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Portables (Apple) Apple Technology

Unreleased M4 MacBook Pro Offered For Sale on Russian Site (9to5mac.com) 17

9to5Mac: Following apparent photos of an M4 MacBook Pro box and a subsequent unboxing video, the unreleased model has now been offered for sale on a Russian classified ads site -- at a highly inflated price, naturally. Multiple units were advertised before the listings were removed, and it does now seem increasingly likely that the leaks are real.

Apple Pro tweeted a screengrab of one of the listing, which offered what appears to be the base model 14-inch M4 MacBook Pro, with the previously reported specs of 16GB unified memory, 512GB SSD, and three Thunderbolt 4 ports. We've also seen Geekbench results for a machine identified as "Mac 16,1" with performances in line with the reported specs. Rather than a one-off leak, it has been claimed that there are some 200 units out there. The ad on Avito was asking 720,000 rubles, which is around $7,400.

Unreleased M4 MacBook Pro Offered For Sale on Russian Site

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  • less base ram then the m3 systems?

    • by Holi ( 250190 )

      Pretty sure the base m3 model has 8gb, and a quick check on Apple's site verifies it.

  • See below...
  • $7400 (Score:5, Funny)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @01:52PM (#64851489)

    So cheaper than Apple will charge for it?

  • Did Apple just re-invent shared CPU/GPU memory?

    I remember many years ago specifying in the PC BIOS the amount of system RAM that was allocated to the onboard GPU. I guess Apple just decided that it's a selling point now...

    • by Guspaz ( 556486 )

      A bit late to the party, aren't you? They've used unified memory in their M-series chips since the M1, and in their mobile products much longer than that.

    • Re:Unified memory (Score:4, Informative)

      by DamnOregonian ( 963763 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @02:39PM (#64851629)
      No.

      Shared is different than unified.
      With shared, you partition off a chunk of RAM and make it local to the GPU, and non-local to the CPU.
      I.e., transferring data from one partition to the other is still a relatively slow process.

      With unified, all RAM is local to the CPU and the GPU- there's no transferring of the data at all.
      For example, say you've got a vertex buffer stored on disk in a format that works with your graphics library (Vulkan, Metal, DX12) on a system with unified memory.
      You load that into a buffer, and simply hand the pointer off to the library, and instead of copying that to RAM that is local to the GPU, it just hands that pointer to the GPU and it uses it directly. No copy.

      That being said, Intel GPUs have done this for a while now.
      They still have an option to report a chunk of RAM as partitioned, but that's only for older graphics libraries expect discrete RAM (OpenGL, DX11).
      AMD iGPUs still use partitioned RAM.
      • Amd called it HSA and the ps4 cpu supports heterogeneous memory management. They also added it to a few desktop APUs in 2015

        Itâ(TM)s part of the HSA standard

        • AMD pre-Zen APUs did.
          Zen and above do not, and likely never will.
          The chiplet latency is too high for reasonable cache coherency.
          • Then what is the UMA Frame Buffer in all current Ryzen APU's?

            As far as I'm aware, current AMD integrated GPU's support the optional UMA in Direct3D 12

            • Then what is the UMA Frame Buffer in all current Ryzen APU's?

              Marketing co-option of a term.
              The "UMA Frame Buffer" sets the partition size for the shared memory at runtime.
              There is no UMA**

              As far as I'm aware, current AMD integrated GPU's support the optional UMA in Direct3D 12

              Nope.
              They don't, can't, and won't.
              It would be very, very bad for performance if they did.
              The GPU is on the I/O die, and the CPU cores are across a very high latency link.
              If you were to start a job with all of your CUs blasting away as hard as they could at a chunk of memory claimed in both locations, you would overwhelm the bus between the I/O die and the CCX with coherency tr

            • If you'd like to take a look yourself, get yourself a vulkan information tool and see the output of VkPhysicalDeviceMemoryProperties.
              You're looking for a heap with MEMORY_PROPERTY_DEVICE_LOCAL_BIT | MEMORY_PROPERTY_HOST_VISIBLE_BIT | MEMORY_PROPERTY_HOST_COHERENT_BIT

              That means allocations there are local to both the CPU, the GPU, and cache coherent.
  • by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @02:40PM (#64851631) Journal
    it has been claimed that there are some 200 units out there.

    If this is true, this is not a "leak". This is outright theft from the company making these machines. Are these still being made in China, or did Apple get its India plant up and running?
    • by davidwr ( 791652 )

      Not necessarily: I can see making an early run of 200 machines with very restricted distribution. I can also see 1 of them being lost or stolen.

      On the other hand, you could be right, this could be a single lot of 200 that was stolen.

  • There is no universe in which you will receive anything for your $7400 other than some happy Russian trolls.
  • If your unreleased hardware has a problem, you're probably SOL.

I've got a bad feeling about this.

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