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Apple M3 Ultra

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Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#131

Post by bigyabai »

dylan604 wrote: post #121
bigyabai wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That makes sense to me though. If you don’t run iOS, you don’t have App Store and that means a loss of revenue.

Right. Same goes for MacOS and all of it's convenient software services. Apple might stand to sell more units with a more friendlier stance towards Linux, but unless it sells more Apple One subscriptions or increases hardware margins on the Mac, I doubt Cook would consider it.

If you sit around expecting selflessness from Apple you will waste an enormous amount of time, trust me.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#132

Post by Havoc »

NorwegianDude wrote: post #122

The memory amount is fantastic, memory bandwidth is half decent(~800 GB/s), and the compute capabilities are terrible(36 TOPS). For comparison, a single consumer card like the RTX 5090 is only 32 GB of memory, has 1792 GB/s memory and 3593 TOPS of compute. The use cases will be limited. While you can't run a 600B model directly like Apple says(cause you need more memory for that), you can run a quantized version, but…

>36 Tops

Thats going to be the NPU specifically. Pretty much nothing on llm front seems to use NPUs at this stage (copilot snapdragon laptops aside) so not sure the low number is a problem

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#133

Post by sschueller »

eigenspace wrote: post #63
klausa wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not soldered, it's _on the package_ with the SoC.

It is _not_ on die. It's soldered onto the package. There's a good reason it's soldered, i.e. the wide memory interface and huge bandwidth mean that the extra trace lengths needed for an upgradable RAM slot would screw up the memory timings too much, but there's no need to make false claims like saying it's on-die.

> RAM slot would screw up the memory timings

Existing ones possibly but why not build something that lets you snap-in a BGA package just like we snap in CPUs on full sized PC mainboards?

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#134

Post by BonoboIO »

NorwegianDude wrote: post #122

The memory amount is fantastic, memory bandwidth is half decent(~800 GB/s), and the compute capabilities are terrible(36 TOPS). For comparison, a single consumer card like the RTX 5090 is only 32 GB of memory, has 1792 GB/s memory and 3593 TOPS of compute. The use cases will be limited. While you can't run a 600B model directly like Apple says(cause you need more memory for that), you can run a quantized version, but…

A factor of 100 faster in compute … wow.

It will be interesting when somebody will upgrade the ram ram of the 5090 like they did with 4090s

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#137

Post by coder543 »

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

DeepSeek-R1 only has 37B active parameters.

A back of the napkin calculation: 819GB/s / 37GB/tok = 22 tokens/sec.

Realistically, you’ll have to run quantized to fit inside of the 512GB limit, so it could be more like 22GB of data transfer per token, which would yield 37 tokens per second as the theoretical limit.

It is likely going to be very usable. As other people have pointed out, the Mac Studio is also not the only option at this price point… but it is neat that it is an option.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#138

Post by AndroTux »

dylan604 wrote: post #121
bigyabai wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That makes sense to me though. If you don’t run iOS, you don’t have App Store and that means a loss of revenue.

If you don't run macOS, you don't have Apple iCloud Drive, Music, Fitness, Arcade, TV+ and News and that means a loss of revenue.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#139

Post by e40 »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #79
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.…

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

I torrent things from two different hosts on my gigabit network. The macos stack literally cannot handle the full bandwidth I have. It fails and the machine needs to be rebooted to fix it. It’s not pretty on the way into this state, either. Other remote connections to the computer are unreliable. On Linux, running the same app in a docker container works perfectly. Transmission is the app.
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