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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

#231

Post by goosedragons »

rnk wrote: post #133
whalesalad wrote: post #86

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 bought the prev generation for that kind of purpose, about 3 months ago. To get 2tb disk/128gb ram cost over $5k. Curious about new prices. The perf seemed good running 65b models but not 16bit. You need the ram and disk space, but the cost was astronomical.

$5200 for an M2 Ultra Studio with 128GB RAM and 2TB SSD. Still costs $200 to upgrade a MBA with a 512GB SSD.

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

#232

Post by safog »

neilalexander wrote: post #222
dheera wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

And yet somehow it's better to say transformer models and not AI?

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

#233

Post by sliken »

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…

Sure, but what if a normal C code needs more bandwidth?

Or if a GPU code needs more than 12-16GB of memory (normal cards) or 24GB (if you get a 4090)?

What I like about the apple approach is that low end laptops/desktops get 100GB/sec. Pay another $500 get 200GB/sec. Pay another $500 get 400GB/sec. Pay another $1000 get 800GB/sec and still fits in a small desktop. On the PC side with AMD/Intel you get the same memory bandwidth for the low, medium, and high end chips. Until you upgrade to a threadripper, which is a 280 watt chip, on an expensive motherboard, usually in a rather large PC case and makes the mac studio look cheap.

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

#234

Post by jkestner »

safog wrote: post #232
neilalexander wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And yet somehow it's better to say transformer models and not AI?

Sir, this is a developer conference.

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

#236

Post by _ea1k »

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.

IDK, I feel like people are making it so narrow that it basically cannot exist.

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

#237

Post by nico_h »

Well there was 3 interesting questions about the apple silicon mac pro going into the keynote:

- how will they provide more RAM than the Mac Studio?

- how will they provide more GPU than the Mac Studio?

- how will they provide more CPU than the Mac Studio?

And the answer is « let’s not! »

I’m disappointed there was no surprise on that front.

I’m sad they mentioned gaming and created a « gaming mode » and then the Mac Pro has no GPU story to speak of. So all the 3d artists will keep stacking green team or red team GPU in their intel or amd boxes. This is not a good sign for 3d authoring software.

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

#238

Post by jeffbee »

derefr wrote: post #226
jeffbee wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.) Ther…

That's the sound card. It's a Lynx E44. It has two giant breakout cables.

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

#239

Post by wilg »

nico_h wrote: post #237

Well there was 3 interesting questions about the apple silicon mac pro going into the keynote: - how will they provide more RAM than the Mac Studio? - how will they provide more GPU than the Mac Studio? - how will they provide more CPU than the Mac Studio? And the answer is « let’s not! » I’m disappointed there was no surprise on that front. I’m sad they mentioned gaming and created a « gaming mode » and then the Mac…

It's bizarre that you'd pay $3000 more over the Mac Studio for zero extra performance, upgradability only for storage, and a bunch of useless PCI slots that don't support GPUs.

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

#240

Post by dathinab »

221qqwe wrote: post #161
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.

> 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..

The DDR5 bandwidth is ~51.2 GiB/s per "channel".

With consumer desktop CPUs having 2 "channels" (~102.4GiB/s).

And prosumer desktop/workstation CPUs (e.g. Threadripper) having 4 "channels" (~204.8GiB/s).

While apple is claiming 819.2GiB/s.

That is _max throughput is 4x/8x more_ (depending if you compare it to prosumer (fair comparison) or consumer (unfair comparison for a $7k system) hardware.

Now the _max_ part is important, Apple mainly reaches this by having more bandwidth, i.e. parallelism.

Mainly (oversimplified) the per "CPU memory channel" bandwidth for x86 is 64bit (for 51.2GiB/s) so the M1 Ultra is roughly comparable to having 16 "CPU memory channels" instead of 8 (prosumer) or 4 (consumer).

Some applications can take advantage of this nicely and will scale potentially even to 4x/8x speed, most probably will not some might even have neglible improvements. But applications which use a lot of RAM (as much as they can get) and most of the RAM they use is "warm" (e.g. doesn't just lie around with little access but isn't super "hot", i.e. highly contented either) will profit quite a lot.

On the other hand applications which use little RAM but the same small RAM region very heavily contented likely will hardly at all profit and will likely run faster on overclocked RAM on consumer systems.

Luckily for apple most the typical use case they sell their pro desktop model for belong more/mostly in the first category.

Additionally if you can run Linux on this system they might become _very_ interesting for some scientific applications for some users. I mean even e.g. Zen 4 EPYC CPU only have 12 "CPU memory channels" not 16 and it's much easier to put a desktop box "somewhere" then a server unit.

Side note: I say "CPU channel" in quotes because while it tends to be the marketing term things are more complicated in practice, e.g. in general DDR5 is splitting the 64bit channels into 32bit sub-channels, and just listing the channel width and throughput is still not painting the whole picture at all, e.g. the latency also matters for some applications (hence why OC can make sense) etc.

EDIT: Correction: The Threadripper PRO models have 8 "CPU memory channels" so it's just 2x on a fair comparison.

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