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In Apple’s first-quarter earnings, the Mac leads the way in sales growth (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/technology
16 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

AI Summary:

Apple's first-quarter earnings report revealed a mixed performance. While overall sales increased by 4%, iPhone sales showed weakness, particularly in China, where they declined by over 11%. CEO Tim Cook attributed this partly to the lack of Apple Intelligence in China and inventory changes. However, the Mac, iPad, and Services categories saw significant growth, with Services up 14% and both the Mac and iPad up 15%. The company reported $36.33 billion in net revenue, a 7.1% increase from the previous year.

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[–] kalleboo 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

It's for running AI on the GPU. You need a really expensive PC GPU to get more than like 16 GB of RAM or whatever, so the bottleneck for large AI models is swapping in and out data from system RAM over PCIe.

The Mac has an SoE with unified memory, where the GPU can access all 192 GB at full speed, which is perfect for AI workloads where you need the GPU to access all the RAM. There's always a tradeoff where the PC GPUs have faster processors (since they have a way bigger power budget), but the Mac GPU has faster memory access, so it's not always a slam-dunk which is better.

APUs/Integrated GPUs on PCs also have unified memory but they always targeted the low end so aren't as useful.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 16 hours ago

In order to run say something like deep-seek R1 the full fat version you need to stick something like eight Mac minis together.

Doesn't seem like a single device is really going to be capable long term, since it doesn't seem like it's capable right now.