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Apple M3 Ultra

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111–120 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#111

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

They use their own M chips for IA. They are far more advanced on AI than the majority of company.

They are using OpenAI for now but in couple months they will own the full chain of value.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#112
post #82

When would Apple silicons made natively support for OSes such as Linux? Apple seemlingly reluctant to release detailed technical reference manual for M-series SoCs, which makes running Linux natively on Apple silicon challenging.

Probably never. We don't have official Linux support for the iPhone or iPad, I would't hold out hope for Apple to change their tune.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#113
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?

Maybe because .1% of tasks need this RAM, it attracts a .1% price tag

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This hardware is really being held back by the operating system at this point. Please elucidate.

No native docker support, no headless management options (enterprise strength), Limited QoS management, lack of robust python support (out of the box), interactive user focused security model.

>lack of robust python support (out of the box)

What would robust python support oob look like?

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#115
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.

LLMs easily use a lot of RAM, and these systems are MUCH, MUCH cheaper (though slower) than a GPU setup with the equivalent RAM.

A 4-bit quantization of Llama-3.1 405b, for example, should fit nicely.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#116
post #67
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…

I suspect that they do not consider workstations to be personal computers.

No the comment misunderstood the difference between CPU memory and unified memory. This can dedicate 500GB of high bandwidth memory to the GPU. - ~3.5X that of an H200.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#117
post #82

When would Apple silicons made natively support for OSes such as Linux? Apple seemlingly reluctant to release detailed technical reference manual for M-series SoCs, which makes running Linux natively on Apple silicon challenging.

That’s what’s weird to me too. It’s not like they would lose sales of macOS as it is given away with the hardware. So if someone wants to buy Apple hardware to run Linux, it does not have a negative affect to AAPL

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 figures? can be done in 6k https://x.com/carrigmat/status/1884244369907278106

That's CPU only memory, not high bandwidth, and not addressable by the GPU.

There isn't anything particularly high-bandwidth about Apple's DDR5 implementation, either. They just have a lot of channels, which is why I compared it to a 24-channel EPYC system. I agree that their integrated GPU architecture hits a unique design point that you don't get from nvidia, who prefer to ship smaller amounts of very different kinds of memory. Apple's architecture may be more suited to some workloads but it hasn't exactly grabbed the machine learning market.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#119
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I know you’re referring to the exolabs app, but the t/s is really not that good. it uses thunderbolt instead of NVlink.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#120
post #86
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe they'll change the form factor of the Mac Pro, too? Either that or kill the Mac Pro altogether, the current iteration is such a half-assed design and blatantly terrible value compared to the Studio that it feels like an end-of-the-road product just meant to tide PCIe users over until they can migrate everything to Thunderbolt. They recycled a design meant to accommodate multiple beefy GPUs even though GPUs ar…

I agree. Nonetheless, I agree with Siracusa that the Mac Pro makes sense as a "halo car" in the Mac lineup. I just find it interesting that you can currently buy a M2 Ultra Mac Pro that is weaker than the Mac Studio (for a comparable config) at a higher price. I guess it "remains a product in their lineup" and we'll hear more about it later. Additionally: If they wanted to scrap it down the road, why would they do th…

The current Mac Pro is not a "halo car". It's a large USB-A dongle for a Mac Studio.
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