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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

#221

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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.

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

#222
post #210

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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".

How dare they speak in a language their users might understand!

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

#224

I’ve been draggggggiiinnngggg my feet on a new desktop workstation. Waiting for the store to come back to truly make a decision but I think that I’m gonna go for a Studio. The hacker in me wants to build a beefy Linux workstation but the pragmatist in me wants a machine that just works. I think the Apple tax is worth it here.

I'm pretty certain you can buy yourself a Linux workstation that just works. ThreadRipper, ECC, NVidia proprietary drivers. Put Fedora on it. The trouble is leaving it alone and not messing with it after you get it going.

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

#225

I'm surprised they kept the cheese grater case for the new Pro. It is one of my least favorite case designs of any high end mac. I'm really surprised they didn't go with something simpler and more like a tall, scaled up Mac Studio. It's strange that given it is such a big architecture change on the inside isn't mirrored with a physical change on the outside. Mostly I hate the juxtaposition of the chrome legs/handles…

I love the cheese grater but I don't care for the chrome handles and feet either. They remind me of bed frames and office chairs.

I think the G5 case was peak design for a tower that's hard to top but Apple's surprised me before.

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

#226
post #197

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> It's such a specific use case that I'm not entirely sure what the use case even is. Live TV production, I think. Mostly in the rackmount form-factor. A plethora of "IO breakout boards" is what turns a regular computer into a "video production system" head-unit. Though also, at least three of the PCI-e cards shown on the slide were for fibre-optic networking. So, presumably, this would be the Mac to get if you're tr…

I liked how one of the cards on the screen was a sound card, as if a PCIe slot wasn't 1000x overkill for that amount of I/O. We had USB ports that could handle that when Bill Clinton was still president of the United States.

There was also what I believe to be an SDR card (the one with all the antenna-inputs) — which is pretty interesting in its implications, but perhaps not the brightest one in this context. Aren't RF antennas also lightning rods? :)

There was also something there that had DB9 and DB25 connectors, but both female. (I would think this was a weird SuperIO card, but the computer side of a serial port is usually male.) There was also a lot of stuff on that card. Anyone know what that one was?

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

#227

Congrats to Apple on completing another IA migration! It really is an incredible accomplishment to get such a massive base of customers, partners, and developers to run on a new architecture so quickly and relatively seamlessly. I remember the PPC to Intel move, which was also well done, and they'd improved even on that ... with what must be many many more users. Awesome! P.S. Hopefully this transition frees someone…

And before that was the 68k -> PPC transition, which was even smoother: 68k and PPC code could co-exist and call each other in the same address space.

(Well there was no memory protection in those days, so everything was in one address space. Still, impressive!)

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

#228

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Mac Pro = Mac Studio + Expansion Cards I have to imagine this will be a huge disappointment to some, because 192GB of shared memory is way less than the 1.5TB of RAM available on the "old" Mac Pro.

Perhaps someone will come out with a new PCIe card with a load of RAM slots on it, and then writes a kernel driver to map the pcie card pages to appear as regular pages

You could use them as some kind of swap or ram disk, but I don't believe as normal RAM would be possible due to how CPUs work.

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

#229
post #189

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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.

Likely better on any workloads that are GPU heavy and fit in 24GB of vram.

Two data points from Apple:

  a) M2 Ultra 24 cores, 128GB ram, 2TB storage = $5,200
  b) M2 ultra 24 cores, 192GB ram, 4GB storage = $6,600
Likely 1/4th the size, 1/4th the power consumption, and 4x the ram bandwidth. Have you by chance played with any LLMs? Just saw a post that someone managed 5 tokens/sec with the llama 65B model.

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

#230

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> 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.

> NLP has been considered AI for generations now

I'm arguing the term AI has become "inclusive to the point of meaninglessness." That doesn't mean it was always meaningless.

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