571–580 of 672 posts
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I don't see how 5x 3090's is a better option than an M3 Ultra Mac studio. The mac will just work for models as large as 100B, can go higher with quantized models. And power draw will be 1/5th as much as the 3090 setup. You can certainly daisy chain several 3090's together but it doesn't work seamlessly.
> You can certainly daisy chain several 3090's together It's not "daisy chaining" 3090 has NVLink.
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To me there is a fundamental difference. Even if PC hardware costs slightly more (now because of the RAM situation, Apple producing his chips in house can get better deals of course), it's something that is worth more investing in in. Maybe you spend 1000$ more for a PC of comparable performance, well tomorrow you need more power, change or add another GPU, add more RAM, add another SSD. A workstation you can keep up…
> with Apple devices you are forced to use macOS that kind of sucks, especially for a server usage you can just install linux?
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$3.5k is a lot of money, but not a ton by American hobby standards. It's easy to spend multiples, even orders of magnitude more than that on hobbies like fishing, wine, sports tickets, concerts, scuba, travel, being a foodie, golf, marathons, collectibles, etc. It's out of reach for lots of people, even in developed countries. But it's easily within reach for loads of people that care more about computing than other…
I live in America, I am very well compensated. Have been for 15 years now. $3500 is a lot of money. A lot. There is a tiny bubble of us tech folks who think it is accessible to most people. It is not. It is also the same reason Macs are still a niche. Don't take your circles to be the standard, it is very very far from it, especially if you think $3500 is not a lot of money. It is easy to confirm this, just look at t…
Some people succumb to lifestyle creep or choose it deliberately. Others choose to live below their means when their income grows. The latter have a lot more money to spend on extras, or to save if that's what they prefer.
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…
> ...making the perfect hardware for home inference machines. I really don't get why anybody would want that. What's the use case there? If someone doesn't care about privacy, they can use for-profit services because they are basically losing money, trying to corner the market. If they care about privacy, they can rent cloud instances in order to setup, run, close and it will be both cheaper, faster (if they can affo…
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Apple is not catering to minimum salaries in poor countries. Does this really need to be explained? $3499 is definitely enthusiast compatible. That's beefy gaming PC tier, which is possibly the canonical example of an enthusiast market. This isn't tens of thousands of dollars for top tier Nvidia chips we're talking about.
Seems I misunderstood what a "enthusiast" is, I thought it was about someone "excited about something" but seems the typical definition includes them having a lot of money too, my bad.
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I'm a former 4,1 user, myself — replaced with an M2Pro mini Jan 2023 (finally retired fully 2025). Absolutely recommend you purchase the 4-bay Terramaster external enclosure — gives you four SATA slots that are hot-swappable (unlike MacPro's). 10gbps via USB-C.
Are SMART attributes independently readable on that? (Or any multi-drive USB-C enclosures?)
Still an inexpensive solution to help ease your transition away from MacPro"5,1"land.
As USB-C is a physical form factor (capable of supporting multiple protocols), I would think that the ability to have multidrive external SMART support would be up to the vendor's choice of datachip/datastream. Again: my Acasis does support SMART for nVMEs.
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Heh, my main "heavy stuff" desktop only has 64GB. But it feels really good to have more ram than you can think of a use for. I have a faint memory of an interview ages ago with Knuth I think where he mentioned as an aside he was using a workstation with 3.2 Gb of storage and 4 Gb of ram :)
Around the year 2001 I recall watching 3d studio Max R3 tutorials in which the teacher had an electric purple desktop which possessed an entire 4 gigs of ram. It blew my mind. My computer had 128mb and an ATI Rage 128 Pro. I was young and dumb and never would have guessed I'd own a computer with 32gb of RAM that felt pitifully underpowered for today's tasks.
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Nvidia's recent GPUs are more power-efficient than Apple Silicon in raster, training and inference workloads. A blade server would get cancelled just like the Mac Pro for exactly the same reasons: https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/02/some-apple-ai-servers-are-rep...
> Nvidia's recent GPUs are more power-efficient than Apple Silicon in raster, training and inference workloads. I think you can do better than the proverbial Apples and Oranges comparison. In terms of total system, "box on desk", Apple is likely to remain the performance per watt leader compared to random PC workstations with whatever GPUs you put inside.
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Or it could be the same CPU as in pro/max with more GPU chiplets.
Sure. AI workloads would really benefit from having more RAM, GPU cores, and memory channels.
But sure, more GPU cores will definitely fix it this time.
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 much as I love alluring designs such as the NeXT Cube (which I have), the Power Mac G4 Cube (which I wish I had), and the 2013 Mac Pro (which I also have), sometimes a person needs a big, hulking box of computational power with room for internal expansion, and from the first Quadra tower in the early 1990s until the 2012 Mac Pro was discontinued, and again from 2019 until today, Apple delivered this. Even so, the…
Between cloud computing and server racks, is this still a real niche?