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New Mac Mini with M4

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Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#191

Post by yunohn »

jsheard wrote: post #8

16GB base RAM across the board, following the iMac. AI is certainly good for pushing up the baseline RAM that manufacturers can get away with shipping if nothing else.

I learned yesterday that all M-chip Macs with enough RAM are getting Apple Intelligence?

This basically proves that Apple shot themselves in the foot for AI on mobile by artificially restricting RAM for so long! Heck, even the Neural Engine has turned out to be basically useless despite all their grandstanding.

So alas, their prior greed has resulted in their most popular consumer iDevices being the least AI compatible devices in their lineup. They could’ve leapfrogged every other manufacturer with the largest AI compatible device userbase.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#192

Post by aldarisbm »

Etheryte wrote: post #161
JKCalhoun wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point it feels like (correct me if I'm am wrong) that Apple's AI is often performed "in the cloud". I suspect though that if Apple moves increasingly to on-device AI (as I suspect they will — if not for bandwidth and backend resource reasons then for privacy ones) Apple's Silicon will have adopted more and more specialized AI components — perhaps diminishing the need for use of off-board memory.

Last I checked, Apple was pretty much the only major player who does everything that they can do on device on device, that is their whole ethos behind it, no?

Yeah they have literature about this, they do as much as they can on device

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#193

Post by makeitdouble »

etempleton wrote: post #102

What a great little computer at a very reasonable price. A few interesting things with this announcement: 1. Interesting that they did not have this as part of an event. I think this either means they do not have much else to share around the Mac right now or the opposite, there just won't be room to talk about the iMac or Mac Mini. I am leaning towards the former as a I suspect the other computers in their lineup wi…

> This seems small, but it would have been almost blasphemy under the jobs era.

I feel like Jobs was a lot more pragmatic than we give him credit for. I mean we had the HP iPods, iTunes on Windows etc.

And the iMac's catch copy was "BYODKM" at the very start, fully putting the spotlight on third parties and composability.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#194

Post by [deleted] »

rsync wrote: post #118

How many 4k screens can be attached? The published specs call out 3 6k screens but is that a display bandwidth limit or an arbitrary “screen” limit ? I’d like to drive four displays and 4k is sufficient for me … possible? Perhaps with Number four on the HDMI port?

[deleted]

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#195

Post by mostlysimilar »

yunohn wrote: post #191
jsheard wrote: post #8

16GB base RAM across the board, following the iMac. AI is certainly good for pushing up the baseline RAM that manufacturers can get away with shipping if nothing else.

I learned yesterday that all M-chip Macs with enough RAM are getting Apple Intelligence? This basically proves that Apple shot themselves in the foot for AI on mobile by artificially restricting RAM for so long! Heck, even the Neural Engine has turned out to be basically useless despite all their grandstanding. So alas, their prior greed has resulted in their most popular consumer iDevices being the least AI compatib…

I think it's great that Apple was able to ship devices that millions of people made happy use of without needing to put additional hardware resources into them. That's efficiency, not greed.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#197

Post by stego-tech »

I love its form factor, less so the price difference between the M4 and M4 Pro models ($800 USD, presumably so it doesn’t cannibalize the Studio). It looks small, friendly, and inviting to the user, despite not breaking its industrial aesthetic.

Honestly kind of want one as a desktop, even though my M1 Pro MBP is still insanely powerful for my needs.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#198

Post by nextos »

talldayo wrote: post #184
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is huge for AI / ML at least for inference. Apple chips are among the most efficient out there for that sort of thing, the only downside is the lack of cuda

> Apple chips are among the most efficient out there for that sort of thing Not really? Apple is efficient because they ship moderately large GPUs manufactured on TSMC hardware. Their NPU hardware is more or less entirely ignored and their GPUs are using the same shader-based compute that Intel and AMD rely on. It's not efficient because Apple does anything different with their hardware like Nvidia does, it's efficie…

For inference, Apple chips are great due to a high memory bandwidth. Mac Studio is a popular choice in the local Llama community for this particular reason. It's a cost effective option if you need a lot of memory plus a high bandwidth. The downside is poor training performance and Metal being a less polished software stack compared to CUDA.

I wonder if a little cluster of Mac Minis is a good option for running concurrent LLM agents, or a single Mac Studio is still preferable?

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#199

Post by alwayslikethis »

talldayo wrote: post #184
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is huge for AI / ML at least for inference. Apple chips are among the most efficient out there for that sort of thing, the only downside is the lack of cuda

> Apple chips are among the most efficient out there for that sort of thing Not really? Apple is efficient because they ship moderately large GPUs manufactured on TSMC hardware. Their NPU hardware is more or less entirely ignored and their GPUs are using the same shader-based compute that Intel and AMD rely on. It's not efficient because Apple does anything different with their hardware like Nvidia does, it's efficie…

Does it use the GPU? I was under the impression that it uses the CPU. It's only faster because of the massive memory bandwidth compared to DDR4/5

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#200

Post by kissiel »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #108
Longlius wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thunderbolt is significantly slower than gen 4 NVME. In the PC world, gen 3 speeds are considered an extreme budget-tier option these days.

Not everyone needs a Lamborghini just to do their weekly grocery shopping. The vast majority of people who will buy this will be just fine with that level of performance for many years to come.

Bandwidth vs latency is like a pickup vs lambo I guess. And what the tb limits is the bandwidth, if you catch my drift (although lambos are awd and poor at drifting). So the actual performance that matters (the snappiness) is still there.
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