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Comment by g42gregory | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps, Apple Silicon is the way to solve the dilemma... :-)

It'll never be made available outside of the Apple ecosystem, but if ever was there'd be billions of dollars of orders on day one.

They are not a particularly good desktop chips, though. Or rather the market niche for them is rather small (low-power and relatively high performance) and generally filled by laptops anyway.

For desktop use cases like gaming or performance intense cases they are not that great (IIRC the 14900k which cost a few hundred $ by the end was considerably faster than the top end M3 chip).

Of course high memory bandwidth + unified CPU/GPU memory is an advantage in certain cases but that also makes the system entirely unmodular.

I don’t really think apple cares about gaming. AI is a big part of why their SOC’s matter (coupled with the potential to have 128-512gb of unified memory coupled with these SOCs. These chips are all about running llms locally pretty well at under 100w. Also great for creatives as well.

This market of people willing to spend thousands to run large LLMs locally -- and still slowly -- has to be tiny.

Plus, there's competitors using AMD CPUs that provide 128GB with 500GB/s of bandwidth (8xDDR5-8000) for just $2K now.[1]

A Mac Studio with an M4 Max has similar bandwidth but costs $4k for similar specs; the M3 Pro has ~800GB/s of bandwidth but 256GB of RAM (there's no 128GB option) and 2TB of SSD will set you back $6k!

[1] https://www.gmktec.com/products/amd-ryzen%E2%84%A2-ai-max-39...

Also the 48GB B60 for $1000. Of course it might be massively overhyped like some Intel things but if you don’t care about power usage, noise and heat a PC with 4 of those might blow the equivalent priced Mac out of the water.

Apple is faster at single core and can match or exceed the 14900k at multi core in some applications.

They are not for gaming. They are much faster than Intel for video editing due to hardware codecs.

The Mac Mini / iMac / Apple Studio / Mac Pro are more than enough for most desktop users and provide high performance without obnoxious fan noise. The high end Intel chips draw ~300 watts. I need a silent desktop.

> Apple is faster at single core and can match or exceed the 14900k

Well yeah, if price is not a factor and you don’t care about gaming and such.

That’s a perfectly reasonable use case. The original premise was that Apple’s M series chips would be extremely successful if Apple started selling them directly (and presumably provided Windows/Linux drivers.

Which obviously can’t and won’t happen due to clear reasons but even if it did they probably wouldn’t be very popular as desktop chips (of course that also comes down to pricing). There aren’t that many people who’d want or need a desktop with a chip like that (instead of just getting a laptop ).

If Apple released x86 desktop processors with the same performance as the M series of course they would be popular.

M3 Ultra

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/10919322

M4 Pro

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8786129

AMD 9950X

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/12194580

Intel Ultra 9 285K

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/7609759

Well sure, it comes down to price. If they continued charging $200 for 12GB of memory then I’m doubtful.

If only the CPUs could be had outside of Macs!

At least we're seeing _some_ ARM development, I'm currently typing this from a Lenovo x13s with a Qualcomm ARM CPU. It works with Fedora, but the firmware is less than ideal and requires you to feed the bootloader a devicetree file. Other than that, I'm really happy with the hardware.

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