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Comment by bayareabadboy | Hacker News Reader

What are the longer term implications that Apple is doing this on their own hardware and not Nvidia? This seems like a big thing to me, an idiot.

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Apple doesn't want to pay the Jensen Leather Jacket Fee and has $200 billion in cash it is sitting on to make it happen. If anyone can create an Nvidia substitute for AI chips its Apple and their cash hoard combined with their world-class design team and exclusive access to all of TSMC 3nm and next year 2nm production they could possibly want.

If you're one of the richest companies in history you can "simply" invest 15 years into developing your own chips instead of buying Nvidia GPUs.

> simply invest 15 years into developing your own chips instead of buying Nvidia GPUs

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-and-Imagination-strike-G...

  Following the loss of Apple, easily its biggest client, Imagination was bought out by a Chinese-based investment group. Apple subsequently released its first in-house designed mobile GPU as part of the A11 Bionic SoC that powered the iPhone X.. The new “multi-year license agreement” gives Apple official access to much wider range of Imagination’s mobile GPU IP as well as its AI technologies. The A11 Bionic also included the first neural processing engine in an iPhone

https://9to5mac.com/2020/01/01/apple-imagination-agreement/

  Apple described Imagination’s characterizations as misleading while hiring Imagination employees to work for Apple’s GPU team in the same community.

That probably has nothing to do with the Neural Engine though.

Probably a coincidence that Apple GPU and NPU both appeared at the same time (A11).

It is a coincidence. They are unrelated hardware blocks and very different architectures.

But this is just inference. What did they use to train their foundation models?

The M-series CPUs are stupidly effective in LLM operations. Even my relatively old M1 mac mini can do decent speeds of 7B models.

And Apple clearly has made some custom server hardware and slapped a ton of them on a board just to do the PCC stuff.

This feels like the biggest part of the news to me

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