Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?

scottjg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–195 of 195 posts

Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?

#191

Post by zer0zzz »

ActorNightly wrote: post #188
zer0zzz wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Man, Apple fans are still proving the stereotype to be accurate after 20 years. Who is this straw man you're flogging? > Ignoring the fact that the Mac OS gets in your way every time you try to do something that Apple doesn't like, with no guarantee that an update won't break anything existing, ignoring the fact that Macs are non repairable, non upgradable, ignoring the fact that they don't support multiple display…

Mac will appear to give some leeway to fake being dev friendly, but they are not. There is a reason why still Asahi is in its state - lack of any real documentation from Apple. If Apple was dev friendly, they would just bring those people on board and give them the documentation and have them develop a fully working linux for free. But Apple fundamentally DGAF about linux users. RDMA over Thunderbolt is going to be u…

It's a little unclear why you are discussing desktop mode on phones in all this? Seems really irrelevant when the thread is about NV gpus on arm desktops.

When it comes to Apple hardware, they're offering pretty good performance per watt and the machine form factors they are offering with the level of perf they have is where I really start to care (small compact footprint with good perf, runs any kind of unix/unix-like system).

You may well be right, and we may not see productized eGPUs in mass on Apples platforms, but I am liable to go grab a GB10 over some PC tower at that point.

As far as the software stack and OS, its also kind of irrelevant (to me anyways). If the hardware is good and the OS has decent performance for builds and jobs I am going to use it to do my work. The rest of it is just fashion as far as I can tell.

Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?

#192

Post by PicardsFlute »

Aurornis wrote: post #52
superlopuh wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious and not an expert here, do you know why the TTFT is so much worse on Mac? To elaborate, the article just says that this step is compute bound, but I'm wondering whether it is just that simple or if it might also be less optimised in MLX?

Prefill (prompt processing) is compute bound doing large matrix operations. Token generation (aka tokens/s) is memory bandwidth bound. The RTX 5090 has an incredible amount of compute performance for matrix operations and a lot of memory bandwidth. The Apple Silicon parts have unusually high memory bandwidth for general purpose compute chips, which is why they can generate tokens so fast. Their raw matrix compute per…

The TTFT benchmarks don’t look right to me. I don’t use vLLM, but at 16k pre-fill, the M5 Max is 3.6 times faster than the M4 Max. The 5090 is surely faster, but the numbers in the article are not reflecting what I have seen thus far. Perhaps vLLM hasn’t been updated to use the new tensor APIs for metal?

My point is this: The M5 should have reflected this in the charts, but it doesn’t. The situation on pre-fill is not nearly as bad as in the M4 generation.

Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?

#193

Post by ActorNightly »

zer0zzz wrote: post #191
ActorNightly wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac will appear to give some leeway to fake being dev friendly, but they are not. There is a reason why still Asahi is in its state - lack of any real documentation from Apple. If Apple was dev friendly, they would just bring those people on board and give them the documentation and have them develop a fully working linux for free. But Apple fundamentally DGAF about linux users. RDMA over Thunderbolt is going to be u…

It's a little unclear why you are discussing desktop mode on phones in all this? Seems really irrelevant when the thread is about NV gpus on arm desktops. When it comes to Apple hardware, they're offering pretty good performance per watt and the machine form factors they are offering with the level of perf they have is where I really start to care (small compact footprint with good perf, runs any kind of unix/unix-li…

>The rest of it is just fashion as far as I can tell.

EXACTLY.

Apple is a fashion company. They don't care about improving usability of any of their devices. The most important thing is to them is selling a lifestyle.

This is why eGPU will never happen - having an external gpu is too nerdy for a lifestyle of an apple user. Same thing of having a phone plugged into a monitor and keyboard. Thats why all their products are separate. You are meant to buy a iphone for phone things, and iPad for the plane, a Macbook for work and a Mac Pro for any serious compute. Them trying to offer a cheaper solution like eGPU dilutes the lifestyle image.

Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?

#194

Post by runjake »

mercutio2 wrote: post #143
runjake wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was some bad history between Apple and Nvidia. Perhaps with a new generation of leadership at Apple things might change. https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1hmgmuf/apples_hi...

I wasn't in the room when it happened, but this is very different than the story told internally about why Apple became allergic to Nvidia. Arguably more petty. SJ has been dead for almost 15 year now, I imagine the C-suite might get over it at some point.

Do tell. Or at least provide hints?

Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?

#195

Post by zer0zzz »

ActorNightly wrote: post #193
zer0zzz wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a little unclear why you are discussing desktop mode on phones in all this? Seems really irrelevant when the thread is about NV gpus on arm desktops. When it comes to Apple hardware, they're offering pretty good performance per watt and the machine form factors they are offering with the level of perf they have is where I really start to care (small compact footprint with good perf, runs any kind of unix/unix-li…

>The rest of it is just fashion as far as I can tell. EXACTLY. Apple is a fashion company. They don't care about improving usability of any of their devices. The most important thing is to them is selling a lifestyle. This is why eGPU will never happen - having an external gpu is too nerdy for a lifestyle of an apple user. Same thing of having a phone plugged into a monitor and keyboard. Thats why all their products…

> Apple is a fashion company. They don't care about improving usability of any of their devices. The most important thing is to them is selling a lifestyle.

I don’t think you read what I said, or you are intentionally being dense. My point is that users and the industry have largely moved on from the modular pc box concept. Those who cling to it do it out of a sense of identity.

> They don't care about improving usability of any of their devices.

Do you have any metrics to back that up? As far as I can see they’ve built what is a pretty good platform that still supports native applications for normal people on hardware that is improving ~.5-1.5x every year. Even if I ran Linux 100% of the time I’d likely go with their (used) hardware.

> having an external gpu is too nerdy for a lifestyle of an apple user

I used to think this, but then when they brought arm64 to laptops they brought macOS not iOS. They did that because the Mac IS for nerds be it for video editing, publishing, software development, Unix it sysadmin stuff etc. Even the last time they brought egpu to the Mac the first time, it was for something as niche as the whole vr wave. I could see them doing it for ml compute in the future. I doubt they will bring graphics along but wouldn’t Be surprised if there’s more developments like the tinygrad driver (which was literally signed by Apple, so it already discounts your absurd claim).

> Same thing of having a phone plugged into a monitor and keyboard. Thats why all their products are separate.

Again, what are you on about with phones? Phones don’t matter.

Post reply on HN