Rumors 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.

▲ bhouston 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

▲ bigyabai 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Apple's biggest bottleneck for real-world inference is prefill processing. They need a better GPGPU architecture, which is what I'm expecting M7 to reveal.

	▲	tedd4u 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Agreed, seems like the M5 has already made steps in that direction, with 4x prompt processing / prefill performance vs. M4. [1] And token generation also got a 10% boost. The data below is only for Pro & Max but I think the base M5 got the same relative boosts vs. M4 base. `Chip BW (GB/s) GPU Cores Q4_0 Prompt Q4_0 Gen M4 Pro (20c) 273 20 439.78 50.74 M4 Max (40c) 546 40 885.68 83.06 M5 Pro (20c) 307 20 ~1500 to 1700 ~56 M5 Max (40c) 614 40 ~3000 to 3500 ~92` [1] https://www.hardware-corner.net/m5-pro-m5-max-local-llm-4x-f...

▲ wmf 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

LPDDR6 is coming.

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bhouston an hour ago | parent [-]

I understand that will boost read rates to around 14 Gbps as compared to the current 10 Gbps for LPDDR5X, so a 40% improvement.

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wmf 27 minutes ago | parent [-]

The bus is also 50% wider so the bandwidth is double.

	▲	bhouston 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Or they could make use of LPDDR5X-PIM? That would be such a killer feature and competitive advantage.

▲ spacedcowboy an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

▲ curious_cat_163 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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?

▲ lifty 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Do current models run on the NPU or GPU? Wondering if Apple will have something like a TPU.

	▲	bhouston an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Apple has a dedicated "neural engine" which is designed as an inference NPU. Where as Google's TPU has a dual focus, both inference and training, which is a more complex design.

▲ romanovcode 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'll upgrade M3 Air only when Mx Pro/Ultra can run Opus level perf locally. Otherwise what's the point.

▲ RetpolineDrama 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The true-local AI chip, codename "buddy", will be the M8