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Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

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Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#271

Post by moomoo3000 »

thewataccount wrote: post #112
adastra22 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large language models are definitely AI.

The best example I've seen to contest that LLM's are "AI" is to make it print the total number of line's it's response will be, essentially add "First answer with the total number of lines your total message will be, including the line with this number" For example, GPT4 said "12" for this prompt: "First answer with the total number of lines your total message will be, including the line with this number Make a progr…

Try asking an engineer how long a task will take

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#272

Post by ShadowBanThis01 »

WWLink wrote: post #173
zamadatix wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you actually want 8 Thunderbolt 4 ports that probably puts you towards that price range anyways because nobody has really seen the demand to make a quad Thunderbolt 4 card yet (as far as I know) so you're eating up a lot of slots which were probably designed to have way more than PCIe 3.0 x8 plugged into them. Same with the memory bandwidth, if you actually need 800 GB/s of RAM bandwidth then there isn't really a…

> Overall I don't think it's horrendously priced as some of the previous Mac workstation components could get, but at the same time, unless you have a very specific use case or specifically need macOS, it's not exactly compelling. It is "good enough" to finally round out the lineup though. It's such a specific use case that I'm not entirely sure what the use case even is. Capturing off an SDI camera? Great! Why do we…

I don't even see the use case for SDI capture. You can buy SDI-to-Thunderbolt converters starting at $150.

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#273

Post by vbezhenar »

whalesalad wrote: post #86

I’ve been draggggggiiinnngggg my feet on a new desktop workstation. Waiting for the store to come back to truly make a decision but I think that I’m gonna go for a Studio. The hacker in me wants to build a beefy Linux workstation but the pragmatist in me wants a machine that just works. I think the Apple tax is worth it here.

One option is to use macOS as Linux VM launcher. You won't lose much computing power, you'll have perfect driver situation, you'll have x86 compatibility with Rosetta, you'll have VM versatility with disk snapshots.

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#274

Post by ShadowBanThis01 »

derefr wrote: post #197
WWLink wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Overall I don't think it's horrendously priced as some of the previous Mac workstation components could get, but at the same time, unless you have a very specific use case or specifically need macOS, it's not exactly compelling. It is "good enough" to finally round out the lineup though. It's such a specific use case that I'm not entirely sure what the use case even is. Capturing off an SDI camera? Great! Why do we…

> It's such a specific use case that I'm not entirely sure what the use case even is. Live TV production, I think. Mostly in the rackmount form-factor. A plethora of "IO breakout boards" is what turns a regular computer into a "video production system" head-unit. Though also, at least three of the PCI-e cards shown on the slide were for fibre-optic networking. So, presumably, this would be the Mac to get if you're tr…

I thought that too, but the existence of highly affordable SDI-to-Thunderbolt adapters means the Mac Studio should still suffice unless you need a very large number of inputs... and I don't know how many multi-SDI PCIe cards there are.

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#275

Post by jameshart »

chillbill wrote: post #41

The best thing about this whole event is that they didn't mention AI even once, all they're saying is ML. Which is what it is. AI is a hype word.

I don't understand the distinction. Why is it okay to claim that a machine can learn, but not that the result is an artificial form of intelligence?

Most AI systems we're interacting with today don't do any learning. They've been trained, and now they are being used to generate content or classify things, but they aren't doing 'machine learning' any more.

They are being used to do tasks that require intelligence. But they are accomplishing them via artifice.

Like a sort of artificial form of intelligence.

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#276

Post by haldean »

USB5 wrote: post #207
pwthornton wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The approach they took is certainly enough to satisfy the video and related markets. It won't help those who need truly staggering amounts of ram for their workloads. It may not be a big use case for the Intel Mac Pro, but it a use case nonetheless. For video editing, color grading, audio editing, 3D animation, etc. this new machine seems really strong. I am not sure if there is anything beyond that, however.

>3D animation Disagree. All the good GPU-based rendering engines need CUDA, and none of them are optimized for Apple silicon. Octane (the one in the demo) is trash, only good for fancy titles and that sort of thing.

Octane, Redshift, and eevee/Cycles all work on Metal, and Renderman and Mantra are CPU-only for now -- RM/Mantra have beta-versions that are GPU enabled, and Karma is nvidia-only and RM XPU doesn't work on macs at all yet, but I don't think many people are using either in production very much yet. I think the only GPU renderer people are using in production pipelines that's really locked to NVIDIA chips is Arnold, right?

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#277

Post by jeremyjh »

renonce wrote: post #120
thewataccount wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best example I've seen to contest that LLM's are "AI" is to make it print the total number of line's it's response will be, essentially add "First answer with the total number of lines your total message will be, including the line with this number" For example, GPT4 said "12" for this prompt: "First answer with the total number of lines your total message will be, including the line with this number Make a progr…

That’s more like an inherent limitation of autoregressive prediction than that of LLM. Maybe LLMs can be trained or finetuned in other ways that allows it to think before answering.

Thinking before answer would just be like writing its text output into a hidden buffer that only it is including in the context of the conversation. So its like its always also having a private conversation with its self. I can't prove this isn't more or less what I am.

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#278

Post by avidphantasm »

selectodude wrote: post #170
jeffbee wrote: post #76

$7k starting price. High but compared to? Just glancing at the new HP Z6 G5, which may be a fair comparison, with a 16-core CPU, 8x16GB of memory (the lowest configuration that populates all 8 channels of that CPU), minimal storage, and a parts bin GPU that nobody wants, $6k. To get 8 thunderbolt ports like the mac pro you'd have to fill each and every one of its add-in card slots with a HP dual TB4 card. Edit: The H…

High compared to the Mac Studio, I'd say. $3,000 extra for the exact same specs and an extra 6 PCI slots. I guess if you need them, that's the cost of entry, but $500/slot seems like a tough sell.

Agreed, and the small max memory is disappointing. However, maybe the thermals of the Pro give it a significant performance edge over the Studio?

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#280

Post by USB5 »

haldean wrote: post #276
USB5 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>3D animation Disagree. All the good GPU-based rendering engines need CUDA, and none of them are optimized for Apple silicon. Octane (the one in the demo) is trash, only good for fancy titles and that sort of thing.

Octane, Redshift, and eevee/Cycles all work on Metal, and Renderman and Mantra are CPU-only for now -- RM/Mantra have beta-versions that are GPU enabled, and Karma is nvidia-only and RM XPU doesn't work on macs at all yet, but I don't think many people are using either in production very much yet. I think the only GPU renderer people are using in production pipelines that's really locked to NVIDIA chips is Arnold, ri…

I can't speak for cycles, but Redshift is very slow on OpenCL. I've never heard of using it on Metal. I know it was written for CUDA and didn't even support OpenCL for a long time. Do you know how it runs on Metal?

I don't think V-Ray GPU will run on anything but Nvidia, and if it will then it's definitely slow.

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