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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#531

Post by utopiah »

BeetleB wrote: post #522
utopiah wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> suddenly jack up the rates or go out of business? There is basically no lock-in, you don't even "move" your image, your data is basically some "context" or a history of prompts which probably fits in a floppy disk (not even being sarcastic) so if you know the basic about containerization (Docker, podman, etc) which most likely the cloud provider even takes care of, then it takes literally minutes to switch from one…

Ok. I think I misunderstood. So the idea is to simple set up the LLM service on the server and access it with an API like I would with any LLM provider? This way whatever application I want to use it for stays at home? That's a bit more appealing. How much would it cost per month to have it continually online?

Well it depends entirely on what you need. You can even do the training yourself on that infrastructure to rent if you want. The more you do yourself, the more private but also the more expensive it will be.

I don't want to make an ad here but I'm going to point to HuggingFace https://endpoints.huggingface.co (and to avoid singling them out just https://replicate.com/pricing too but I don't know them well) as an example with pricing.

The "beauty" IMHO of such solutions is that again you pay for what you want. If you want to use the endpoint only for 5min to test that the model and its API fits your need? OK. You want the whole month? Sure. You want 1 user, namely you? Fine, not a lot of power, you want your whole organization to use that endpoint? Scale up.

I'm going to give very rough approximation because honestly I'm not really into this so someone please adjust with source :

Apple Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB = $4K

~NVIDIA A100 with 80G ~ 10x perf compared to M3 Pro (obviously depends on models)

So on Replicate today a one can get an A100 for ~$5/hr which is ... about a month. But that's for 10x speed and electricity included. So very VERY approximately if you use a Mac Studio for 10 months on AI non stop (days and night) then it's arguably worth it.

If you use it less, say 2hrs/day only for inference, then I imagine it takes few years to have the equivalent and by that time I bet Replicate or HuggingFace is going to rent much faster setup for much cheaper simply because that's what they have ALL done for the last few years.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#532

Post by secabeen »

cesarb wrote: post #517
mjburgess wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Upgrades" havent been a thing for nearly a decade. By the time you want to upgrade a machine part (c. 5yr+ for modern machines), you'd want to upgrade every thing, and its cheap to do so. It isnt 2005 any more where RAM/CPU/etc. progress benefits from upgrading every 6mo. It's closer to 6yr to really notice

> By the time you want to upgrade a machine part (c. 5yr+ for modern machines), you'd want to upgrade every thing, That's only the case for CPU/MB/RAM, because the interfaces are tightly coupled (you want to upgrade your CPU, but the new one uses an AM5 socket so you need to upgrade the motherboard, which only works with DDR5 so you need to upgrade your RAM). For other parts, a "Ship of Theseus" approach is often wor…

Even this is understating it; if you buy at the right point in the cycle, you can Ship-of-Theseus quite a while. An AM4 motherboard released in Feb 2017 with a Ryzen 1600X CPU, DDR4 memory and a GTX780 Ti would be a obsolete system by today's standards. Yet, that AM4 motherboard can be upgraded to run a Ryzen 5800X3D CPU, the same (or faster) DDR4 memory, and a RTX 5070Ti GPU and be very competitive with mid-tier 2026 systems containing all new components. Throughout all this, the case, PSU, cooling solution, storage could all be maintained, and only replaced when individual components fail.

I expect many users would be happy with the above final state through 2030, when the AM6 socket releases. That would be 13 years of service for that original motherboard, memory, case and ancillary components. This is an extreme case, you have to time the initial purchase perfectly, but it is possible.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#533

Post by Melatonic »

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 abandoned the pro market long before ever releasing the current iteration of Mac Pro. I doubt they care about getting it back considering its a smaller niche of consumers and probably significantly more investment on the software side.

At best we probably get a chassis to awkwardly daisy chain a bunch of Mac Studios together

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#534

Post by kllrnohj »

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.

Their compact solution doesn't cover all needs, they just decided that they didn't care about some of those needs. The Intel Mac Pro was the last Apple offering with high end GPU capabilities. That's now a market segment they just aren't supporting at all. They didn't figure out how to do it compactly, they just abandoned it wholesale.

Similarly if your use case depends on a whole lot of fast storage (eg, the 4x NVME to PCI-E x16 bifurcation boards), well that's also now something Apple just doesn't support. They didn't figure out something else. They didn't do super innovative engineering for it. They just walked away from those markets completely, which they're allowed to do of course. It's just not exactly inspiring or "deserves credit" worthy.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#535

Post by Melatonic »

dabockster wrote: post #471
traceroute66 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tell me what pc with an nvidia gpu can you buy with same memory and performance. And power consumption ! The performance per watt of Apple is unmatched.

This needs to be sold as the big ticket item for low level devs. Their chips are some of the most power efficient chips on the market right now. Hoping they release a blade server version somehow.

Apple releasing anything enterprise or "server" related would be a pretty big pivot - let alone blades.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#536

Post by kllrnohj »

audunw wrote: post #390
andrewl-hn wrote: post #332

This would probably push some high-end audio professionals away from Logic. One of the niches Mac Pro has been popular is audio production. And with cheesegrader the ability to slot in many-many different audio interfaces into a box instead of dangling out to various PCIe enclosures has been a big win. Here's a good video how it looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIQINCWMd6I&list=PLi2i2YhL6o... (at 1:40 Neil…

Feels like it'd just create a market for a big rack-mountable multi-bay PCIe enclosure, with its own internal power supply, that you could connect with one ore more thunderbolt cable. I don't see any reason why a solution built around a Mac Studio should have to be significantly more cluttered. I don't know if such a solution exists right now, but I'm thinking there's a fair chance it will soon as the Mac Pro disappe…

The Thunderbolt offerings on the current Mac lineup offer dramatically less bandwidth in total if that matters for a given use case. Thunderbolt 5 is the equivalent of PCI-E Gen 4 x4. So if all 4 of the Thunderbolt 5 ports on a Mac Studio can run at full speed, that's still only the equivalent of a single gen 4 x16 slot. That's less than half the bandwidth of a basic consumer x86 CPU, to say nothing of the Xeon that was in the previous Intel Mac Pro or a modern Epyc/Threadripper (Pro).

This is a big reason why things like eGPUs kinda suck. Thunderbolt is fast for external I/O, but it's quite pathetic compared to internal PCI-E.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#537

Post by Melatonic »

fooker wrote: post #391
chatmasta wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isnt that because nobody has released one yet? They are brand new

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#538

Post by Melatonic »

kllrnohj wrote: post #534
diabllicseagull wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Their compact solution doesn't cover all needs, they just decided that they didn't care about some of those needs. The Intel Mac Pro was the last Apple offering with high end GPU capabilities. That's now a market segment they just aren't supporting at all. They didn't figure out how to do it compactly, they just abandoned it wholesale. Similarly if your use case depends on a whole lot of fast storage (eg, the 4x NVME…

You could argue they abandoned that market long before (around the era of the mac pro trashcan). Along with the pro software.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#539

Post by Melatonic »

kranke155 wrote: post #366
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 new M chips beat basically any PC on video editing. Their new ProRes accelerator chiplet is so good they can’t even compete.

Goodluck storing all those 8k videos, plates, and other content on soldered in SSD

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#540

Post by Melatonic »

nsteel wrote: post #528
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A huge reason for this is Apple needs unified memory to keep their money maker (laptops) profitable and performant None of the things people care about really get much out of "unified memory". GPUs need a lot of memory bandwidth, but CPUs generally don't and it's rare to find something which is memory bandwidth bound on a CPU that doesn't run better on a GPU to begin with. Not having to copy data between the CPU an…

Except they don't use DDR5. LPDDR5 is always soldered. LPDDR5 requires short point-to-point connections to give you good SI at high speeds and low voltages. To get the same with DDR5 DIMMs, you'd have something physically much bigger, with way worse SI, with higher power, and with higher latency. That would be a much worse solution. GDDR is much higher power, the solution would end up bigger. Plus it's useless for sy…

Is it really useless for system memory or is it just too expensive and no manufacturer has bothered?
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