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.
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Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
281–290 of 403 posts
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#282Well 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, it’s a bit baffling. Maybe the Pro has better thermals and can run the chips at higher frequencies/at peak frequency all the time compared to the Studio?
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#283The 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.
Why were you impressed by that? WWDC is a developer's conference. I bet many developers would have been offended if they were told AI is some enigma.
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Octane, Redshift, and eevee/Cycles all work on Metal, and Renderman and Mantra are CPU-only for now -- RM/Mantra have beta-versions that are GPU enabled, and Karma is nvidia-only and RM XPU doesn't work on macs at all yet, but I don't think many people are using either in production very much yet. I think the only GPU renderer people are using in production pipelines that's really locked to NVIDIA chips is Arnold, ri…
I can't speak for cycles, but Redshift is very slow on OpenCL. I've never heard of using it on Metal. I know it was written for CUDA and didn't even support OpenCL for a long time. Do you know how it runs on Metal? I don't think V-Ray GPU will run on anything but Nvidia, and if it will then it's definitely slow.
Ah yeah forgot about V-Ray. I haven't tried Redshift on Metal, nope; all my work has been Renderman and Cycles recently. Curious to hear how well it works, people online seem to say it's pretty fast but hard to tell marketing copy from actual performance when it comes to renderers.
FWIW Cycles is definitely slower on my M2 than it was on my 3080 but it's not a huge difference -- maybe 20% slower? I still have to let the render run overnight either way haha.
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sir, this is a developer conference.
The rest of the conference, sure. But the keynote has always been designed for a mainstream audience.
That wouldn't make sense. "Let's have a conference strictly for developers, but let's speak to a completely different audience in the keynote."
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#286I’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.
Everything seems slightly parallel-universe in Apple world, looking at it from over here in x86/linux land. I can see why they’d decide to go in-package with their memory, it is really very fast. And 192GB of memory is not a huge amount of memory in server/HPC land, but it is still a decent chunk of space. You could load up a Mac Pro with a bunch of PCIe nvme drives or something, I wonder if it would really be that h…
I've got a PCIe RAID card loaded with NVMe SSDs on my 2019 MP. It's really great. Unfortunately, the latest macOS versions are not amenable to using other drives as a boot drive (IIRC may be related to secure enclave stuff?). Lots of (third party) macOS apps don't play real well with additional storage devices either, and the OS itself has some (relatively minor) hurdles to deal with, too. For project/data/"working directory"/general filesystem usage, it's great.
That said, up to now it's probably provided me with ~ fastest possible drive speeds available for macOS. For business/dev purposes, I really can't complain (except about price & lack of modern Nvidia support - but alas), even though I'm already using M1 Max these days - the single-core speed is just too good.
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#288Earlier 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.
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Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything seems slightly parallel-universe in Apple world, looking at it from over here in x86/linux land. I can see why they’d decide to go in-package with their memory, it is really very fast. And 192GB of memory is not a huge amount of memory in server/HPC land, but it is still a decent chunk of space. You could load up a Mac Pro with a bunch of PCIe nvme drives or something, I wonder if it would really be that h…
NVMe wouldn't give you the best latency, but a 16x PCIe card loaded with DRAM and addressable as a scratch disk doesn't sound bananas. I wonder why Apple didn't market something like that as a first party solution.
I expect that expansion cards from Apple are going to be the way they differentiate the mac pro line. I'm betting that Apple is going to come out with discrete GPU's based on their integrated graphics and sell them as add-ons for the Pros for ML/AI workloads and likely to help with normal stuff like rendering in Autodesk/Adobe/Finalcut type apps.
That said, it isn't the bet I'd make if I was tasked with purchasing for a company. I'd get the studios in a reasonably high config and then sell them every 2-3 years and replace with newer model. You'd pass the pro's in perf pretty readily from CPU bumps alone and likely recoupe a lot of your investment.
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#290I 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.
I have a 2013 Mac Pro running Alpine Linux and a bunch of Docker containers.
Installing any Linux distro is trivial, just boot the installer for your distro of choice off a USB stick. Hold down the Option key when the Mac turns on and it'll appear as a boot option alongside the internal drive and internet recovery.