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Apple M3 Ultra

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Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#151

Post by yk »

mrtksn wrote: post #105
behnamoh wrote: post #98

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 think I've seen 800 GB/s memory bandwidth, so a q4 quant of a 400 B model should be 4 t/s if memory bound.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#152

Post by _alex_ »

apple keeps talking about the Neural Engine. Does anything actually use it? Seems like all the current LLM and Stable Diffusion packages (including MLX) use the GPU.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#153

Post by jeroenhd »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #130
dylan604 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Except the linux users won't be buying Apple software, from the app store or elsewhere. They won't subscribe to iCloud.

While I don't think Apple wants to change course from its services-oriented profit model, surely someone within Apple has run the calculations for a server-oriented M3/M4 device. They're not far behind server CPUs in terms of performance while running a lot cooler AND having accelerated amd64 support, which Ampere lacks.

Whatever the profit margin on an iMac Studio is these days, surely improving non-consumer options becomes profitable at some point if you start selling them by the thousands to data centers.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#154

Post by cosmic_cheese »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #130
dylan604 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Except the linux users won't be buying Apple software, from the app store or elsewhere. They won't subscribe to iCloud.

Those buying the hardware to run Linux also aren’t writing software for macOS to help make the platform more attractive.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#155

Post by _2d30 »

dwedge wrote: post #146
darthrupert wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've been buying and using MBP for 6 or 7 years now, and just assumed I could run Linux on one if I wanted to. I just spent a couple of days trying to get a 2018 MBP working with Linux and found out [edit to clarify] that my other ARM MBP basically won't work. I just want a break from MacOS, I'll be buying a Thinkpad and will probably never come back. This isn't my moaning, I understand it's their market, but if thei…

> trying to get a 2018 MBP working with Linux and found out ARM basically doesn't work.

Since the M series of ARM processors didn’t come out until 2020, that would make a lot of sense.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#156

Post by seanmcdirmid »

submeta wrote: post #127

I am confused. I got an M4 with 64 GB Ram. Did I buy something from the future? :) Now why M3 now? Not M4 Ultra.

It took them awhile to developed their ultra chip and this is what they had ready? I’m sure they are working on the M4 ultra, but they are just slow at it.

I bought a refubished M3 max to run LLMs (can only go up to 70b with 4 bit quant), and it is only slightly slower than the more expensive M4 max.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#157

Post by jsheard »

crowcroft wrote: post #128
jsheard wrote: 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…

Agree with this, and it doesn't seem like it's a priority for Apple to bring the kind of expandability back any time soon. Maybe they can bring back the trash can.

Isn't the Mac Studio the new trash can? I can't think of how a non-expandable Mac Pro could be meaningfully different to the Studio unless they introduce an even bigger chip above the Ultra.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#158

Post by internetter »

diggan wrote: post #90
jagged-chisel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075 ("Apple's Software Quality Crisis" - 1134 comments) ^ has a lot of elaborations on this subject

This is more about "average" end user software, not the type of software that would be running on a machine like this. Yes their applications fell off, but if you're paying for 512gb of RAM apple notes being slow isn't the bottleneck

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#159

Post by [deleted] »

jeroenhd wrote: post #141
TheTxT wrote: post #8

512GB unified memory is absolutely wild for AI stuff! Compared to how many NVIDIA GPUs you would need, the pricing looks almost reasonable.

If you're going to overthrow your entire AI workflow to use a different API anyway, surely the AMD Instinct accelerator cards make more sense. They're expensive, but also a lot faster, and you don't need to deal with making your code work on macOS.

[deleted]

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#160

Post by bigyabai »

ferguess_k wrote: post #149

Ah, if we can have the hardware and the freedom of installing a good Linux repo on top of it. How is Asahi? Is it good enough? I assume, that since Asahi is focused on Apple hardware, it should have an easier time figuring out drivers and etc?

> How is Asahi?

For M3 and M4 machines, hardware support is pretty derilict: https://asahilinux.org/docs/M3-Series-Feature-Support/

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