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Apple M5 chip

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Re: Apple M5 chip

#11
And here I am, selling my Macbook M4 Pro to buy a Macbook Air and a dedicated gaming machine. I've tried gaming on the Macbook with Heroic, GPTK, Whiskey, RPCS3 emu and some native. When a game runs, the performance is stunning for a Laptop - but there is always glitches, bugs and annoyances that take out the joy. Needles to mention lack of support from any sort of online multiplayer, due to the lack of anticheat support.

I wish Apple would take gaming more seriously and make GPTK a first class citizen such as Proton on Linux.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#12

A unified memory bandwidth of 1,224 gigabits per second is quite impressive.

Probably gigabytes (GB) and not gigabits (Gb)?

Edit: gigabits indeed. Confusing, my old M2 Max has 400 GB/s (3200 gigabits per second) bandwidth. I guess it's some sort of baseline figure for the lowest end configuration?

Edit 2: 1,224 Gbps equals 153 GB/s. Perhaps M5 Max will have 153 GB/s * 4 = 612 GB/s memory bandwidth. Ultra double that. If anyone knows better, please share.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#13
With the same number and types (P/E) of cores, the M5 seems more like a feature refinement over M4. I wonder if this is a CPU that Apple released primarily for AI marketing purposes and perception, rather than to push the envelope.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#15

The modern Apple feels like their hardware teams way outperforming the software teams.

Apple has always been a hardware company first - think of how they sell consumers computers with the OS for free, while Microsoft primarily just sells the OS (when comparing the consumer business; I don’t want to get into all the other stuff Microsoft does).

Now that they own the SoC design pipeline, they’re really able to flex these muscles.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#16
post #10
post #2

This is only the base model, no upgrades yet for the Pro/Max version. The memory bandwidth is 153GB/s which is not enough to run viable open source LLM models properly.

What do you mean by properly? What’s the behavior one would observe if they did run an llm?

If you have enough memory to load a model, but not enough bandwidth to handle it, you will get a very low token/s output.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#18
I appreciate Apple propping up the GPU performance of their SoC but it feels a bit pointless when all the libraries they provide are so insular and disconnected from the rest of the industry.

I personally wish they would learn from the failure of Metal.

Also unleashes? Really? The marketing madness has to stop at some point.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#19
post #2

This is only the base model, no upgrades yet for the Pro/Max version. The memory bandwidth is 153GB/s which is not enough to run viable open source LLM models properly.

Enough or not, they do describe it like this in an image caption:

"M5 is Apple’s next-generation system on a chip built for AI, resulting in a faster, more efficient, and more capable chip for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro."

Re: Apple M5 chip

#20

And here I am, selling my Macbook M4 Pro to buy a Macbook Air and a dedicated gaming machine. I've tried gaming on the Macbook with Heroic, GPTK, Whiskey, RPCS3 emu and some native. When a game runs, the performance is stunning for a Laptop - but there is always glitches, bugs and annoyances that take out the joy. Needles to mention lack of support from any sort of online multiplayer, due to the lack of anticheat sup…

Yep, I use Moonlight / Sunshine / Apollo to stream from my gaming PC, so I still use my Mac setup but get nearly perfect windows gaming with PC elsewhere in house.

This has been by far the best setup until Apple can take gaming seriously, which may never happen.

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