M6 era will last just 6 months in push for for AI-focused M7

It takes years to tape out a chip and bring it to market, with overall industry seismic shifts taking much less time. Nothing will demonstrate that better than the rumored six-month gap between the M6 processor debut and the AI-focused M7.

Apple’s chip lines have gradually become more AI-centric, and that will be the same in the future too. However, rather than sticking to an established release format, Apple’s intending to skip ahead to the bits it wants the public to use.

In Sunday’s “Power On” newsletter for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman revives a late June report that the M6 Pro and M6 Max chips won’t exist. Instead, it is putting the work into the development of AI-first chips for the M7 generation.

The fall cycle will include the usual base chip release, consisting of the M6. But there won’t be an M6 Pro, M6 Max, or even an M6 Ultra following months later.

Apple’s intended schedule is to instead bring the base M7 chip line a mere six months after the M6. That would make it a release in the first half of 2027.

The M7 Pro and M7 Max are thought to arrive at the end of 2027. That will then be followed by the M7 Ultra sometime in 2028.

Skipping to the good part

Gurman doesn’t really explain why Apple is moving to get M6 out of the way in favor of the M7 generation on Sunday. However, he did a better job doing so in June.

The M6 will improve the memory bandwidth from 153 gigabytes per second in the M5 to a massive 200 gigabytes per second. That will be by introducing a new memory architecture, as well as boosting the Neural Engine and using 12 GPU cores instead of ten.

While memory bandwidth is important, the M7 generation will have a much bigger focus on AI processing. This should help the prospective users of the M7 Pro, M7 Max, and M7 Ultra, who will have more complex workflows and could benefit from AI.

Even in the M7, memory bandwidth will also be increased, going up to around 240 gigabytes per second in the base chip.

The massive improvements in the M7 range are deemed by Apple to be sufficient enough to skip most of a chip generation.

Server Strategy

The usually massive performance of the Ultra chip is also at play here. To Gurman, the upgrades in the M7 Ultra allegedly bring the chip close in performance to dedicated AI accelerators, including Nvidia’s Blackwell.

That includes support for as much as 1.5 terabytes of memory. This may not necessarily be an amount presented to consumers or enterprise customers considering the current memory pricing crisis, but it could still be useful for servers.

Gurman proposes that the M7 Ultra could be the basis for Apple’s AI server strategy. While Apple is soon to introduce servers based on the M5 Ultra, engineers are said to be working on a new server chip built around the M7 Ultra.

That chip could see the light of day by 2029.