M6 chip.
They don't want to tell the world how the new redesigned MBP is the best laptop in the world but it's slower than the older MBPs.
The extra ports are nice along with better speakers.
The actual laptop I want is an Air 15" with 120hz OLED screen.
I wonder how much the rumored 768GB RAM version will cost.
A top of range Mac is a depreciating asset and looks exactly the same as the other models physically.
https://bontechlabs.com/news/apple-is-reportedly-using-intel...
Given the risks involved in establishing Apple Silicon designs with a new fab, I would expect early M7 parts to be in test production right now.
The fundamental M7 design is already set in stone.
Mark Gurman's Bloomberg article does not mention fabrication partners or processes.
If they have Apple's designs months prior to launch, rather than after launch.
The real advantage is knowing exactly what Apple is launching months or years in advance, because that can inform strategic planning.
While I'm sure some level of internal leakage does take place, at least on paper the fab's planning needs to be firewalled off from their own chip roadmap.
I'm also not sure how much Apple actually cares, tbh. Yes, they currently have an edge in silicon, but it's heavily due to being willing to outspend everyone else, and their real superpower is vertical integration - which Intel isn't in a position to compete with.
Also the AI boom means NVIDIA et al. can afford to buy TSMC's best processes at scale, which means less available capacity for Apple.
I'm sure given no other forces at work, Apple would prefer to stick with what they were doing previously, buying the lion's share of TSMC's best process.
This has both a technical and human component.
On the human side, top x86 execs refused to see any threat coming. They must have thought Apple couldn't overcome the x86 software moat, thought the chips were for servers, consoles, or some other non-PC device, or perhaps they simply couldn't believe what their investigative teams told them.
At the same time, we're 6 years post-launch. The proof of ARM's capability is clear. x86 server marketshare is about to hit just 50% and Microsoft is pushing ARM hard as a replacement for x86. Either all the x86 engineers are completely incompetent and incapable of learning from years of ARM designs or there are aspects of x86 that makes copying those designs infeasible.
> teams from Intel and AMD absolutely HAD to know the truth.
These people are professionals that acknowledge IPC is a stupid metric. If you switch your statement to SIMD throughput, now ARM NEON has the lower IPC and x86 looks like space age technology. They're optimized for different workloads.
x86 vendors recognized that they could recoup the majority of efficiency that Apple Silicon has without buying an architectural license for ARM. Intel invested early on big.LITTLE, and AMD drilled down on denser nodes for their preexisting designs. As both businesses converge on each other's ideas, their SOCs have adapted most of ARMs' greatest mobile innovations. Even before that, x86 hardware was always usable - AMD was shipping faster integrated GPUs than the M1 Pro before the M1 ever hit shelves.
All of this makes sense, nothing objectively prevents the x86 architecture from being power-efficient. Arm LTD. would have gouged any of those vendors for their IP, and even with an architectural license it's not like AMD or Intel would get usable core designs from Arm. There was no reason to pivot to ARM for either company, they both saw Qualcomm and could read the writing on the wall.
> x86 server marketshare is about to hit just 50% and Microsoft is pushing ARM hard as a replacement for x86
That's Nvidia's work, no credit is due to Microsoft or Apple for reshaping the server market. Apple's early ARM hardware was outright ignored for server/HPC applications, leading to the discontinuation of the Mac Pro. Apple was entirely incapable of pivoting their mobile chipsets to the server scale, surprising nobody that had paid attention to Apple's godawful raster/GPGPU acceleration stack. The Ultra hardware looked like a dog's dinner compared to x86 arches like CDNA.
The Graviton and Grace chips that displaced x86 servers did it because they are slower, cheaper and less feature-dense. Graviton for the bare minimum of Raspberry Pi-tier web serving, and Grace for the high-end of "we need CUDA and enough bandwidth for Infiniband" that made trillions in the HPC market.
Even if you think IPC is a stupid metric (it's not), ARM is still wiping the floor in total performance, performance per area, and performance per watt.
> If you switch your statement to SIMD throughput, now ARM NEON has the lower IPC and x86 looks like space age technology. They're optimized for different workloads.
Fujitsu also makes a 512-bit SIMD that has very good performance, but that large SIMD eats area and power while giving very little back to consumers. Honestly, SME co-processors or 6-wide SVE are much closer to "space age" than simply making a wider packed SIMD.
> x86 vendors recognized that they could recoup the majority of efficiency that Apple Silicon has without buying an architectural license for ARM.
AMD actually bought an architectural license and Intel used to have one too. They could (and should) undercut ARM entirely by making x86+RISC-V cores. You can talk about Intel's E-cores or AMD C-cores, but they still don't compare in the key metrics.
> AMD was shipping faster integrated GPUs than the M1 Pro before the M1 ever hit shelves.
Which GPUs are you talking about? 4800U (Vega 8) was around 50% slower than M1's GPU. 5700G released in April 2021 and also had the same Vega 8 GPU design. They didn't see a bump until RDNA2 in Rembrandt in 2022 (by which point Apple was already on M2).
> nothing objectively prevents the x86 architecture from being power-efficient.
Citation needed. This is like saying nothing prevents branch delay slots from being good or VLIW/EPIC/Itanium is just as good as anything else. uop cache, extra pipeline stages for decoding, and memory ordering prediction are enough by themselves to use more power when under load. If you have actual proof that x86 workarounds have absolutely ZERO energy/area/latency, then show it.
> That's Nvidia's work, no credit is due to Microsoft or Apple for reshaping the server market.
Linus Torvalds pointed out that ARM server wouldn't take off until devs could run ARM natively on their laptops. Apple provided those laptops.
MS claims Cobalt 200 lowers carbon footprint by 40% vs x86 (which should mostly reflect power consumption per unit of work). ARM accounted for over a third of Azure deployments in 2025 and should increase as C200 becomes available.
> The Graviton and Grace chips that displaced x86 servers did it because they are slower, cheaper and less feature-dense. Graviton for the bare minimum of Raspberry Pi-tier web serving
That hasn't been true for a long time now. Graviton5 in particular is a big deal. It removes the NUMA issues resulting in much lower latencies (and higher performance) for a lot of things. It gives 2.6x more cache per core and a general ~25% performance uplift (SAP said it was up to 60% for their workloads) which is more than the difference between graviton4 and Zen5 for most workloads. Graviton accounts for more than 50% of all new servers in AWS and basically all of their 1000 largest customers are using them.
> Apple was entirely incapable of pivoting their mobile chipsets to the server scale, surprising nobody that had paid attention to Apple's godawful raster/GPGPU acceleration stack. The Ultra hardware looked like a dog's dinner compared to x86 arches like CDNA.
Apple wasn't incapable -- they didn't want to because they aren't in the server market. That is the entire reason X-Elite/Nuvia exists. GPU stack is completely orthogonal to making server CPUs (you can make good CPUs without making good GPUs).
At 30 watts TDP?
As we all know, Intel used to be famous for their engineering and their ability to scale up a newer, smaller process with way earlier commercial viability. This all ended with the Sisyphean 10nm move that was years late and honestly Intel just don't seem to have recovered from it.
So Intel seemingly has underutilized fab capacity whereas the likes of TSMC and Samsung can probably produce every chip they make with demand to spare. Given the CHIPS Act that was passed under Biden, the Trump admin taking a stake in Intel and the environment of tariffs and a push for American manufacturing, everything seems to be lining up for someone to take advantage of Inte's physical fabs and American production and that could be Apple.
I haven't seen any competitor even try to address the backside power delivery of 18A. I suspect that Samsung,TSMC have something similar and doesn't talk about it.
The design rules for the standard cell (sort of corresponding to the die area required by a transistor) for the Intel 18A seem to target dense, high performance designs. That's not a particularly meaningful insight - of course Intel wants to have the highest performance of all the fabs.
Intel's packaging expertise used to be a generation ahead, and indeed their server chips currently use a mad mix of chiplets and through-silicon visas for direct stacking, all heaped onto a reticule-limited monster interposer die. All of this expensive complexity might be sustainable as long as Intel can keep its enterprise customers happy. That hasn't turned out too well for them.
AMD has found a mass-market winner with mainstream gaming CPU with extra level 3 cache die stacked on top. Compared to Intel servers, it's brutally simple. But extremely effective in its consumer market.
But the Intel chiplets and packaging could be a great toolbox for M7 generation of Apple Silicon. Now that the M5 Pro and Max are multi chip packages, they more resemble the Intel and AMD designs, with chiplets dedicated to I/O or GPU.
(Speculation and dreams. That's all I got, and I'm writing it in the face of an absolutely psychotic autocorrect on a tablet.)
They do, just not as hyped up as Intel. TSMC will have it after 20A. Either 18A or 14A. GAA was supposed to be in 3nm but didn't happen due to multiple reasons. So it is now delayed to 20A. Backside delivery was supposed to be 20A and also got pushed back as well.