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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

#241

Post by virtuallynathan »

gumby wrote: post #181
moondev wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

It has 8 x DDR4 3200, so about 204GB/s of memory bandwidth, 1/4th of the M2 Ultra.

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

#242

Post by grishka »

jasoneckert wrote: post #235

The fact Apple didn't announce that their product line was 'now fully ARMed' during today's WWDC keynote was a lost opportunity.

They seemingly avoid calling it ARM whenever they can do it. The only place where I myself saw Apple spell out that Apple Silicon is ARM was somewhere deep in developer docs.

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

#243

Post by virtuallynathan »

osti wrote: post #202

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?

The live video encode use-case seems like one that makes sense, and likely requires more bandwidth than TB4 can support.

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

#244

Post by jasoneckert »

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #213
jasoneckert wrote: post #134

I own an M1 Ultra Mac Studio that I primarily run Asahi Linux on. Prior to that, I ran a trashcan 2013 Mac Pro 6-core Xeon that I primarily ran Ubuntu Linux on. Thus, I buy Apple primarily for the hardware. After watching today's WWDC product announcements regarding the Mac Studio and Mac Pro updates, I really don't see myself ever buying a Mac Pro in the future. While I can understand how very large studios may valu…

Was it hard to get Linux to run well on the trashcan? Mine is still my main machine, but there are no more MacOS upgrades for it.

It was trivially simple - boot the Mac from a USB thumb drive that has Ubuntu 20 or later installation media. No need to search for any drivers afterwards either.

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

#245

Post by ucm_edge »

wilg wrote: post #239
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.

Yeah the Pro feels like a miss. I figured it would have same specs as the Studio for its SoC but would come with a bunch of options for co processor cards akin to the Afterburner card. So a studio you can kit out for additional specialized performance.

Maybe those cards will trickle out over time, but not having them ready at launch makes the Pro feel like an afterthought right now.

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

#246

Post by smoldesu »

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…

The GPU situation is getting really dire, and showing the obvious limitations of putting everything on one die at-scale. The Blender benchmarks tell the entire story now that Metal is supported: https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query

The M2 Max renders on-par with a 90 watt, 12nm RTX 2070 laptop card. From 2018.

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

#247

Post by joshspankit »

lukifer wrote: post #160
joshspankit wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general public assumes AGI when they hear AI and that’s a problem worth fighting against.

The goalpost keeps moving on what is sufficiently "general" to meet a hypothetical AGI definition. At one point the distinction was more meaningful: AIs were always highly domain-specific (eg, playing chess). Now the same transformer model can write a string-parsing JS function, concoct a recipe that uses six arbitrary ingredients, pass a biology exam, sort unstructured data, and give tax advice, but somehow that sti…

The lines are fuzzy for sure, but the point is more about public perception instead of actual definition. The issue is really more about the public worrying about an AI being 'conscious' enough to be a threat to humanity (AKA skynet) and LLMs/Diffusion models just can't be that.

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

#248

Post by USB5 »

sliken wrote: post #229
USB5 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't care about playing with LLMs, so this is simply meaningless to me.

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

#249

Post by jasoneckert »

tostr wrote: post #200
jasoneckert wrote: post #134

I own an M1 Ultra Mac Studio that I primarily run Asahi Linux on. Prior to that, I ran a trashcan 2013 Mac Pro 6-core Xeon that I primarily ran Ubuntu Linux on. Thus, I buy Apple primarily for the hardware. After watching today's WWDC product announcements regarding the Mac Studio and Mac Pro updates, I really don't see myself ever buying a Mac Pro in the future. While I can understand how very large studios may valu…

Would you mind expanding a bit on your experiences with running linux on mac hardware? Especially the M1, what is your daily experience like? Any pain points or gotchas? Reason for my question is that I used to run linux on the mac as well (10 years ago), and I love the hardware. I don't think there is anything that even comes close hardware-wise. But currently I am on mac os, well, because it works basically ;) But…

Of course - I have a blog post detailing that here: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/ultimate-linux-arm64-wo...

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

#250

Post by avar »

ridiculous_fish wrote: post #227
colmmacc wrote: post #16

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!)

You're both forgetting the ppc32 to ppc64 migration, i.e. G4 to G5 processors.

It was a lot easier than the rest, but still come with its own migration and compatibility issues.

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