Apple M series are competitive in inference at least. I wish Apple would just aim their chip people at NVIDIA in everything else. They are probably the only ones that have the talent, resources, and capital to do that.

I'm quite happy Apple stays focused on their products. They enter a market when they can own it end-to-end -- it makes no sense for them to all of a sudden become an AI chip house or AI server house.

They're honestly not competitive for inference, it's why datacenters largely ignore Apple Silicon. Even the M5 Max is still bottlenecked for dense models due to the relatively weak GPU and paltry ~500-600gb/s of GPU memory bandwidth. For reference, the RTX 5080 (a consumer GPU) has 1tb of VRAM bandwidth and runs circles around the M5 Max in GPU compute benchmarks: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks

Even for home inference, it's hard to recommend a dedicated Mac over a cheap Nvidia server box.

> They are probably the only ones that have the talent, resources, and capital to do that.

Apple invented OpenCL. The problem was their reluctance to work with the rest of the industry, and once CUDA took over it was too late for them to even try.