Apple A19/M5 GPU Neural Accelerators

[leman]

Really what I was driving at (badly!) is that while Apple may still have some levers of optimization to pull with respect to caching as you rightly pointed out…. I’m nevertheless wondering if all these rumors about apple investing in 3d chip fabrication could be the next big leap for memory bandwidth starved applications on M5 Pro/Max and that it might be a good reason why we have not seen any M5 pro/max announcements yet (and still rumored for 2026).

My personal (and unqualified) opinion is that we are unlikely to see much wider memory interfaces from Apple. I just don’t think it’s economical, and is also at odds with their focus on low power consumption. I also don’t see that they really need it to be honest, their bandwidth to compute ratio is already very good. Regarding 3D packaging, something I can imagine is integration of a larger fast cache closer to the SoC.

 

[The Hardcard]

My personal (and unqualified) opinion is that we are unlikely to see much wider memory interfaces from Apple. I just don’t think it’s economical, and is also at odds with their focus on low power consumption. I also don’t see that they really need it to be honest, their bandwidth to compute ratio is already very good. Regarding 3D packaging, something I can imagine is integration of a larger fast cache closer to the SoC.

Another reason why they probably won’t increase bandwidth is that bandwidth is one area Apple is leagues ahead of the competition. Nvidia just dropped their AI supercomputer on a desk with the same bandwidth as the M4 Pro. Strix Halo is also M4 Pro bandwidth. Qualcomm’s new X2 Elite Extreme is just 192-bits.

The cousins are in a ferocious battle for HBM and they both have huge bankrolls. Apple would have to double the price of any product they put it in.