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New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
141–150 of 570 posts
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#142Sorry for being lazy, but is there a rough breakdown like "You get sonnet level for M5 and Opus for M5 pro, etc.", or is it still speculative. Or put simpler, do you get Opus level for the 256GB M5 Max?
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Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
The relevant comparison isn't one mac studio to one RTX 6000, it's a 24 channel DDR5 system, which also has ~1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth (or more when Xeon 6 compatible 8800mt/s memory becomes widely available), vastly higher prefill due to more CPU horsepower, orders of magnitude faster networking, can hook into GPU accelerators, can be upgraded etc. A baseline 384GB system from eg Puget is ~30K vs ~12K for the 256G…
So 3x more, plus the cost of a GPU (another 10k?). How is that value for money to get slightly better performance?
It can be more than "slightly", particularly if the model you're interested in (or will be interested in in 6 months) doesn't fit on the mac studio. You also need to account for eg storing 10TB of random checkpoints, load time when experimenting, and so on. When you start actually needing throughput these are all capability gaps in practical use, not just x% benchmark differences.
If you just want to run Qwen 3.8 27B and Deepseek v4 Flash in perpetuity and that's it, there are a lot of solutions that will work and this is a fairly user friendly one.
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#144Mac Studio with M5 Max starts at $2,499 (U.S.) and $2,299 (U.S.) for education. Additional configure-to-order options are available at apple.com/mac-studio. Mac Studio with M5 Ultra starts at $5,499 (U.S.) and $5,099 (U.S.). I am in Europe, and the Mac Studio M5 Ultra GPU 64 cores with 96GB RAM is up to 6.649,00 €. Ouch.
Don't forget that US prices usually do not include the VAT, while EU prices usually do include respective VAT.
A lot of us in America have no sales tax (if that’s what you mean by VAT) and those that do have it at a fraction of EU VAT rates.
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wa…
I've done that, but I chose a Framework Desktop instead. The latest Fedora is closer to Snow Leopard than anything Apple has to offer. Downside is that I still have my MBP because of the lock-in and occasionally pick it up to do computer stuff in weird places.
I got used to the hub-and-spoke model at home (previously thin terminal, server-client, etc.). Big ole desktop/server and smaller devices that (ab)use it remotely. Roam around with a smaller computer/tablet/phone. Tailscale to bind it all together.
If your computing needs line up, it's a very serviceable approach.
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#146$5500 for 96GB of RAM? insanely expensive (the MacOs is really bad compared to Windows or Linux).
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#147Sorry for being lazy, but is there a rough breakdown like "You get sonnet level for M5 and Opus for M5 pro, etc.", or is it still speculative. Or put simpler, do you get Opus level for the 256GB M5 Max?
Opus is probably ~2T parameter model, so that would probably not run on these. More like Sonnet.
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#148Mac Studio with M5 Max starts at $2,499 (U.S.) and $2,299 (U.S.) for education. Additional configure-to-order options are available at apple.com/mac-studio. Mac Studio with M5 Ultra starts at $5,499 (U.S.) and $5,099 (U.S.). I am in Europe, and the Mac Studio M5 Ultra GPU 64 cores with 96GB RAM is up to 6.649,00 €. Ouch.
> I am in Europe, and the Mac Studio M5 Ultra GPU 64 cores with 96GB RAM is up to 6.649,00 €. Ouch. It would be significantly cheaper to fly to a tariff-free country and buy there.
that's what I'm planning to do.
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been holding out, because I think my next purchase will be a Studio with an Ultra Chip in it. I'm wanting it to be a "forever" server, so I'm holding out while I can.
Supply rumours are next year we see an M7 AI-focused chip with large inference performance upgrades. It's unlikely we'll see heavy upgrades in other areas. If you care about AI, it's worth waiting. If you don't, pull the trigger now. RAM constraints are likely to get worse next year. Or wait 2-3 years and prices should be back to Earth (plus newer and even better chips). I'm waiting this out.
Yeah, but how many years until 128GB+ is attainable by mere mortals again? My 2021 home server build was 64GB of RAM. My 2025 build was 32GB and zram. :/
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#1501.2 TB/s bandwidth of M5 Ultra comes from two dies of M5 Max (each 614 GB/s) connected together using 4.4 TB/s inter-die fabric.
For a non-quantized Deepseek V4 flash on an ultra, I would estimate about 1000+ tokens per second prefill and 50+ tokens per second on generation. This is actually quite usable and near parity to cloud.
They mention "adds the GPU Neural Accelerators." which, if exploitable for LLM loads, would probably help the prefill a lot