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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

#201

Post by airgapstopgap »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #107
adastra22 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large language models are definitely AI.

> large language models are definitely AI The term “AI” is becoming over inclusive to the point of meaninglessness. Cupertino is smart enough to pick up on that. “Statistical linguistics” is the best general term for LLMs I’ve come across.

LLMs are the apex of NLP research to date, and NLP is obviously a branch of AI. You may have some sophisticated notion of AI, AGI, human-level or human-like AI or whatever, but NLP has been considered AI for generations now.

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

#202

Post by osti »

Mac Pro and Mac Studio, spec'd to the same maximum possible Ultra cpu, 192GB ram, 1tb ssd, Mac Pro is $9600, while the Mac Studio is $6600. How many people really need the Mac Pro's PCI-E expandability (which probably no third party GPU's can use) to justify the $3000 premium, in an arguably worse form factor?

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

#203

Post by jeffbee »

acchow wrote: post #192
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…

How many simultaneous 4K input video steams can that HP handle (input and encoding)?

I haven't the slightest idea. I assume people with such requirements know how to specify and buy machines. That said, these guys who specifically target the video production market sell machines with the latest Xeons and e.g. an RTX 4080 (which I suspect is the more relevant part). https://www.pugetsystems.com/workstations/xeon/w790-e/

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

#205

Post by musicale »

jsheard wrote: post #44
bee_rider wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PCIe slots look easy enough to get at.

Apple showed a lineup of compatible PCIe cards, with a variety of accelerators and I/O hardware but conspicuously no GPUs. https://i.imgur.com/28J1KfN.jpg The Apple Silicon transition ended support for external GPUs, so I think it's safe to assume they won't support internal ones either.

> conspicuously no GPUs

That is interesting. I wonder how hard it would be to do PCI passthrough to enable GPUs to work with Windows 11 ARM running in a VM?

I wonder if it is even possible to write a driver for an external GPU for macOS on Apple Silicon? It seems that Metal on macOS Sonoma intel still supports external GPUs.

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

#206

Post by kristianp »

jyu wrote: post #126
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…

What do you think the odds are we can get H100s or equivalent in Mac Studio?

Nvidia gpus haven't been supported by Macs for a long time. Apple and Nvidia relations are not good for some reason.

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

#207

Post by USB5 »

pwthornton wrote: post #34
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 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.

>3D animation

Disagree. All the good GPU-based rendering engines need CUDA, and none of them are optimized for Apple silicon. Octane (the one in the demo) is trash, only good for fancy titles and that sort of thing.

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

#208

Post by smoldesu »

jmkni wrote: post #106
f6v wrote: post #19

Incoming: “Not going to upgrade, I’m fine with my 1996 toaster, thank you!” It’d be actually interesting to read from people who buy a top config and how they use it.

I'd really love to hear from somebody currently using a 1.5TB Intel Mac Pro

My ex-boyfriend had a 128gb Mac he would regularly max out with nothing more than Spotify and Firefox tabs. I still don't understand it.

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

#209

Post by 1Y3 »

whatever1 wrote: post #199

Can one install a regular AMD gpu in this?

I was asking myself the same, but I am assuming there is no way. The specs list only 300W of extra power budget (with only 150W on the single 8-pin PCI-E connector) and the x16 slots are shown as single height on the images. Also I don't think there are any drivers for Apple Silicon afaik and using AMD GPUs purely as accelerator cards seems pointless when you have M2 Max.

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

#210

Post by dheera »

DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #49
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.

I agree. I was really impressed that even with regard to the Autocorrect update, they used technical terms like "transformer model" without using hype words. They very clearly labeled it as a predictive text engine rather than some magical pseudo-sentient enigma or something.

Much better than their previous marketing 15 years ago measuring hard drive capacities in "songs".
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