A Mac variant that trades CPU cores for GPU/ML cores while having 192GB+ of UMA memory.
> I struggle to imagine the “opportunities”
Two of them: 1) academic / R&D compute, where people could have at least A6000 class GPU on the desktop, and 2) cloud inference servers, probably for Apple’s own services.
I’m not saying they will or should do those things, just that the apple silicon arch is well positioned if they choose to. Bolting on exponentially better GPU is not especially difficult, and they’ve got an OS that would bring existing apps and libraries right over.
Look at it this way: is there a path to UMA on Windows / Linux? If not, those systems will always duplicate RAM and require users to decide in advance whether to allocate RAM budget to OS or ML.
Whichever way you look at it though, neither of those are really opportunities. Apple boxed themselves into the consumer market, and now has to compete with professionally-priced products.
Pursue what though?
UMA is cool, but kinda meaningless if the majority of Macbooks are min-spec. That leaves you with 4-5gb of VRAM, assuming you've left nothing open. What is Apple going to do with that UMA that other manufacturers cannot?
It's certainly nice that 128gb Macs exist for models that might be too big to otherwise load into memory. It's useless for production inferencing though, and I struggle to imagine the "opportunities" they're missing out on here.