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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

#331

Post by DonaldPShimoda »

jlmorton wrote: post #305
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.

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

The other response has my thoughts right. Although the two things are separate, laypeople (and a surprising number of others too) seem too easily duped by false claims of modern language models exhibiting "emergent properties" of potential sentience. It's absurd, to be sure, but that also means it would've been easy to tap into that to generate hype among such people.

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

#332

Post by DonaldPShimoda »

ignoramous wrote: post #293
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.

Apple marketing uses weasel words all the time.

And they didn't in this instance when I think other companies would have, so I was impressed.

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

#333

Post by DonaldPShimoda »

copperx wrote: post #285
tedmiston wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

That is actually how it goes, though. The WWDC opening keynote is the typical Apple computer user's best look at what's coming up. It's not not technical, but it's very much deliberately made to be approachable to non-developers.

Whether you agree with this choice or not, it's the way things have been for at least as long as I've been watching (which is over a decade).

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

#334

Post by bee_rider »

AprilArcus wrote: post #165
bee_rider wrote: post #53

Earlier 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.

A RAM disk formatted as swap? Probably would work. Funny concept.

Let’s lie to OS and tell it that this memory is actually a disk. Then, it will lie to the programs, and tell them that that disk is actually memory.

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

#335

Post by dathinab »

rektide wrote: post #328
dathinab wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> not a GDDR based APU

AFIK Apple currently doesn't have a foodhold on gaming outside of phone/tablet games (where they are strong, but the games are used to LPDDR perf.).

And while many of the Graphic applications people do use would profit from it I'm not sure it's that big of benefit.

In the end a lot of users just do daily tasks on Apple laptops and for that battery life absolutely trumps any speed benefits GDDR gives.

I guess the desktop versions could/should use GDDR, but there are two issue: 1. Heat, 2. more design/variance in the CPU production supply chain.

The 2nd can drive up cost by quite a surprising high amount.

The 1st point I'm not supper sure about. But AFIK one big problem with things which are stacked on-die is heat as all the heat of the CPU needs to go through whatever is stacked onto it to reach the cooler. And while there are probably all kinds of tricks to improve this I could imagine that using a GDDR which has a higher power draw and produces more heat itself could make this more of an issue. But that is purely speculative.

I guess we have to see until around 2025+ to know if such stacked chips are more prone to die a early (i.e. <5 years) heat death. Especially some of the Air models without heat pipes could be at risk if used in a less climate controlled environment. Or it could be all perfectly fine. I'm looking forward to finding out.

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

#336

Post by HaZeust »

ignoramous wrote: post #293
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.

Apple marketing uses weasel words all the time.

"logarithmic leaps" in their Welcome IBM Ad is my favorite industry example

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

#337

Post by makeitdouble »

jeffbee wrote: post #76

$7k starting price. High but compared to? Just glancing at the new HP Z6 G5, which may be a fair comparison, with a 16-core CPU, 8x16GB of memory (the lowest configuration that populates all 8 channels of that CPU), minimal storage, and a parts bin GPU that nobody wants, $6k. To get 8 thunderbolt ports like the mac pro you'd have to fill each and every one of its add-in card slots with a HP dual TB4 card. Edit: The H…

With the M2 transition, I feel we're back in the days of the PowerMac G5.

It was a beast on its own, but the main issue for comparison was that you couldn't just do the same things. If you're working on video editing or Photoshop perhaps, but if you're developping games for instance you'll want an x86 computer, and however good the M2 specs are on benchmarks, you can't compare it on real world usage anymore.

For ML it seems there are efforts to be ARM compatible, then VR is a weird bit where current ecosystem is x86 only, but the introduction of the Apple headset could probably help ?

For scientific research, I was under the impression that Nvida/AMD GPUs were a given, and Metal had very little support.

What would the other serious uses of a high power machine that could help make comparison with other actual workstations ?

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

#338

Post by Dylan16807 »

lalaithion wrote: post #324
Dylan16807 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Ignoring the fact that this comment has a completely different bar than OP,

Op didn't say anything else did that much, they asked why apple didn't.

Any valid answer to that needs to also explain why apple didn't do intermediate amounts, or even as much as the old mac pro.

So I thought it would be helpful to give you examples that have much more memory than a mac pro, even if they're not 32TB.

Though I didn't even realize the old model could do a full 1.5TB, so I didn't even need to bother linking other systems. 1.5TB is plenty to highlight the weakness of a 192GB maximum.

> I’m asking about desktops. Is there a desktop

If you're being picky about desktop versus workstation, mac pro is the latter and workstations are completely valid here.

If you just want a link, here: https://boxx.com/threadripper-pro

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

#339

Post by astrange »

gumby wrote: post #178
chillbill wrote: post #41

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.

Yes, and it's shameful when people descibe a wrong or bogus answer as "hallucination". They are just stimulating unknowledgeable people's fears and/or fanboiism.

"Hallucination" comes from vision models, I think. "Confabulation" would be a better term for text.

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

#340

Post by kamranjon »

USB5 wrote: post #248
sliken wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But for many people training or running inference on large models is important and the apple approach actually makes that feasible in a desktop solution which is pretty awesome.
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