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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

#341

Post by avalys »

JohnBooty wrote: post #188
imagetic wrote: post #102

I guess I've never been blessed enough to work at a place that will spend $7k on a base model edit station.

What do you do for a living? I'm just curious which kinds of workplaces/industries are splashing out for $7K workstations. Would love to hear from people whose workplaces do provide such things. I wouldn't expect many software engineers to be answering in the affirmative but I suspect it may be fairly common in other realms...

Anyone working on a large iOS or MacOS codebase needs a serious machine due to compile times. Apple/Xcode tooling isn’t really set up to let you run the compiler and IDE brains on another machine.

Any companies with these mega-monolithic apps (Facebook, Uber, AirBnB) with 16 companies worth of functionality inside one app used to buy Mac Pros for those developers. Now I imagine they’ve mostly switched to Mac Studios.

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

#342

Post by worrycue »

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…

IMHO it’s AGI when can do everything humans can and at least do it just as well.

It’s a pretty high standard but I feel it’s a “irrefutable” one - if you can find an information processing task that humans can do but the AI can’t or does poorly compared to a human, then it has failed the AGI test.

It’s also a useful one in that no one will have a problem with AGI taking over a task if its capabilities matches and exceeds any human’s.

Else where should the goalpost be then? Your claim that LLMs have reached AGI is about as valid as someone claiming ELIZA is AGI - in both cases standards are completely arbitrary.

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

#343

Post by rektide »

dathinab wrote: post #335
rektide wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Apple already outclasses everyone in throughput & throughput/watt especially. In case it wasn't already crystal clear, I was talking about everyone else finding ways to get their throughput up to more competitive levels, such as by supporting GDDR.

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

#344

Post by musictubes »

tiffanyh wrote: post #323
BXlnt2EachOther wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Video capture and Pro Tools dedicated cards.

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

#345

Post by wtallis »

kcb wrote: post #326
sliken wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Putting things in context, the 3-thread measured memory bandwidth measured there on the M1 Max is approximately equal to the maximum theoretical memory bandwidth available across all channels and chiplets of a current Ryzen Threadripper PRO. If the M1 Ultra doubles the achievable memory bandwidth by virtue of having twice as many CPU clusters, then an 8-thread test should still be able to match AMD's latest EPYC processors with 12-channel DDR5.

(I don't know how well AMD's current processors do with utilizing the socket's full DRAM bandwidth from a limited number of chiplets, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's a more severe limitation than what M1 Max/Ultra show with their CPU clusters. It looks like only the 12-chiplet EPYC processors actually use all the links from the IO die to the CPU chiplets.)

So the inability to use all the DRAM bandwidth from the CPU cores, while perhaps disappointing, isn't exactly a weakness for Apple's processors compared to the competition.

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

#346

Post by IOT_Apprentice »

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.

I've noticed the hype and the doomsayers implying both.

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

#347

Post by reassembled »

ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #274
derefr wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's such a specific use case that I'm not entirely sure what the use case even is. Live TV production, I think. Mostly in the rackmount form-factor. A plethora of "IO breakout boards" is what turns a regular computer into a "video production system" head-unit. Though also, at least three of the PCI-e cards shown on the slide were for fibre-optic networking. So, presumably, this would be the Mac to get if you're tr…

I thought that too, but the existence of highly affordable SDI-to-Thunderbolt adapters means the Mac Studio should still suffice unless you need a very large number of inputs... and I don't know how many multi-SDI PCIe cards there are.

AJA makes a couple of Thunderbolt 3 external SDI capture/output devices with 4x bidirectional SDI I/Os. If you want more than that you need multiple devices or a PCIe card. AJA and Blackmagic both make 8x SDI cards, as do a couple other vendors.

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

#348

Post by reassembled »

ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #272
WWLink wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Overall I don't think it's horrendously priced as some of the previous Mac workstation components could get, but at the same time, unless you have a very specific use case or specifically need macOS, it's not exactly compelling. It is "good enough" to finally round out the lineup though. It's such a specific use case that I'm not entirely sure what the use case even is. Capturing off an SDI camera? Great! Why do we…

I don't even see the use case for SDI capture. You can buy SDI-to-Thunderbolt converters starting at $150.

SDI->Thunderbolt “converters” are capture cards, they just use TB as the physical connector. Also, not all capture cards have the same feature set. Some of these cards have SDI capture and/or output, sometimes simultaneously and some with up to 8 SDI IO connectors. Some cards also do HDMI capture and/or output of the same or different feeds as the SDI signal(s).

The landscape of capture cards (not just SDI) is pretty diverse. It all depends on the kind of workflow you’re dealing with. Live productions in particular will often demand many connections, to be able to capture multiple camera angles, as well as to output to confidence monitors and/or backup recording devices, frame syncs, switchers, SDI routers and more.

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

#349

Post by simondotau »

teddyh wrote: post #215
dymk wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean acquired? 'cause that's more likely

No, it means that Apple rewrites your app and releases their version for free with macOS, destroying your business. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sherlock_(softwar...

Apple has also acquired successful apps. In 2001, the same year that Apple "sherlocked" the app Watson, Apple acquired SoundJam MP and turned it into an app affectionately known as iTunes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundJam_MP

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

#350

Post by haldean »

USB5 wrote: post #327
haldean wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Mac Mini with M2 Pro
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