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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

#161

Post by 221qqwe »

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.

> much more usable than similar amounts of ram

People keep repeating this but how does higher bandwidth (probably not 8x higher though) compensate for a lower amount of RAM?

It's not quite as silly as the people saying that 8GB in the base config 'feels' much faster than 8GB on a PC cause the drive/swap are "so fast" but still..

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

#162

Post by qwytw »

kllrnohj wrote: post #85
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.

The integrated memory design doesn't prevent doing it over a dimm slot. It seems more they just didn't want to deal with a ddr5 or some bespoke connector.

Also allowing users to upgrade RAM themselves would lower Apples margin and their computers would remain usable for much longer which would result in even less profits... Now Apple can release a 512 GB version in a year or two then a 1TB one etc.

The technical issues are totally insignificant compared to this.

Edit: having said this extra memory for Mac Pro seems cheap as f** by Apple standards. Just $800 for 64 -> 128GB. 8 -> 24GB for Mac mini/Air is $400 and you only get 48GB for $800 in a MBP.

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

#163

Post by lowbloodsugar »

skunkworker wrote: post #26

It's a little interesting that that are going to the Video 1st/ Training second model and abandoning the HPC market where they can't compete with high, multi TB workstations. But I guess it's playing to the strength that video decode/encode has right now with the M series chips. I wish that they would have a tiered memory expansion, eg 192gb fast tier, and expandable to 1.5TB slower but DDR5 expandable.

I imagine they did the research and found that most people with HPC needs are just renting it, and those that aren’t renting aren’t filling a data center with fucking apples.

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

#164

Post by moondev »

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…

FWIW Ampere Altra dev kit is $4k for 128 cores and supports 768GB of RAM. Bring your own memory, storage, PSU, GPU

https://www.ipi.wiki/products/com-hpc-ampere-altra?variant=4...

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

#165

Post by AprilArcus »

bee_rider wrote: post #53
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.

Everything seems slightly parallel-universe in Apple world, looking at it from over here in x86/linux land. I can see why they’d decide to go in-package with their memory, it is really very fast. And 192GB of memory is not a huge amount of memory in server/HPC land, but it is still a decent chunk of space. You could load up a Mac Pro with a bunch of PCIe nvme drives or something, I wonder if it would really be that h…

NVMe wouldn't give you the best latency, but a 16x PCIe card loaded with DRAM and addressable as a scratch disk doesn't sound bananas. I wonder why Apple didn't market something like that as a first party solution.

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

#166

Post by detrites »

racl101 wrote: post #46

What the hell is that cheese grater looking thing? I can't make out what that is.

It's the front of a desktop tower, except it looks exactly like a cheese grater and triggers some peoples visual phobias. While it's claimed functional for quiet airflow, it's also possibly Apple's worst visual design, ever.

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

#168

Post by munificent »

Solvency wrote: post #139
chillbill wrote: post #41

The best thing about this whole event is that they didn't mention AI even once, all they're saying is ML. Which is what it is. AI is a hype word.

Games have talked about "enemy AI" for 25+ years. Hell, Halo 1 was considered revolutionary for its advanced enemy AI. Was that a hype word? Was that an incorrect misnomer?

Different fields use the same term to mean unrelated things. "AI" in gaming just means "non-player-controlled entity behavior" and has meant that all the way back to the first chess computer games (when they did think what they were doing was "AI").

"Theory" in law, versus in science is another example.

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

#169

Post by nightski »

kimixa wrote: post #130
adastra22 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large language models are definitely AI.

Expert systems used to be considered "AI". Certainly some optimization algorithms like genetic algorithms were "AI". Pretty much any system that makes a decision was considered "AI" at some point. The problem is the general use of the term changes in a way to often make the meaning unclear to the point of being near useless. Outside of marketing, of course.

AI is a pretty well defined field I feel like. It combines symbolists, connectionists, evolutionaries, bayesians, and analogizers. Just because those not in the field misuse the term does not make it less useful.

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

#170

Post by selectodude »

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…

High compared to the Mac Studio, I'd say. $3,000 extra for the exact same specs and an extra 6 PCI slots. I guess if you need them, that's the cost of entry, but $500/slot seems like a tough sell.
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