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New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

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Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#81

Post by PaulRobinson »

joshstrange wrote: post #7

Due to pricing insanity (not that Apple prices weren’t insane before the ram/ssd shortages) I’m not in the market but I do wonder if my next computer should be a Mac Studio instead of a MBP that lives its life docked. Might be better to just run a Studio and Neo for the very few times I actually need remote capabilities.

I've been thinking about this a fair bit recently.

We make a lot of price/performance compromises for having an attached screen and keyboard on our computer. That was what got me started.

Then I remembered the days of having to go to a special corner of the house to use a computer, vs now when I have a computer with me all the time. In my bag, on the sofa, on the train. Hell, I'm writing this on the work MBP while waiting for an appointment.

And you know what, I think I got more done when I went and sat in a corner of the house all those years ago. I set up an area for "computer work", and it worked really well.

I have a home office, but it's a jumble of cables going into docking stations and all sorts of weird stuff. I think if I streamline it and turn it into a proper "computer room", I might get some of that mojo back. I might even convince my partner that surrendering the home office and having a corner of the den might be good - she can watch TV while I tinker. And I won't be balancing a laptop on my knee and trying to do two things at once.

And the price/performance thing comes back in. Hmm.

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#82

Post by armadyl »

joshstrange wrote: post #7

Due to pricing insanity (not that Apple prices weren’t insane before the ram/ssd shortages) I’m not in the market but I do wonder if my next computer should be a Mac Studio instead of a MBP that lives its life docked. Might be better to just run a Studio and Neo for the very few times I actually need remote capabilities.

That’s nearly what I do but on a smaller scale. My iPad Pro serves as my laptop 90% of the time, and the 10% of the time I need to actually code and test in a chromium browser I remote into a mini.

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#83

Post by jacobr1 »

mrala wrote: post #63
nine_k wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put this into a perspective, Google helpfully reminds: > A fully configured IBM Personal Computer AT (Model 5170) with expanded memory and storage cost around $5,795 to $6,000 at its launch in August 1984, which equals roughly $18,600 to $19,300 in 2026 USD.

It would be interesting to compare the costs of a top of the line machine every decade or so. Costs were steadily decreasing until recently.

They still are, if what you want is roughly the same as the prior generations capability with some uplift (making then number up, but say 20% faster or more ram or whatever).

What is changing is that there genuine demand for more capabilities disproportionate to the cost decrease curve. Fab demand and supply constraints have slowed or even reversed some cost decreases - but that is still getting absorbed by the overall systems costs when you are looking at things like laptops. If you all you want is the last decades demand to browse the web and use office - things are cheaper than ever.

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#84

Post by _kush »

mschuster91 wrote: post #67
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not exactly "future proof" Computers are never "future proof".

> Computers are never "future proof". Upgradeable components however could go a loooong stretch towards that goal. It can't be that hard to follow a common form factor for at least the housing across two or three generations to allow a reuse of everything but the main PCB.

If it was upgradable, then yes, spending more on top of it every year would make it future proof, but that's not the point. It's that spending 10 grand doesn't get you a future proof computer today.

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#85

Post by dannyw »

petercooper wrote: post #52
dist-epoch wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 10 grand for 256GB memory. A NVIDIA RTX 6000, 96 GB at 1.7 TB/s, is 13 grand. This 256 GB at 1.2 TB/s Mac is extremely competitive, it will be sold out everywhere.

How's the compute side now, I wonder? Because while the Ultras have impressive memory bandwidth for inference, processing prompts still takes a dog's age on my M3 Ultra. I heard the M5 makes some strides forward in this area, though, and the M7 in particular promises to go a lot further.

M5 is excellent, they’ve finally gotten their own tensor cores.

Good for inference; however if you like to train, data format support and effective performance is limited (M5 Pro). Some hardware features are not exposed or extremely slow.

You’ll be fine for inference, but pales in comparison to what a RTX 6000 Pro can do for compute/matmuls/training.

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#86

Post by Lwerewolf »

tristor wrote: post #65
f0cus10 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

chaining an option?

RDMA is buggy and Thunderbolt only delivers 1/10th the throughput of native connectivity. 1TB of Unified Memory w/ 1.2TB/s of bandwidth with marginally ~$30k cost is a different story than 1TB of sorta Unified Memory w/ an effective 120GB/s of bandwidth with a marginally ~$40k cost + all the RDMA bugs.

You need latency for token parallelism, not bandwidth. Hence actual RDMA that bypasses the software TCP stack (ROCe or whatever).

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#87

Post by ThouYS »

joshstrange wrote: post #7

Due to pricing insanity (not that Apple prices weren’t insane before the ram/ssd shortages) I’m not in the market but I do wonder if my next computer should be a Mac Studio instead of a MBP that lives its life docked. Might be better to just run a Studio and Neo for the very few times I actually need remote capabilities.

Having replaced my MacBook with a Mac Mini, I would reconsider. The MacBook is just such a _complete_ package. Great speakers, great keyboard, fantastic screen, the fingerprint sensor thingy.. Takes a lot of gear to match that

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#88

Post by fearmerchant »

mschuster91 wrote: post #67
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not exactly "future proof" Computers are never "future proof".

> Computers are never "future proof". Upgradeable components however could go a loooong stretch towards that goal. It can't be that hard to follow a common form factor for at least the housing across two or three generations to allow a reuse of everything but the main PCB.

The way the Apple M-series does ram that might be difficult to pull off.

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#89

Post by rjrjrjrj »

jgwil2 wrote: post #75
joshstrange wrote: post #7

Due to pricing insanity (not that Apple prices weren’t insane before the ram/ssd shortages) I’m not in the market but I do wonder if my next computer should be a Mac Studio instead of a MBP that lives its life docked. Might be better to just run a Studio and Neo for the very few times I actually need remote capabilities.

If all you want to do is remote into your desktop, Neo seems like overkill. Why not just get a $200 Chromebook and save yourself $500?

Because the screen, keyboard, and especially trackpad on a $200 Chromebook sucks?
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