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Apple M3 Ultra

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Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#231

Post by naikrovek »

kokada wrote: post #188
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. Apple could either create a 2U rack hardware and support Linux (and I mean Apple supporting it, not hobbysts), or have a build of Darwin headless that could run on that hardware. But in the later case, we probably wouldn't have much software available (though I am sure people would eventually starting porting software to it, there is alr…

> But Apple is also not interested in that market, so this will probably never happen.

they're just a tiny company with shareholders who are really tired of never earning back their investments. give 'em a break. I mean they're still so small that they must protect themselves by requiring that macs be used for publishing iPhone and iPad applications.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#232

Post by bilbo0s »

BonoboIO wrote: post #134
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

They’re a bit confused and not comparing the same compute.

Pretty sure they’re comparing Nvidia’s gpu to Apple’s npu.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#233

Post by bigyabai »

cxie wrote: post #222

512GB of unified memory is truly breaking new ground. I was wondering when Apple would overcome memory constraints, and now we're seeing a half-terabyte level of unified memory. This is incredibly practical for running large AI models locally ("600 billion parameters"), and Apple's approach of integrating this much efficient memory on a single chip is fascinating compared to NVIDIA's solutions. I'm curious about how…

For enterprise markets, this is table stakes. A lot of datacenter customers will probably ignore this release altogether since there isn't a high-bandwidth option for systems interconnect.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#234

Post by kstrauser »

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.

*bibytes are a practical joke played on computer scientists by the salespeople to make it sound like we’re drunk. “Tell us more about your mebibytes, Fred elbows colleague, listen to this”.

If Donald Knuth and Gordon Bell say we use base-2 for RAM, that’s good enough for me.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#235

Post by jeffhuys »

NorwegianDude wrote: post #217
InTheArena wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single AI shop on the planet is trying to figure out if there is enough compute or not to make this a reasonable AI path. If the answer is yes, that 10k is a absolute bargain.

Not much to figure out. It's 2x M4 Max, so you need 100 of these to match the TOPS of even a single consumer card like the RTX 5090.

Sure, but if you have models like DeepSeek - 400GB - that won't fit on a consumer card.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#236

Post by DrBenCarson »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #197
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.…

Keep in mind the minimum configuration that has 512GB of unified RAM is $9,499.

Cheap relative to the alternatives

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#237

Post by nsteel »

InTheArena wrote: post #106
Teever wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> uses an _embedded_ silicon interposer

It sounds like they're using TSMC's new LSI (Local Si Interconnect) technology, which is their version of Intel's EMIB. It's essentially small islands of silicon, just around the inter-chip connections, embedded within the organic substrate. This gives the advantages of silicon interconnect, without the cost and size restrictions of a silicon interposer. It would not be visible from just looking at the package.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16031/tsmcs-version-of-emib-l...

https://semianalysis.com/2022/01/06/advanced-packaging-part-...

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#238

Post by mohsen1 »

bredren wrote: post #126

Apart from enabling an 120h update to the XDR Pro, does TB5 offer a viable pathway for eGPUs on Apple Silicon macbooks? This is a cool computer, but not something I'd want to lug around.

For AI stuff, 120GB/s is not really useful really...

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#239

Post by jeffhuys »

internetter wrote: post #175
rewtraw wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because that's how much its worth

Its not though. For consumer computers somewhere 1k-4k there's nothing better. But for the price of 512gb of RAM you could buy that + a crazy CPU + 2x 5090s by building your own. The market fit is "needs power; needs/wants macOS; has no budget" which is so incredibly niche. But in terms of raw compute output there's absolutely no chance this is providing bang for buck

Do you understand that it's UNIFIED RAM, so it doubles as vRAM? I would love to know what computer you can build for <10k with 0.5TB of VRAM.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#240

Post by ryao »

stego-tech wrote: post #228
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. It really is. Even if they themselves won't bring back their old XServe OS variant, I'd really appreciate it if they at least partnered with a Linux or BSD (good callout, ryao) dev to bring a server OS to the hardware stack. The consumer OS, while still better (to my subjective tastes) than Windows, is increasingly hampered by bloat and…

Given shared heritage, I would expect to see Apple work with FreeBSD before I would expect Apple to work with Linux.
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