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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

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars don’t usually become obsolete and borderline worthless after 5 years.

i still use my 2013 macbook pro and it still works great and fast

What’s its resale value compared to what you paid? It’s just the nature of technology.

I can buy one for $100, literally a fraction of what you paid originally for it.

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

#302
post #183
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that was deliberate. I am kinda amused at how they keep on narrowing the scope of what the mac pro is intended to be used for lol.

They probably have very good data on how their machines are used, and are optimizing for the fat part of the market. This may not be a great machine for training models, which is what I happen care about (I couldn't care less about video). I wonder how big the model generation market actually is though.

I do wonder in these conversations how many people are actual users of these things - I'm not, I got a Studio last year to manage my photography addition better, and the Pro is pointless for that - but you'd assume that Apple have talked to major Pro users, and they've said things like "oh, no for training a model I just spin up terabyte instances on AWS, why would I do that on a workstation?", or whatever.

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

#304

It's a little interesting that that are going to the Video 1st/ Training second model and abandoning the HPC market where they can't compete with high, multi TB workstations. But I guess it's playing to the strength that video decode/encode has right now with the M series chips. I wish that they would have a tiered memory expansion, eg 192gb fast tier, and expandable to 1.5TB slower but DDR5 expandable.

I imagine they did the research and found that most people with HPC needs are just renting it, and those that aren’t renting aren’t filling a data center with fucking apples.

Interesting that they added a rackmount option though. At a $500 premium too, I guess it’s mostly for iOS developer build servers.

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

#305

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.

> magical pseudo-sentient enigma or

Since when does artificial intelligence imply sentience? They're interdependent and neither are reliant on the other.

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

#306
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..

> People keep repeating this but how does higher bandwidth (probably not 8x higher though) compensate for a lower amount of RAM?

I guess it depends on your use case, but back when part of my day job was debugging performance problems with JVM-hosted applications, one of the things that was most noticeable was that the degree to which latency blows up memory use - whether the latency was GC, disk, network, DB queries, whatever. It all turns into holding items in memory longer before they get processed (which in the case of older JVMs, turns into a death spiral of GC thrashing, which blows up processing times further, until your application is staggering along).

Increasing memory can alleviate this, but only up to a point - and it can make things worse, because you've now got significant overhead managing the in-flight workloads.

It's also possibly that this is simply a decision driven by what Apple can produce with their M2 chips at this point, and that they wanted to offer 384 or 640 GB as the maximum, and everyone is making excuses for them.

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

#307

>Today, Apple is carbon neutral for global corporate operations and is focused on its Apple 2030 goal to make every product carbon neutral. This means every Mac Apple creates, from design to manufacturing to customer use, will have net-zero climate impact. I love my bullshit green washing of hunks of metal produced by the millions too. Buying carbon credits from I-Promise-I-Will-Plant-Trees Inc. is still lying, Apple…

After apple stopped including chargers with their phones, the marketing department sold it as a green initiative, yet with the new rackmount mac pro, they include a keyboard and mouse with every purchase, how many customers are actually gonna use those?

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

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/10/13/apple-vs-nvidia-w... Nvidia had a knack for putting Apple into difficult situations.

I think Apple is afraid of the AI people switching to CUDA and neglecting Apple's own accelerators. Whatever the case is, it's entirely petty - Nvidia still ships FreeBSD drivers and would probably gladly pick up Apple support again (at least for CUDA drivers). If it was as simple as "Nvidia was an unreliable hardware partner", they wouldn't go out of their way to arbitrarily limit the drivers you can run.

> […] Nvidia still ships FreeBSD drivers and would probably gladly pick up Apple support again (at least for CUDA drivers).

Heck, Nvidia still ships Solaris drivers:

* https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/

I guess now that they have the infrastructure for these more niches OSes, it's not too hard to just keep going (especially if the kernel APIs are relatively stable).

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

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different fields use the same term to mean unrelated things. "AI" in gaming just means "non-player-controlled entity behavior" and has meant that all the way back to the first chess computer games (when they did think what they were doing was "AI"). "Theory" in law, versus in science is another example.

Scripted enemies are "non-player-controlled entity behavior", yet they are not AI. For NPC behaviours to be considered game AI, there needs to be some calculation depending on the current state of the game and objectives of the character. What makes a game behaviour "AI" is its feedback with the player actions and/or events evolving in the game. Super Mario mushrooms and turtles are not AI controlled; Pac-Man ghosts…

Super Mario mushrooms have an ai component.

When they hit walls, they change direction

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

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> magical pseudo-sentient enigma or Since when does artificial intelligence imply sentience? They're interdependent and neither are reliant on the other.

Yes, but that’s not how “normal” people take it. People believe these are thinking machines and programs, capable of some amount of reasoning. It’s coming from somewhere between decades of terrifying sci-fi and a few months of impressive model results.
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