alt Hacker NewsRumors say that Apple will only release M6 base variant and skips M6 Pro, M6 Max and M6 Ultra variants to concentrate all efforts to create a good AI capable M7:
"According to reports from Bloomberg, Apple will be skipping its M6 Pro, M6 Max, and M6 Ultra chips to accelerate development of the M7 chip. That means the only chip to be released from the M6 family will be the base M6.
The reason for this break with tradition: AI. Apple had been planning major neural-processing upgrades for the M7 family and ultimately decided those improvements were important enough to justify accelerating the next generation rather than completing the M6 lineup." https://9to5mac.com/2026/08/08/apple-m7-chip-heres-why-it-ma...
I'd skip M5 and M6 chips for LLM work and wait for a year for M7.
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The M6 doubled the neural engine from 16 to 32 cores. I would expect that the M7 doubles that again to 64 from 32? That would make sense.
I believe that the CPUs are actually limited by ram bandwidth more than the neural engine right when it comes to LLM processing?
Maybe the M7 introduces something new to get around the current ram bandwidth problems on the non-Ultra chips.
i sold my m3 ultra /512 for £14000, or about $18000. The difference is what is important to me for a new one, and assuming $6k or so for the 256->512 boost, my cost will be about $16k, so i’ll save $2k by upgrading to the top-of-the-range model, bar it being a 4TB drive
Do current models run on the NPU or GPU? Wondering if Apple will have something like a TPU.
That makes sense. I also think that we are at the point where maybe the expectation of a yearly refresh on everything should be reconsidered. They can end up on a Tick-Tock schedule when the Pro/Max/Ultra can be done every second year.
> I'd skip M5 and M6 chips for LLM work and wait for a year for M7.
Please say more? Is it because it is a one-time cost, unlike a recurring subscription of Claude/Codex?
I'll upgrade M3 Air only when Mx Pro/Ultra can run Opus level perf locally. Otherwise what's the point.
The true-local AI chip, codename "buddy", will be the M8
I wonder when/if we will start to see Apple include a silicon encoded model into their chips. Similar to Taalas build Llama 3.1 silicon with 17,000 tok/s inference.
So could the M7 actually include an AFM 3B model, alongside a generic neural engine?