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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#281

Post by hermanzegerman »

chatmasta wrote: post #165

I bet there’s gonna be a banger of a Mac Studio announced in June. Apple really stumbled into making the perfect hardware for home inference machines. Does any hardware company come close to Apple in terms of unified memory and single machines for high throughput inference workloads? Or even any DIY build? When it comes to the previous “pro workloads,” like video rendering or software compilation, you’ve always been…

Framework offers the AI Ryzen Max with ̶1̶9̶6̶G̶B̶ 128GB of unified RAM for 2,699$

That's a pretty good deal I would think

https://frame.work/de/de/products/desktop-diy-amd-aimax300/c...

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#282

Post by hermanzegerman »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #190
chatmasta wrote: post #165

I bet there’s gonna be a banger of a Mac Studio announced in June. Apple really stumbled into making the perfect hardware for home inference machines. Does any hardware company come close to Apple in terms of unified memory and single machines for high throughput inference workloads? Or even any DIY build? When it comes to the previous “pro workloads,” like video rendering or software compilation, you’ve always been…

I don't think Apple just stumbled into it, and while I totally agree that Apple is killing it with their unified memory, I think we're going to see a pivot from NVidia and AMD. The biggest reason, I think, is: OpenAI has committed to enormous amount capex it simply cannot afford. It does not have the lead it once did, and most end-users simply do not care. There are no network effects. Anthropic at this point has com…

Nvidia is definitely preparing for this with the Opensource LLMs they are currently developing

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#283

Post by rl3 »

hermanzegerman wrote: post #281
chatmasta wrote: post #165

I bet there’s gonna be a banger of a Mac Studio announced in June. Apple really stumbled into making the perfect hardware for home inference machines. Does any hardware company come close to Apple in terms of unified memory and single machines for high throughput inference workloads? Or even any DIY build? When it comes to the previous “pro workloads,” like video rendering or software compilation, you’ve always been…

Framework offers the AI Ryzen Max with ̶1̶9̶6̶G̶B̶ 128GB of unified RAM for 2,699$ That's a pretty good deal I would think https://frame.work/de/de/products/desktop-diy-amd-aimax300/c...

128GB*

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#284

Post by wolfhumble »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #190
chatmasta wrote: post #165

I bet there’s gonna be a banger of a Mac Studio announced in June. Apple really stumbled into making the perfect hardware for home inference machines. Does any hardware company come close to Apple in terms of unified memory and single machines for high throughput inference workloads? Or even any DIY build? When it comes to the previous “pro workloads,” like video rendering or software compilation, you’ve always been…

I don't think Apple just stumbled into it, and while I totally agree that Apple is killing it with their unified memory, I think we're going to see a pivot from NVidia and AMD. The biggest reason, I think, is: OpenAI has committed to enormous amount capex it simply cannot afford. It does not have the lead it once did, and most end-users simply do not care. There are no network effects. Anthropic at this point has com…

> tldr; competition is as stiff as it is vicious-- Apple's "lead" in inference is only because NVidia and AMD are raking in cash selling to hyperscalers. If that cash cow goes tits up, there's no reason to assume NVidia and AMD won't definitively pull the the rug out from Apple.

These companies always try to preserve price segmentation, so I don’t have high hopes they’d actually do that. Consumer machines still get artificially held back on basic things like ECC memory, after all . . .

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#285

Post by eigenspace »

hermanzegerman wrote: post #281
chatmasta wrote: post #165

I bet there’s gonna be a banger of a Mac Studio announced in June. Apple really stumbled into making the perfect hardware for home inference machines. Does any hardware company come close to Apple in terms of unified memory and single machines for high throughput inference workloads? Or even any DIY build? When it comes to the previous “pro workloads,” like video rendering or software compilation, you’ve always been…

Framework offers the AI Ryzen Max with ̶1̶9̶6̶G̶B̶ 128GB of unified RAM for 2,699$ That's a pretty good deal I would think https://frame.work/de/de/products/desktop-diy-amd-aimax300/c...

The framework desktop is quite cool, but those Ryzen Max CPUs are still a pretty poor competitor to Apple's chips if what you care about it running an LLM. Ryzen Max tops out at 256 GB/s of memory bandwidth, whereas an M4 Max can hit 560 GB/s of bandwidth.

So even if the model fits in the memory buffer on the Ryzen Max, you're still going to hit something like half the tokens/second just because the GPU will be sitting around waiting for data.

Personally, I'd rather have the Framework machine, but if running local LLMs is your main goal, the offerings from Apple are very compelling, even when you adjust for the higher price on the Apple machine.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#286

Post by asimovDev »

wolfhumble wrote: post #279
spacedcowboy wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I’m planning on selling my 512GB M3 Ultra Studio in the next week or so (I just wrenched my back so I’m on bed-rest for the next few days) with an eye to funding the M5 Ultra Studio when it’s announced at WWDC. I can live without the RAM for a couple of months to get a good price for it, especially since Apple don’t sell that model (with the RAM) any more.

Just out of curiosity, where do you think is the best place to sell a machine like that with the lowest risk of being scammed, while still getting the best possible price? Wish you a speedy recovery for your back!

lowest is probably an apple trade in if available, but i can't imagine how bad of a price hit it will be.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#288

Post by fooker »

chatmasta wrote: post #165

I bet there’s gonna be a banger of a Mac Studio announced in June. Apple really stumbled into making the perfect hardware for home inference machines. Does any hardware company come close to Apple in terms of unified memory and single machines for high throughput inference workloads? Or even any DIY build? When it comes to the previous “pro workloads,” like video rendering or software compilation, you’ve always been…

The typical inference workloads have moved quite a bit in the last six months or so.

Your point would have been largely correct in the first half of 2025.

Now, you're going to have a much better experience with a couple of Nvidia GPUs.

This is because of two reasons - the reasoning models require a pretty high number of tokens per second to do anything useful. And we are seeing small quantized and distilled reasoning models working almost as well as the ones needing terabytes of memory.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#289

Post by asimovDev »

matthewfcarlson wrote: post #125
jasoneckert wrote: post #120

As someone who came from the SGI O2/Octane era when high-end workstations were compact, distinctive, and sexy, I’ve never really understood the allure of the Mac Pro, with the exception of the 2013 Mac Pro tube, which I owned (small footprint, quiet, and powerful). For me, aesthetics and size are important. That workstation on your desk should justify its presence, not just exist as some hulking box. When Apple relea…

As someone who worked on the M2 Mac Pro and has a real soft spot for it, I get it. It’s horrendously expensive and doesn’t offer much benefit over a Mac Studio and a thunderbolt pci chassis. My personal dream is that vms would support pci pass through and so you can just spin up a Linux vm and let it drive the gpus. But at that point, why are you buying a Mac? Opinions are my own obvs.

do / did you have to always work in the office or do you get to work from home by taking a test rig with you ? always been curious about this

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#290

Post by freeqaz »

hermanzegerman wrote: post #281
chatmasta wrote: post #165

I bet there’s gonna be a banger of a Mac Studio announced in June. Apple really stumbled into making the perfect hardware for home inference machines. Does any hardware company come close to Apple in terms of unified memory and single machines for high throughput inference workloads? Or even any DIY build? When it comes to the previous “pro workloads,” like video rendering or software compilation, you’ve always been…

Framework offers the AI Ryzen Max with ̶1̶9̶6̶G̶B̶ 128GB of unified RAM for 2,699$ That's a pretty good deal I would think https://frame.work/de/de/products/desktop-diy-amd-aimax300/c...

128gb is the max RAM that the current Strix Halo supports with ~250GB/s of bandwidth. The Mac Studio is 256GB max and ~900GB/s of memory bandwidth. They are in different categories of performance, even price-per-dollar is worse. (~$2700 for Framework Desktop vs $7500 for Mac Studio M3 Ultra)
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