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Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

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Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#11
post #4
post #2

> M5 Ultra features a massive amount of high-bandwidth unified memory, up to 512GB, and delivers a staggering 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth that is 50 percent higher than M3 Ultra. Apple never needed to participate in the AI race to zero. Because they were already at the finish line years ago building their own chips that can run large >100B parameter AI models locally.

Is there anything comparable that runs Linux, doesn't necessarily look as good, but is perhaps (a lot) cheaper/fixable? Or is this really pretty optimal? I mean this is not nvidia based right? It's all custom? So we can use it under Asahi perhaps? I want to get something for my company to run local models, wondering what would be a good option.

Asahi was stuck at M3 last time I checked it out.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#16
Apple Studio with maxed out M5 Ultra, 256GB RAM and 16TB storage is 18,299$. The 512GB RAM version apparently is coming in October, considering that the difference between 96GB and 256GB is priced at 4000$, the 512GB upgrade must be eye watering.

So, on the mini the RAM upgrade runs at 25$ per GB on all tiers, the same as the Studio therefore the upgrade to 512 will probably cost 6400$.

The fully maxed out Apple Studio then will be 24699$. It's 17199$ if you don't upgrade the storage(1TB).

Nevertheless I itch to have one :)

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#18
post #2

> M5 Ultra features a massive amount of high-bandwidth unified memory, up to 512GB, and delivers a staggering 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth that is 50 percent higher than M3 Ultra. Apple never needed to participate in the AI race to zero. Because they were already at the finish line years ago building their own chips that can run large >100B parameter AI models locally.

As someone who works in AI now, I have found it pretty amazing that Apple basically didn't do much with AI software, and focused more on the hardware side. I think this is what the future of AI is going to look like, local models run on your mac for your workflow. It's possible that they're working on their own LLM that's going to work very well on their chips, and possibly outperform anything out there when they do…

>local models run on your mac for your workflow.

10 years ago 32GB ram laptops sounded too much. 8 was enough. These days even I would get that much ram since it’s soldered. 64GB is higher end.

In a few years we should see such high end hardware commonplace. Working with a local LLM to get work done is the ideal way to go which has mostly hardware limitation as of now that gets solved in due time.

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#19
post #7
post #2

> M5 Ultra features a massive amount of high-bandwidth unified memory, up to 512GB, and delivers a staggering 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth that is 50 percent higher than M3 Ultra. Apple never needed to participate in the AI race to zero. Because they were already at the finish line years ago building their own chips that can run large >100B parameter AI models locally.

1.2TB/s is 2/3 the speed of an nVidia 5090. But you get a generic computer and much more RAM. And you lose a couple of organs.

How much memory does that come with?

Re: Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

#20
post #7
post #2

> M5 Ultra features a massive amount of high-bandwidth unified memory, up to 512GB, and delivers a staggering 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth that is 50 percent higher than M3 Ultra. Apple never needed to participate in the AI race to zero. Because they were already at the finish line years ago building their own chips that can run large >100B parameter AI models locally.

1.2TB/s is 2/3 the speed of an nVidia 5090. But you get a generic computer and much more RAM. And you lose a couple of organs.

is it still effectively 2/3rds? Don't know enough to compare a discrete GPU/CPU setup to something like this where it's more integrated
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