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Apple's M7 Ultra Chip Designed to Match a 2019 Mac Pro Feat

djjuice80 said:
You can buy a house or a Mac Pro
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The M7 Ultra very likely will not bring back the Mac Pro. A new (not used) Mac Pro bought from Apple or certified retailer ... you will not be able to buy, because Apple won't be selling any. Same exact status as right now.

The M7 Ultra rolling out a 1.5TB is one more 'nail' that the Mac Studio is a viable replacement for the outer fringe edge case Mac Pro 2019 is the more likely sales pitch going to get from Apple.

Although probably not really an equivalent as pretty likely still won't have full ECC Memory ( like rest of the M-series line up). But "good enough" for folks in stuff like A/V and AI inference bit-flips don't have a high cost ( a pixel 'off' in a sea of 4k-8k forest or another hallucination chocked up to the cost of doing business in AI la-la-land. )
 
Pezimak said:
Soooo with Apples traditional 60% mark up that will only cost you $200,000 in todays market... considering if I recall the Mac Pro maxed out was around 45 to 50 thousand? And the 200 to 300% memory cost increases..

Order lead time will probably be at least a year too.
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Except that since the release of Apple silicon Macs have been by far the best value at their price points, and it’s not even debatable.
 
jb310 said:
If that chip can somehow get put into a Mac Mini or Mac Studio, I think Apple will make a fortune from people using it for data centers
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Probably not. Pretty good chance the M7 Ultra comes loaded down with some , relative to datacenter in 2028-29 timeframe, medicore networking.

Apple already makes a subsantial amount of money selling mini's and studio to co-location/cloud vendors like MacStadium and Amazon who rent them out , but that is not the 'core' of the data center market. Several thousand minis being a couple dozen data centers doesn't drive the datacenter market now. It won't in 2028-29 either.

By 2028-29 going to start to see data center target packages with photonic connectors build in. Apple will very likely still at best be offering copper wires and early 2000's Ethernet ports. Although with a relatively limited "RDMA Thunderbolt". Neither of those will be 'best in class' data center level networking in 2028.

Apple may do their own AI server chip, but likely that will be different package configuration than what lands in the M7 Ultra (and inside a Mac Studio). That may have a data center class networking chiplet, but likely loosing the consumer targeted I/O as a trade-off.
 
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Nik said:
This is going to be the first Mac to break the $100,000 barrier.
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And if the bubble pops, the world will have more RAM than we’ve ever had before and nowhere to put it. Apple is smart. If they’re designing this, then they know the writing is on the wall. And they know the future is local models.

We only need the AI to get to a certain level of usefulness and speed before diminishing returns and then compute catches up. ChatGPT 5.6 Sol Ultra and Claude Fable 5 Max are already there for usefulness for most software engineering tasks. We just need more speed and capacity. The earth does not have the thermal capacity to sustain this growth more than a couple more decades, and I’m not even talking classical climate change, just thermodynamics.
 
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MacRumors said:
Apple's M7 Ultra chip coming in 2028 is designed to support up to 1.5TB of unified memory, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. However, whether such a configuration is offered may depend on the state of the ongoing memory chip shortage.
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According to this forum's staunch supporters of greedy Silicon Valley CEOs, it's much more important for Silicon Valley corporations to build data centers and hog up memory chips for AI slop than it is for ordinary people to have easy access to and buy reasonably priced memory chips.
 
It will worth nothing if they don’t drastically increase memory bandwidth… I mean drastically… moving over ddr5… otherwise useless for true local ai inference
 
zedsdead said:
I foolishly waited thinking the M5 Mac Studios would come out - and at this point, it'll be way too far into the release cycle (and with current price increases). I likely will wait for the M7 series.
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Pretty sure they’re still coming in October. You’re not gonna see an m7 studio til the following fall anyways
 
TheLastDogcow said:
I'd be willing to pay up to $5k for a Mac Studio that gave me enough memory bandwidth and context size to run a local LLM comparable to what I can get w/ OpenAI, Anthropic, manus, and openclaw. Sadly, I think we'll be looking at something close to $100k
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You can ask Claude AI this question and it’s conclusion is it will be expensive but under $100K.
According to it, three current M3 Ultra Mac Studios maxed out in a bedroom can get you 98% of the AI computing power found on corporate AI servers - but you can do it offline in private (on machine)
 
ygor said:
It will worth nothing if they don’t drastically increase memory bandwidth… I mean drastically… moving over ddr5… otherwise useless for true local ai inference
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Apple's Ultra chips already deliver 8 to 10 times the bandwidth of standard desktop DDR5. An M7 Ultra might hit the 1.5-2TB/s range by the time it ships, and I’m not sure what the local alternative would be when you can’t fit enough 24GB Nvidia GPUs or DGX Sparks in a room with any kind of interconnect that could give you that contiguous amount of memory at any speed.
 
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now i see it said:
You can ask Claude AI this question and it’s conclusion is it will be expensive but under $100K.
According to it, three current M3 Ultra Mac Studios maxed out in a bedroom can get you 98% of the AI computing power found on corporate AI servers - but you can do it offline in private (on machine)
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1.5 terabyte of RAM currently retails close to $50k, but Apple gets substantial volume discounts. My guess is a 1.5 TB M7 Ultra Mac is going to cost under $30K. Similar to the first iMac Pro where it cost less than all its individual parts would cost you to buy separately.
 
Talking about a computer destined for mid 2028 when we can’t even get an M5 studio for a rumored 3 to 4 more months. This shortage is no joke. I don’t remember a time when the current Mac book pro’s had shipping times this far out.
 
Apple currently charges $25/GB so $37,500 for 1.5TB assuming no further price increases.

Apple is unlikely getting the same “volume discounts” as before. They already had some of if not the most expensive memory and storage pricing in the industry and that was before the recent price hikes.
 
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This thing can run FULL deepseek model without sacrificing anything with best quality and 1M context length, or most LLM with over 1T parameter, this is going to be a big thing.
 
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visualseed said:
Apple's Ultra chips already deliver 8 to 10 times the bandwidth of standard desktop DDR5. An M7 Ultra might hit the 1.5-2TB/s range by the time it ships, and I’m not sure what the local alternative would be when you can’t fit enough 24GB Nvidia GPUs or DGX Sparks in a room with any kind of interconnect that could give you that contiguous amount of memory at any speed.
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Agreed. Nvidia GPUs still outperform Apple Silicon (Cuda and native FP4 precision advantages) in model training but DGX/RTX Spark is comparable in local inferencing token generation and TTFT … IF… the model being used fits in memory. Apple’s advantage takes over once you’re dealing with models that exceed Nvidia GPU memory (or in the case of DGX/RTX Spark exceeds unified memory and even here M5 Max exceeds DGX/RTX memory bandwidth by more than 2X - 614GB/s vs 273GB/s and 300GB/s respectively). I comfortably run 8-bit 35B parameters and 4-bit 70B parameter models in 64GB and could run 4-bit 120B parameter models in 128GB with M5 Max. An M7 Ultra will likely also have native FP8 and/or FP4 precision to speed up local inferencing (likely why Apple is now fast-tracking M7) along with ~3X M5 Max bandwidth and with 1.5TB memory local inferencing should be wild.
 
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For anyone with wife and kids who also own a home, there’s always a home equity loan before liquidating/pawning family members. If Apple raises prices again, then maybe a different story.
 
OWC will sell you 1.5TB of RAM for the 2019 MacPro for only $11,300... and that's only DDR4. DDR5 prices are around $4,000/128GB so only $60k. 💀
 
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Justin Cymbal said:
www.macrumors.com

A Maxed Out Mac Pro Will Cost Over $52,000

With Mac Pro orders now live, pricing for all of the build to order options for the machine are available, giving us an idea of what it's going to cost to get the top of the line upgrades. Apple lets Mac Pro buyers upgrade the processor, RAM, GPU, and SSD, as well as add an Apple Afterburner...
www.macrumors.com www.macrumors.com
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That article is from a while ago. in the final model the case is a MacPro but the processor is Silicon rather than Intel and since it is Silicon it is likely doubtful it has user upgradable memory. It also was the final model that supported PCIE cards which many technical and video businesses must have. However, this is all a moot point as Apple has discontinued the Mac Pro Desktop and the only ones available are on the used market. There are no refurbs either. Apple has priced my 2019 "White Elephant" Intel $8K with 32MB Ram and advanced video processor with 1TB SSD for a trade in at under $500.00. I have converted it into a Windows bootable machine for flight simulation and am holding on to it for a while as the demand for this machine has been increasing. Currently my machine is reselling around $5K+ and going up.
 
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