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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

#181

Post by gumby »

moondev wrote: post #164
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...

Curious if you can feed all those Ampere CPUs or if it is memory bandwidth constrained.

Disclaimer: this is not a "zomg apple grate; others must suck" comment. Apple claims that their integrated design balances things out to get the best performance. It will be interesting once there are some real benchmarks to see how well that claim continues to stack up.

The M transition has been amazing, but not every iteration can be a winner.

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

#182

Post by singhrac »

imdsm wrote: post #129
modeless wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's GPU does not compete sufficiently with the discrete GPUs one would put in a $7000 PC.

Out of curiosity, what is your benchmark here? I have a $2000 RTX card that is great for games, but pretty poor for LLMs. For LLM development, I'd be much happier with a Studio and an M2 Ultra. How much would it cost me to get 192 GB in discreet cards I wonder?

I think the statement "I'd be much happier with a Studio" is a little hypothetical? Sorry if that's not true, but everywhere I've looked, it seems like these are not ML training chips, and people are just hoping they will handle LLMs well.

You can absolutely build (with real support from the PyTorch folks) a 4x3090 deep learning workstation that has 96 GB of VRAM for roughly $7k. Or, more likely, you'll rent a A100 from AWS for ~$0.15/hr.

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

#183

Post by gumby »

WWLink wrote: post #176
pwthornton wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They probably have very good data on how their machines are used, and are optimizing for the fat part of the market.

This may not be a great machine for training models, which is what I happen care about (I couldn't care less about video). I wonder how big the model generation market actually is though.

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

#184

Post by vbezhenar »

They're just ridiculous with Mac Pro pricing. $3k for pretty chassis and $3.5k for chassis with wheels. It's a joke. They didn't even match specs for previous Intel Mac Pro, when it comes to RAM.

IMO this announcement is just a funeral for this product.

Mac Studio is fine, I guess... I hate small computers so I would prefer huge empty box with lots of air inside which is likely to be silent. But not with this overprice.

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

#185

Post by gumby »

miklosz wrote: post #159

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.

> I was thinking, that for Mac Pro they will go somehow with multiple processors and some magic with shared memory access...

That is what they did. Read what they wrote about their interconnect. It's just all inside a single package. Look up "chiplets".

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

#186

Post by [deleted] »

runjake wrote: post #155
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.

[deleted]

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

#187

Post by dymk »

teddyh wrote: post #124
llm_nerd wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all pre-recorded now, so what would the worry be?

If Apple likes your macOS app, that’s the first step to being sherlocked.

Does that mean acquired? 'cause that's more likely

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

#188

Post by JohnBooty »

imagetic wrote: post #102

I guess I've never been blessed enough to work at a place that will spend $7k on a base model edit station.

What do you do for a living?

I'm just curious which kinds of workplaces/industries are splashing out for $7K workstations. Would love to hear from people whose workplaces do provide such things.

I wouldn't expect many software engineers to be answering in the affirmative but I suspect it may be fairly common in other realms...

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

#189

Post by USB5 »

StillBored wrote: post #156
sliken wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I just built a workstation with a 32 core Threadripper Pro, 128 GB ECC RAM, Thunderbolt 4, and an RTX 4090 for $6,500.
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