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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#401

Post by bluedino »

Tsiklon wrote: post #344
DeathArrow wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, running 2 to 4 5090 will beat anything Apple has to offer for both inference and training.

That won’t work for the home hobbyist 2.4KW of GPU alone plus a 350W threadripper pro with enough PCIe lanes to feed them. You’re looking at close to twice the average US household electricity circuit’s capacity just to run the machine under load. A cluster of 4 Apple’s M3 ultra Mac studios by comparisons will consume near 1100W under load.

I mean if a hobbyist can run a welder or cnc machine in their home workshop...

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#402

Post by embedding-shape »

plagiarist wrote: post #392
chocochunks wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AFAIK, for the unified bandwidth, it depends mostly on the CPU, for M4 Max (I think it's the default today?) it does ~550 GB/s, while GB10 does ~270 GB/s, so about a 2x difference between the two. For comparison, RTX Pro 6000 does 1.8 TB/s, pretty much the same as what a 5090 does, which is probably the fastest/best GPUs a prosumer reasonable could get.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#403

Post by mixdup »

mrheosuper wrote: post #167
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…

>That workstation on your desk should justify its presence It does the work you want it to do is not enough to justify its presence ?

Parent comment OP has to be trolling

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#404

Post by embedding-shape »

joe_mamba wrote: post #398
embedding-shape wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Right, I think maybe we're then talking about "upper class enthusiasts" or something in reality then? I understood that to juts be about the person, not what economic class they were in, maybe I misunderstood.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#405

Post by bluedino »

klausa wrote: post #262
giantrobot wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you spend $35k and just idle the machine or just check e-mail you've burnt the money. If it's your work machine and you've got a $100/hr billable rate it's paid for in a little over a month. Three months at a $50/hr rate. If you bought the $35k Mac Pro in 2023 when it was released and have a $50/hr rate it's been paid off for about 30 months. So as of today those owners probably aren't too broken hearted. They'll…

>If it's your work machine and you've got a $100/hr billable rate it's paid for in a little over a month. Are you working 996 weeks or something? At standard 40h work-week the math works out to 8.75 weeks to "pay for itself".

What if that machine lets you do your job 4x faster?

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#406

Post by AJRF »

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…

> Apple really stumbled into making the perfect hardware for home inference machines

Apple are winning a small battle for a market that they aren’t very good in. If you compare the performance of a 3090 and above vs any Apple hardware you would be insane to go with the Apple hardware.

When I hear someone say this it’s akin to hearing someone say Macs are good for gaming. It’s such a whiplash from what I know to be reality.

Or another jarring statement - Sam Altman saying Mario has an amazing story in that interview with Elon Musk. Mario has basically the minimum possible story to get you to move the analogue sticks. Few games have less story than Mario. Yet Sam called it amazing.

It’s a statement from someone who just doesn’t even understand the first thing about what they are talking about.

Sorry for the mini rant. I just keep hearing this apple thing over and over and it’s nonsense.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#407

Post by giwook »

sippeangelo wrote: post #394
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?

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

And how much do you trust Chinese hardware?

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#408

Post by cestith »

mciancia wrote: post #355
midnight_eclair wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~not unified memory tho~

It is unified memory on this one

From the spec sheets I’m looking at, it is not. I’m seeing models of the Dell Pro Max with 128 GB of DDR5-6400 as CAMM2, then a separate memory of up to 24 GB on the GPU. CAMM2 does not make the memory unified.

There are also SO-DIMM options.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#409

Post by nottorp »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #256
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…

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.

Hey didn't they drop the 512 Gb model?

https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/03/06/forget-512gb-ram-...

You may want to hold on to your M3 Ultra! There's no guarantee there will be a M5 Ultra with 512 Gb ram.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#410

Post by root_axis »

sipjca wrote: post #152
root_axis wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At some point a beefy Mac Studio and the "right sized" model is going to be what people want. It's pretty clear that this isn't going to happen any time soon, if ever. You can't shrink the models without destroying their coherence, and this is a consistently robust observation across the board.

I don’t think it’s about literally shrinking the models via quantization, but rather training smaller/more efficient models from scratch Smaller models have gotten much more powerful the last 2 years. Qwen 3.5 is one example of this. The cost/compute requirements of running the same level intelligence is going down

There are no practically useful small models, including Qwen 3.5. Yes, the small models of today are a lot more interesting than the small models of 2 years ago, but they remain broadly incoherent beyond demos and tinkering.
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