The return of the rack-mount Mac? Nice one, Apple. But do I get it right, a professional machine with zero ways to upgrade the system? Come on.
They've sold rack-mount Mac Pros since 2019.
Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
171–180 of 403 posts
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#172192GB 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?
When llamaCPP came out, I was running 13B at 100ms/token on a base model MacBook Pro 14".
Edit: apparently llama.cpp supports running on GPU, so I imagine it's gonna be a bit faster. Maybe a fun evening project for me to get going.
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#173$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…
If you actually want 8 Thunderbolt 4 ports that probably puts you towards that price range anyways because nobody has really seen the demand to make a quad Thunderbolt 4 card yet (as far as I know) so you're eating up a lot of slots which were probably designed to have way more than PCIe 3.0 x8 plugged into them. Same with the memory bandwidth, if you actually need 800 GB/s of RAM bandwidth then there isn't really a…
> Overall I don't think it's horrendously priced as some of the previous Mac workstation components could get, but at the same time, unless you have a very specific use case or specifically need macOS, it's not exactly compelling. It is "good enough" to finally round out the lineup though.
It's such a specific use case that I'm not entirely sure what the use case even is. Capturing off an SDI camera? Great! Why do we need so many pcie cards and so little memory? These things aren't even setup to hold that much storage. It appears to not work with PCIE GPUs, so that's out. You probably don't need additional thunderbolt ports since it already has those. Maybe additional USB, but probably not that many cards worth? Most audio equipment is external?
I get it. Apple is saying "This machine is for a very specific type of video editor" lol.
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
The enemies didn’t learn though, so it definitely wasn’t machine learning.
The AI was pre-trained before the game shipped. Kinda like how you can have a conversation with ChatGPT and it will eventually forget what you've "taught" it
Pre-programmed.
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It is useful when you use it like those knowledgeable of the field. Marketing departments are not using it that way.
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#176I’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 approach they took is certainly enough to satisfy the video and related markets. It won't help those who need truly staggering amounts of ram for their workloads. It may not be a big use case for the Intel Mac Pro, but it a use case nonetheless. For video editing, color grading, audio editing, 3D animation, etc. this new machine seems really strong. I am not sure if there is anything beyond that, however.
I think that was deliberate. I am kinda amused at how they keep on narrowing the scope of what the mac pro is intended to be used for lol.
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Scripted enemies are "non-player-controlled entity behavior", yet they are not AI. For NPC behaviours to be considered game AI, there needs to be some calculation depending on the current state of the game and objectives of the character. What makes a game behaviour "AI" is its feedback with the player actions and/or events evolving in the game.
Super Mario mushrooms and turtles are not AI controlled; Pac-Man ghosts are. (Possibly the earliest and simplest form of game AI, but quite effective for its purpose).
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#178The 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.
Yes, and it's shameful when people descibe a wrong or bogus answer as "hallucination". They are just stimulating unknowledgeable people's fears and/or fanboiism.
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you actually want 8 Thunderbolt 4 ports that probably puts you towards that price range anyways because nobody has really seen the demand to make a quad Thunderbolt 4 card yet (as far as I know) so you're eating up a lot of slots which were probably designed to have way more than PCIe 3.0 x8 plugged into them. Same with the memory bandwidth, if you actually need 800 GB/s of RAM bandwidth then there isn't really a…
> Overall I don't think it's horrendously priced as some of the previous Mac workstation components could get, but at the same time, unless you have a very specific use case or specifically need macOS, it's not exactly compelling. It is "good enough" to finally round out the lineup though. It's such a specific use case that I'm not entirely sure what the use case even is. Capturing off an SDI camera? Great! Why do we…
I am probably the minimal target market for the mac pro m2 ultra. I am an artist and I do a lot of 3D rendering. I think it's a great price and I would love to own one, but I wouldn't even consider it unless it had support for Nvidia GPUs. Good GPU-based 3D rendering engines need CUDA. Even with the ones that don't, GPU rendering on a 4090 is 4x-5x times more performant than on an M2 Max, and building my own PC allows me to have multiple of them. Also Octane, the rendering engine in their demo, is trash. Specifically, it's fine for fancy titles and cartoons but terrible for realistic renderings.
Also, I still have a chip on my shoulder about Apple failing to update Mac Pros for about a decade and then rubbing salt in the wound with their pathetic trash can. It would take A LOT to get me back after that BS. Moving to Windows was a horrible experience and they gave me no choice.
Lastly, VFX software is heartily embracing Linux these days and I'm loving it, but I did have to invest in a KVM switch system and 10Gbe network so I can comfortably run Photoshop and Substance on a separate Windows machine.
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#180The 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.
Yes, and it's shameful when people descibe a wrong or bogus answer as "hallucination". They are just stimulating unknowledgeable people's fears and/or fanboiism.
Hallucination is a far better word than the recent verbiage I've seen around LLM's lying to you.