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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

#151
post #75

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 who hates themselves that much? It's the thing I touch and interact with. That's exactly the part that needs to be sturdy, smooth, and pretty. It's the facade to the beast at the other end.

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#153
post #43

> M6 supports up to 32GB of unified memory to multitask across demanding apps and run LLMs on device for secure and private agentic tasks. It also provides up to 170GB/s of unified memory bandwidth — a 10 percent increase over M5 and a 2.5x increase over M1. Isn't 170GB/s slow for bandwidth?

It's higher bandwidth than any dual-channel DDR5 desktop machine, but Apple never quote the memory latency, so hard to compare otherwise.

Would that be a difficult comparison to do fairly sine one is SoC and the other isn’t?

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#154

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 have been thinking a lot about buying a very fast desktop and a cheap laptop that uses remote desktop to connect to the fast computer.

But in the end I ended op buying a Lenovo Legion and put Linux on it.

Laptops are so fast these days that I didn't want to be bothered with setting up connectivity to a remote desktop.

But if your laptop never leaves your desk I think a desktop computer is a great option. Relatively cheaper and easier to maintain and upgrade.

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#155

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 was in the same situation, I used maxed out 15'' M3 Max MacBook Pro docked to Studio Display closed on vertical stand behind the screen. It was fine for office work, but running local LLMs would definitely overheat it. The battery started degrading purely due to heat issues. And it was audible as well. I decided to get Mac Studio M4 Max, also all maxed out config and the cooling is so much better that I can run loc…

Weird, I’ve run LLM batch sessions for hours on my Max M3 MBP. It doesn’t get very loud, though I’m not getting anything close to 100 tok/s on a 27b model, I use a 35b MoE model just to get 90 tok/s. The fan comes on but thermally it never overheats. I do have it in a vertical closed position, though.

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#156

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.

This is my setup (except I have an Air because the Neo didn't exist yet). And it's great. Tailscale makes it trivial.

So, do you use VNC (or ssh) to access the Mac Studio at home? Or do you only access other stuff that's living in your home network?

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#157
post #12

10 grand for 256GB memory. Likely double that for 512GB, but won't be available or finalized until October. Thunderbolt 5 is highest bandwidth external IO available at 120Gb/s. 1.2TB/s claimed max internal memory bandwidth. Not exactly "future proof" for >1T parameter models but good for targeting specific lower-parameter models, or if you can rely on pipeline parallelism and run a cluster.

10 grand for 256GB new Ultra sounds too cheap in today’s crazy DRAM market, it feels too good to be true.

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#158

1.2 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, wo…

Yes, and they specifically mention "Up to 10.7x faster LLM prompt processing in LM Studio" which is probably using the neural accelerator for prefill.

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#160
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> A lot of us in America have no sales tax

Not that many of us, actually. Only Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, and some parts of Delaware and Alaska have no sales tax. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sales_tax_by_county....

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