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1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio – RDMA over Thunderbolt 5

jeffgeerling.com

111–120 of 236 posts

Re: 1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio – RDMA over Thunderbolt 5

#111
post #18

I wonder what motivates apple to release features like RDMA which are purely useful for server clusters, while ignoring basic qol stuff like remote management or rack mount hardware. It’s difficult to see it as a cohesive strategy. Makes one wonder what apple uses for their own servers. I guess maybe they have some internal M-series server product they just haven’t bothered to release to the public, and features like…

Do they run any of their own datacenter stuff ? I thought they just outsourced to GCP

They have some of their own, also use AWS and others too.

Re: 1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio – RDMA over Thunderbolt 5

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - The ability to overclock the system? I know it probably will never happen, but my expectation of Mac Studio is not the same as a laptop, and I'm TOTALLY okay with it consuming +600W energy. Currently it's capped at ~250W. I don't think the Mac Studio has a thermal design capable of dissipating 650W of heat for anything other than bursty workloads. Need to look at the Mac Pro design for that.

The thermal design is irrelevant, and people saying they want insane power density are, in my personal view, deluded ridiculous individuals who understand very very little. Overclocking long ago was an amazing saintly act, milking a lot of extra performance that was just there waiting, without major downsides to take. But these days, chips are usually already well tuned. You can feed double or tripple the power into…

I learned a lot about underclocking, undervolting, and computational power efficiency during my brief time in the ethereum mining[1] shenanigans. The best ROI was with the most-numerous stable computations at the lowest energy expense.

I'd tweak individual GPUs' various clocks and volts to optimize this. I'd even go so far as to tweak fan speed ramps on the cards themselves (those fans don't power themselves! There's whole Watts to save there!).

I worked to optimize the efficiency of even the power from the wall.

But that was a system that ran, balls-out, 24/7/365.

Or at least it ran that way until it got warmer outside, and warmer inside, and I started to think about ways to scale mining eth in the basement vs. cooling the living space of the house to optimize returns. (And I never quite got that sorted before they pulled the rug on mining.)

And that story is about power efficiency, but: Power efficiency isn't always the most-sensible goal. Sometimes, maximum performance is a better goal. We aren't always mining Ethereum.

Jeff's (quite lovely) video and associated article is a story about just one man using a stack of consumer-oriented-ish hardware in amusing -- to him -- ways, with local LLM bots.

That stack of gear is a personal computer. (A mighty-expensive one on any inflation-adjusted timeline, but what was constructed was definitely used as a personal computer.)

Like most of our personal computers (almost certainly including the one you're reading this on), it doesn't need to be optimized for a 24/7 100% workload. It spends a huge portion of its time waiting for the next human input. And unlike mining Eth in the winter in Ohio: Its compute cycles are bursty, not constant, and are ultimately limited by the input of one human.

So sure: I, like Jeff, would also like to see how it would work when running with the balls[2] running further out. For as long as he gets to keep it, the whole rig is going to spend most of its time either idling or off, anyway. So it might as well get some work done when a human is in front of it, even if each token costs more in that configuration than it does OOTB.

It theoretically can even clock up when being actively-used (and suck all the power), and clock back down when idle (and resume being all sleepy and stuff).

That's a well-established concept that [eg] Intel has variously called SpeedStep and/or Turbo Boost -- and those things work for bursty workloads, and have worked in that way for a very long time now.

[1]: Y'all can hate me for being a small part of that problem. It's allowed.

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor

Re: 1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio – RDMA over Thunderbolt 5

#114
post #88
post #2

My expectations from M5 Max/Ultra devices: - Something like DGX QSFP link (200Gb/s, 400Gb/s) instead of TB5. Otherwise, the economies of this RDMA setup, while impressive, don't make sense. - Neural accelerators to get prompt prefill time down. I don't expect RTX 6000 Pro speeds, but something like 3090/4090 would be nice. - 1TB of unified memory in the maxed out version of Mac Studio. I'd rather invest in more RAM t…

> 3090 would be nice They would need 3x speedup over the current generation to approach 3090. A100 that has +- the 3090 compute but 80GB VRAM (so fits LLaMA 70B) does prefill at 550tok/s on a single GPU: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1ivc6vv/llamacp...

the GB10 is only the same performance as a 3090. gb10 uses way less power.

i'm not sure why anyone would buy a mac studio instead of a gb10 machine for this use case.

Re: 1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio – RDMA over Thunderbolt 5

#118
post #2

My expectations from M5 Max/Ultra devices: - Something like DGX QSFP link (200Gb/s, 400Gb/s) instead of TB5. Otherwise, the economies of this RDMA setup, while impressive, don't make sense. - Neural accelerators to get prompt prefill time down. I don't expect RTX 6000 Pro speeds, but something like 3090/4090 would be nice. - 1TB of unified memory in the maxed out version of Mac Studio. I'd rather invest in more RAM t…

Would you please mind leaving some RAM to remain available for purchase at an affordable price for us mere mortals ? 1Tb for what, like, "Come on AI, make the humankind happy now"?

/"s"

Re: 1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio – RDMA over Thunderbolt 5

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - The ability to overclock the system? I know it probably will never happen, but my expectation of Mac Studio is not the same as a laptop, and I'm TOTALLY okay with it consuming +600W energy. Currently it's capped at ~250W. I don't think the Mac Studio has a thermal design capable of dissipating 650W of heat for anything other than bursty workloads. Need to look at the Mac Pro design for that.

The thermal design is irrelevant, and people saying they want insane power density are, in my personal view, deluded ridiculous individuals who understand very very little. Overclocking long ago was an amazing saintly act, milking a lot of extra performance that was just there waiting, without major downsides to take. But these days, chips are usually already well tuned. You can feed double or tripple the power into…

>> people saying they want insane power density are, in my personal view, deluded ridiculous individuals who understand very very little.

Or they are simply not-rich people who cannot afford to purchase extra hardware to run in parallel. Electricity is cheap. GPUs are not. So i want to get every ounce of power out of the precious few GPUs i can afford to own.

(And dont point at clouds. Running AI on someone else's cloud is like telling a shadetree mechanic to rent a car instead of fixing his owm.)

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