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Apple M3 Ultra

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Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#101

Post by Teever »

InTheArena wrote: post #29

Whoa. M3 instead of M4. I wonder if this was basically binning, but I thought that I had read somewhere that the interposer that enabled this for the M1 chips where not available. That Said, 512GB of unified ram with access to the NPU is absolutely a game changer. My guess is that Apple developed this chip for their internal AI efforts, and are now at the point where they are releasing it publicly for others to use.…

FTFA

> Apple’s custom-built UltraFusion packaging technology uses an embedded silicon interposer that connects two M3 Max dies across more than 10,000 signals, providing over 2.5TB/s of low-latency interprocessor bandwidth, and making M3 Ultra appear as a single chip to software.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#102

Post by agloe_dreams »

dwighttk wrote: post #32
ksec wrote: post #22

Previous model of M2 Ultra had max memory of 192GB. Or 128GB for Pro and some other M3 model, which I think is plenty for even 99.9% of professional task. They now bump it to 512GB . Along with insane price tag of $9499 for 512GB Mac Studio. I am pretty sure this is some AI Gold rush.

Maybe .1% of tasks need this RAM, why are they charging so much?

Because the .1% is who will buy it? I mean, yeah, supply and demand. High demand in a niche with no supply currently means large margins.

I don't think anyone commercially offers nearly this much unified memory or NPU/GPUs with anything near 512GB of memory.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#103

Post by [deleted] »

moondev wrote: post #65

> support for more than half a terabyte of unified memory — the most ever in a personal computer AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3995WX released over four years ago and supports 2TB (64c/128t) > Take your workstation's performance to the next level with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3995WX 2.7 GHz 64-Core sWRX8 Processor. Built using the 7nm Zen Core architecture with the sWRX8 socket, this processor is designed to deliv…

[deleted]

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#104

Post by bredren »

nordsieck wrote: post #56
reaperducer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most of the comparisons were with M1 and M2 chips, not M4. Is anyone other than a vanishingly small number of hard core hobbiests going to upgrade from an M4 to an M4 Ultra?

> Is anyone other than a vanishingly small number of hard core hobbiests going to upgrade from an M4 to an M4 Ultra? I expect that the 2 biggest buyers of M4 Ultra will be people who want to run LLMs locally, and people who want the highest performance machine they can get (professionals), but are wedded to mac-only software.

Anecdotal, and reasonable criticisms of the release aside, OpenAI's gpt-4.5 introduction video was done from a hard-to-miss Apple laptop.

It is reasonable to say many folks in the field prefer to work on mac hardware.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#105

Post by mrtksn »

behnamoh wrote: post #98
mrtksn wrote: post #61

Let's say you want to have the absolute max memory(512GB) to run AI models and let's say that you are O.K. with plugging a drive to archive your model weights then you can get this for a little bit shy of $10K. What a dream machine. Compared to Nvidia's Project DIGITS which is supposed to cost $3K and be available "soon", you can get a specs matching 128GB & 4TB version of this Mac for about $4700 and the difference…

> I can't wait to see someone testing the full DeepSeek model on this at 819 GB per second bandwidth, the experience would be terrible

How many t/s would you expect? I think I feel perfectly fine when its over 50.

Also, people figured a way to run these things in parallel easily. The device is pretty small, I think for someone who wouldn't mind the price tag stacking 2-3 of those wouldn't be that bad.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#106

Post by InTheArena »

Teever wrote: post #101
InTheArena wrote: post #29

Whoa. M3 instead of M4. I wonder if this was basically binning, but I thought that I had read somewhere that the interposer that enabled this for the M1 chips where not available. That Said, 512GB of unified ram with access to the NPU is absolutely a game changer. My guess is that Apple developed this chip for their internal AI efforts, and are now at the point where they are releasing it publicly for others to use.…

FTFA > Apple’s custom-built UltraFusion packaging technology uses an embedded silicon interposer that connects two M3 Max dies across more than 10,000 signals, providing over 2.5TB/s of low-latency interprocessor bandwidth, and making M3 Ultra appear as a single chip to software.

I RTFA, RMFP

The comment was that the press had reported that the interposer wasn't available. This obviously uses some form of interposer, so the question is if the press missed it, or Apple has something new.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#107

Post by gatienboquet »

behnamoh wrote: post #35

819GB/s bandwidth... what's the point of 512GB RAM for LLMs on this Mac Studio if the speed is painfully slow? it's as if Apple doesn't want to compete with Nvidia... this is really disappointing in a Mac Studio. FYI: M2 Ultra already has 800GB/s bandwidth

NVIDIA RTX 4090: ~1,008 GB/s

NVIDIA RTX 4080: ~717 GB/s

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX: ~960 GB/s

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT: ~800 GB/s

How's that slow exactly ?

You can have 10000000Gb/s and without enough VRAM it's useless.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#108

Post by InTheArena »

behnamoh wrote: post #83
InTheArena wrote: post #29

Whoa. M3 instead of M4. I wonder if this was basically binning, but I thought that I had read somewhere that the interposer that enabled this for the M1 chips where not available. That Said, 512GB of unified ram with access to the NPU is absolutely a game changer. My guess is that Apple developed this chip for their internal AI efforts, and are now at the point where they are releasing it publicly for others to use.…

> My guess is that Apple developed this chip for their internal AI efforts what internal AI efforts? Apple Intelligence is bunkers, and Apple MLX framework remains a hobby project for Apple

Apple stated that they were deploying their own hardware for next generation Siri. My thesis is that this is the hardware they developed.

If so, this is hardly a hobby project.

It may not be effective, but there is serious cash behind this.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#109

Post by [deleted] »

varjag wrote: post #39
klausa wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's over half a _tera_byte; exactly half of _tebi_byte if you wanna be a fundamentalist.

It is exactly the opposite. Every computer architecture in production addresses memory in the powers of two. SI has no business in memory size nomenclature as it is not derived from fundamental physical units. The whole klownbyte change was pushed through by hard drive marketers in 1990s.

[deleted]

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#110

Post by darthrupert »

InTheArena wrote: post #29

Whoa. M3 instead of M4. I wonder if this was basically binning, but I thought that I had read somewhere that the interposer that enabled this for the M1 chips where not available. That Said, 512GB of unified ram with access to the NPU is absolutely a game changer. My guess is that Apple developed this chip for their internal AI efforts, and are now at the point where they are releasing it publicly for others to use.…

Yeah, if only Apple at least semi-supported Linux, their computers would have no competition.
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