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Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

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Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#151

Post by wmf »

sbierwagen wrote: post #143
wmf wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$3,000 just for slots certainly sends the message that Apple views their customers as completely captive though.

The press release mentions a bunch of use cases for the slots, but does anyone actually sell Apple Silicon-compatible cards yet? It's a brand new processor architecture after all. I checked the store page and it doesn't show any. (The old page would let you configure a Pro with more GPUs or afterburner cards)

People will need to get the new Mac Pro in their hands to develop and test drivers, although any card that works in a Thunderbolt enclosure should also work when plugged in directly.

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#152

Post by elorant »

mk_stjames wrote: post #69

192GB of memory on the Mac Studio is enough to run Llama 65B in full FP16. And at 800GB/s bandwidth, it will do so pretty quickly. I think my M1 Pro memory bandwidth is 200GB/s and I was running quantized 13B Alpaca relatively quickly, I'd say useable for a personal chatbot, and I think it was swapping every now and then causing pauses. So having 4x the memory bandwidth should allow large models to run pretty damn fa…

How many tokens per second are you getting from Alpaca?

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#153

Post by RegularOpossum »

kamel3d wrote: post #138

The M1 Mac Studio has just disappeared from the Apple website. Maybe this disappearance could indicate how great of a deal it would have been if it had remained on sale at a lower price.

I would keep an eye out at Costco, M1 Pro MBPs still pop up on sale there regularly, they might get some Studios.

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#154

Post by tolmasky »

The best part to me is that this looks like a "platform" that can be updated year over year. They can just keep putting the updated M-whatever chip in it (and hopefully eventually figure out how to quadruple it vs. just having the Ultra). Ideally they can bump it up to PCIe 5 and Thunderbolt 5 "easily" too. In other words, the fact that this is so similar to the Mac Studio means it hopefully won't suffer the same fate as the previous "one-hit wonder" Mac Pros. An M3 (3nm) Mac Pro with PCIe5 and Thunderbolt 5 would be a very good machine I think.

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#155

Post by runjake »

lvl102 wrote: post #149

Why didn’t they release GPUs for those PCIe slots? I just don’t get why they couldn’t do a simple thing instead of AR/VR.

Because it's not that easy due to Apple Silicon architecture display controller limitations with the current chips. Note that none of the PCI-e cards in the demonstration were GPUs. They were all network/storage/accelerators/etc.

In the short term, I could see shoving an Nvidia GPU in a slot for offloading CUDA and GPU compute, but it wouldn't be really suitable for video gaming and such.

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#156

Post by StillBored »

sliken wrote: post #89
roughly wrote: post #5

I’d been wondering how they were going to handle expandable memory with the M chip, since the integrated memory seemed pretty central to the design - seems like the answer is, “they’re not.” Be interested to see if PCI expansion is sufficient to satisfy the Max Pro market.

192GB ram does seem like enough for a large fraction of the potential market, especially @ 800GB/sec which makes it much more usable than similar amounts of ram on Intel/AMD desktops at 1/8th the bandwidth.

Except that my fairly modest upper midrange desktop has ~1.2TB/sec of memory bandwidth...

Cause, I just added the GPU and system RAM bandwidth numbers together. Which is what needs to be kept in mind with much of this. Yes that is a lot of memory bandwidth and its hella useful for some subset of users, but its shared, and largely pointless for a lot of CPU bound tasks. But OTOH, may not be enough for many GPU bound ones.

It also assumes that pretty much every other CPU manufacture on the planet are idiots for optimizing for latency and putting in large caches to compensate (aka the desktop parts from AMD/intel have only _two_ channels, vs the 8+ in the server/workstation parts) and price discriminating for the parts that have more CPU bandwidth. AKA, you can get amd machines in the same ballpark (or possibly faster depending on how fast you can get 24 channels of DDR5 to run).

So, I'm not saying which is better because its likely workload dependent, but to claim its a blanket insurmountable advantage is questionable. Particularly since the price ranges we are talking about a similar machine is probably a 64 core threadripper plus a fat nvidia GPU or four and the shear core count and raw GPU compute is probably a win in most workloads.

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#157

Post by twoWhlsGud »

jeffbee wrote: post #76

$7k starting price. High but compared to? Just glancing at the new HP Z6 G5, which may be a fair comparison, with a 16-core CPU, 8x16GB of memory (the lowest configuration that populates all 8 channels of that CPU), minimal storage, and a parts bin GPU that nobody wants, $6k. To get 8 thunderbolt ports like the mac pro you'd have to fill each and every one of its add-in card slots with a HP dual TB4 card. Edit: The H…

The HP is usually at least 30% off and has ECC memory - so depending on your use case it may still make sense.

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#158

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

sliken wrote: post #89
roughly wrote: post #5

I’d been wondering how they were going to handle expandable memory with the M chip, since the integrated memory seemed pretty central to the design - seems like the answer is, “they’re not.” Be interested to see if PCI expansion is sufficient to satisfy the Max Pro market.

192GB ram does seem like enough for a large fraction of the potential market, especially @ 800GB/sec which makes it much more usable than similar amounts of ram on Intel/AMD desktops at 1/8th the bandwidth.

This is competing with servers though, and Epyc 9004 series has 460 GB/sec (and up to 6TB of ram per socket). Apple still gives you faster connection, but I feel like servers below 256GB ram are pretty rare these days.

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#159

Post by miklosz »

Interesting, only single CPU. I was thinking, that for Mac Pro they will go somehow with multiple processors and some magic with shared memory access solved in OS. Interesting though, how the external GPU support will look like if you have PCI and if it will be expanded to the TB4 as well.

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#160

Post by lukifer »

joshspankit wrote: post #113
zbowling wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ML is subset of AI. AI that is inclusive of other concepts and it's not a buzzword. It's valid to call anything ML as AI. Sure there is a lot of AI hype but it's not some made up marketing jargon.

The general public assumes AGI when they hear AI and that’s a problem worth fighting against.

The goalpost keeps moving on what is sufficiently "general" to meet a hypothetical AGI definition. At one point the distinction was more meaningful: AIs were always highly domain-specific (eg, playing chess). Now the same transformer model can write a string-parsing JS function, concoct a recipe that uses six arbitrary ingredients, pass a biology exam, sort unstructured data, and give tax advice, but somehow that still isn't general enough to qualify.
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