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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

#321

Post by _8j50 »

Specs look cool but I haven't bought into apple silicon because I will probably always need to do debugging of x86/64 binaries.

The one workload that would make consider apple silicon is hashcat and password cracking. I am sure that's much faster compared to intel but what is the comparison between the latest nvidia 4090 vs mac studio? I don't know how the unified memory affects gpu workloads, but I do know a lot if graphics people only use macs. If I have to buy a bunch if 4090's anyways, macs don't make sense unless I am a millionaire and this was a hobby.

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

#322

Post by evilduck »

smoldesu wrote: post #296
evilduck wrote: post #253

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.

Apple’s icy relationship with Nvidia started right around when CUDA came into existence and before Metal ever existed. Nvidia created tensions between Apple and Intel and later handed Apple the headache of a class action lawsuit by knowingly shipping faulty GPUs.

I think Apple Silicon and Metal vs CUDA might have been a strategic reason for not repairing that relationship but that came years later.

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

#323

Post by tiffanyh »

BXlnt2EachOther wrote: post #313
tiffanyh wrote: post #303

I’m confused, where are the Afterburner expansion cards when you go configure a new MacPro? It’s missing and is basically an overpriced MacStudio without them.

It sounds like they're leaning on the internal video encode/decode of the M2 ("media engine"), which they claim can decode 22 streams of 8K ProRes on the Ultra. It looks like this replaces dedicated Afterburner cards? And would apply to both the Studio and Pro. But I am not a video production professional.

Then why does the MacPro exist then?

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

#324

Post by lalaithion »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #220
lalaithion wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Example of a desktop computer that comes with 32 TB ram?

Last gen threadripper pro can "only" do 2TB, so 10x as much memory. The upcoming models should allow 6TB, which you can also get today with a server chip. I can't find much using the newest workstation Xeons but they supposedly will do 4TB.

Ignoring the fact that this comment has a completely different bar than OP, I’m not asking about chips, I’m asking about desktops. Is there a desktop for sale at any price, from any manufacturer or custom builder, that goes 2 TB ram?

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

#325

Post by whimsicalism »

m463 wrote: post #299
speed_spread wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Curious - why do you suggest fedora? I'm familiar with ubuntu/debian and arch, but have never delved into why fedora/redhat/centos/rocky.

stable & works, at least in my experience with rhel

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

#326

Post by kcb »

sliken wrote: post #233
StillBored wrote: post #156

Earlier 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…

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

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

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

#327

Post by USB5 »

haldean wrote: post #284
USB5 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting. Which M2 machine are you using?

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

#328

Post by rektide »

dathinab wrote: post #240
221qqwe wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

AMD's Strix Halo is an APU targeted next year that supposedly has 256-bit wide LPDDR5X memory, on laptops I think, which should be nice.

I do hope folks other than Apple can get fast! The new CAMM dual channel module will hopefully help reduce footprint but there's plenty of soldered down systems so it's not really required. It also surprises me there's not a GDDR based APU, except I guess too many games need both a bunch of system ram and video ram and 32GB vram is expensive and has significant lower draw. Apple going wide is really the obvious move, & doing it on package was the best way to do it, it seems.

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

#329

Post by DonaldPShimoda »

copperx wrote: post #283
DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #49

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.

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.

Although WWDC is a developers' conference, the keynote tends to be a popular event for regular Apple users as well, and over the last decade the keynote announcements have become significantly more user-facing while technical details are relegated to the Platforms State of the Union (or the specific sessions throughout the rest of the week).

So I was impressed — or maybe "pleased" would be a better word. I was pleased that they chose not to hype this feature using the common buzz words of the year, and instead just stuck to technical terminology. Some other companies would not have done the same, in my opinion.

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

#330

Post by DonaldPShimoda »

gpt5 wrote: post #291
copperx wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

cough . Google I/O. cough

Yeah, that's what I was thinking of too.
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