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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#391

Post by fooker »

chatmasta wrote: post #330
fooker wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hilarious that not a single one of these has pricing listed anywhere public. I don't think they expect anyone to actually buy these. Most companies looking to buy these for developers would ideally have multiple people share one machine and that sort of an arrangement works much more naturally with a managed cloud machine instead of the tower format presented here. Confirming my hypothesis, this category of devi…

Nvidia doesn’t list prices because they don’t sell the machines themselves. If you click through each of those links, the prices are listed on the distributor’s website. For example the Dell Pro Max with GB10 is $4,194.34 and you can even click “Add to Cart.”

I don't mean the small GB10s.

If you try to find the pricing of the GB300 towers even on the manufacturer sites, you'll see that it's not listed for any of the six or so models.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#392

Post by plagiarist »

chocochunks wrote: post #323
chpatrick wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they're pretty fast and can have loads of RAM, which would be prohibitively expensive with Nvidia.

A 128GB 2TB Dell Pro Max with Nvidia GB10 is about $4200, a Mac Studio with 128GB RAM and 2TB storage is $4100. So pretty comparable. I think Dell's pricing has been rocked more by the RAM shortage too.

Not quite, what is the vRAM bandwidth of each? The bandwidth is a huge contributor to LLM performance.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#393

Post by fooker »

numpad0 wrote: post #322
fooker wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hilarious that not a single one of these has pricing listed anywhere public. I don't think they expect anyone to actually buy these. Most companies looking to buy these for developers would ideally have multiple people share one machine and that sort of an arrangement works much more naturally with a managed cloud machine instead of the tower format presented here. Confirming my hypothesis, this category of devi…

I don't think it's so odd, very few products above ~$50k have final prices listed for anyone to buy 1-click.

Workstations above 50k are not that uncommon.

Older xeon based workstations easily reach that number.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#394

Post by sippeangelo »

rafram wrote: post #316
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But inference is unique because its performance scales with high memory throughput, and you can’t assemble that by wiring together off the shelf parts in a consumer form factor. Nvidia outperforms Mac significantly on diffusion inference and many other forms. It’s not as simple as the current Mac chips are entirely better for this.

But where are you going to find an Nvidia GPU with 128+ GB of memory at an enthusiast-compatible price?

Some Chinese sources sell modded Nvidia GPUs with extra VRAM. They're quite affordable in comparison to even a Mac Pro.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#395

Post by embedding-shape »

rafram wrote: post #316
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But inference is unique because its performance scales with high memory throughput, and you can’t assemble that by wiring together off the shelf parts in a consumer form factor. Nvidia outperforms Mac significantly on diffusion inference and many other forms. It’s not as simple as the current Mac chips are entirely better for this.

But where are you going to find an Nvidia GPU with 128+ GB of memory at an enthusiast-compatible price?

Where are you gonna find Apple hardware with 128GB of memory at enthusiast-compatible price?

The cheapest Apple desktop with 128GB of memory shows up as costing $3499 for me, which isn't very "enthusiast-compatible", it's about 3x the minimum salary in my country!

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#396

Post by fooker »

deelowe wrote: post #363
fooker wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hilarious that not a single one of these has pricing listed anywhere public. I don't think they expect anyone to actually buy these. Most companies looking to buy these for developers would ideally have multiple people share one machine and that sort of an arrangement works much more naturally with a managed cloud machine instead of the tower format presented here. Confirming my hypothesis, this category of devi…

There were plenty of them around when I worked at Nvidia. They definitely exist.

You have seen plenty of third party GB300 DGX workstations?

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#397

Post by embedding-shape »

diabllicseagull wrote: post #385
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'm not a big fan of reducing computing as a whole to just inference. Apple has done quite a bit besides that and it deserves credit. Mac Pro disappearing from the product line is a testament to it, that their compact solutions can cover all needs, not just local inference, to a degree that an expandable tower is not required at all.

> Mac Pro disappearing from the product line is a testament to it

Apple removing/adding something to their product line matters nothing, for all we know, they have a new version ready to be launched next month, or whatever. Unless you work at Apple and/or have any internal knowledge, this is all just guessing, not a "testament" to anything.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#398

Post by joe_mamba »

embedding-shape wrote: post #395
rafram wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But where are you going to find an Nvidia GPU with 128+ GB of memory at an enthusiast-compatible price?

Where are you gonna find Apple hardware with 128GB of memory at enthusiast-compatible price? The cheapest Apple desktop with 128GB of memory shows up as costing $3499 for me, which isn't very "enthusiast-compatible", it's about 3x the minimum salary in my country!

> it's about 3x the minimum salary in my country!

Enthusiast compute hardware doesn't cater to the people on the minimum salary in any country, let alone developing nations. When Ferrari makes a car they don't ask themselves if people on minimum salary will be able to afford them.

In in the bottom two poorest EU member states and Apple and Microsoft Xbox don't even bother to have a direct to customer store presence here, you buy them from third party retailers.

Why? Probably because their metrics show people here are too poor to afford their products en-masse to be worth operating a dedicated sales entity. Even though plenty of people do own top of the line Macbooks here, it's just the wealthy enthusiast niche, but it's still a niche for the volumes they (wish to)operate at. Why do you think Apple launched the Mac Neo?

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#399

Post by bluedino »

fooker wrote: post #292
robotswantdata wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DGX workstations, expensive but allow PCI cards as well. https://marketplace.nvidia.com/en-us/enterprise/personal-ai-...

It's hilarious that not a single one of these has pricing listed anywhere public. I don't think they expect anyone to actually buy these. Most companies looking to buy these for developers would ideally have multiple people share one machine and that sort of an arrangement works much more naturally with a managed cloud machine instead of the tower format presented here. Confirming my hypothesis, this category of devi…

'Important' people in organizations get them. They either ask for them, or the team that manages the shared GPU resources gets tired of their shit and they just give them one.
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