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Apple M3 Ultra

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Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#271

Post by seabrookmx »

criddell wrote: post #226
notpushkin wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asahi is a thing. For headless usage it’s pretty much ready to go already.

The Asahi maintainer resigned recently. What that means for the future only time will tell. I probably wouldn't want to make a big investment in it right now.

Your wording makes it sound like it was a one-man show. Asahi has a really strong contributor base, new leadership[1], and the backing of Fedora via the Asahi Fedora Remix. While Hector resigning is a loss, I don't think it's a death knell for the project.

[1]: https://asahilinux.org/2025/02/passing-the-torch/

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#272

Post by diggan »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #263
diggan wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of focus on quality of software affects all types of workloads, not just consumer-oriented or professional-oriented in isolation.

Nah, if I ever wrote an article about the software crisis on the Linux desktop, there’d be flames here making Apple’s issues look small.

It'd be an interesting flame war in the comments, if nothing else, go for it! I'm happy to give plenty of concrete evidence why Linux is more suitable for professionals than macOS is in 2025 :)

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#273

Post by sroussey »

klausa wrote: post #47
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.…

>I had read somewhere that the interposer that enabled this for the M1 chips where not available. With all my love and respect for "Apple rumors" writers; this was always "I read five blogposts about CPU design and now I'm an expert!" territory. The speculation was based on the M3 Maxes die shots not having the interposer visible, which... implies basically nothing whether that _could have_ been supported in an M3 Ul…

I’m guessing it’s not really a M3.

No M3 has thunderbolt 5.

This is a new chip with M3 marketing. I’d expect this from Intel, not Apple.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#274

Post by DrBenCarson »

behnamoh wrote: post #83
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.…

> My guess is that Apple developed this chip for their internal AI efforts what internal AI efforts? Apple Intelligence is bunkers, and Apple MLX framework remains a hobby project for Apple

Apple have been putting ML models running on their own silicon into production for far longer than any of their competitors. They publish some of the most innovative ML research

They also own distribution to the wealthiest and most influential people in the world

Don’t get lost in recency bias

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#276

Post by KeplerBoy »

InTheArena wrote: post #97
la_oveja wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 figures? can be done in 6k https://x.com/carrigmat/status/1884244369907278106

That's CPU only memory, not high bandwidth, and not addressable by the GPU.

addressable is a weird choice of words here.

CUDA has had managed memory for a long time now. You absolutely can address the entire host memory from your GPU. It will fetch it, if it's needed. Not fast, but addressable.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#277

Post by dagmx »

bigyabai wrote: post #243
dagmx wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M2 Ultra is ~250W (averaging various reports since Apple don’t publish) for the entire SoC. 5090 is 575W without the CPU. You’d have to cut the Nvidia to a quarter and then find a comparable CPU to normalize the wattage for an actual comparison. I agree that Apple GPUs aren’t putting the dedicated GPU companies in danger on the benchmarks, but they’re also not really targeting it? They’re in completely different zone…

Well, select your hardware of choice and see for yourself then: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks > but they’re also not really targeting it? That's fine, but it's not an excuse to ignore the power/performance ratio.

But I’m not ignoring the power/performance ratio? If anything, you are doing that by handwaving away the difference.

Give me a comparable system build where the NVIDIA GPU + any CPU of your choice is running at the same wattage as an M2 Ultra, and outperforms it on average. You’d get 150W for the GPU and 150W for the CPU.

Again, you can’t really compare the two. They’re inherently different systems unless you only care about singular metrics.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#278

Post by whimsicalism »

gatienboquet wrote: post #78
iambateman wrote: post #14

People who know more than me: they’re talking a lot about RAM and not much about GPU. Do you expect this will be able to handle AI workloads well? All I’ve heard for the past two years is how important a beefy GPU is. Curious if that holds true here too.

LLMs are primarily "memory-bound" rather than "compute-bound" during normal use. The model weights (billions of parameters) must be loaded into memory before you can use them. Think of it like this: Even with a very fast chef (powerful CPU/GPU), if your kitchen counter (VRAM) is too small to lay out all the ingredients, cooking becomes inefficient or impossible. Processing power still matters for speed once everythin…

Transformers are typically memory-bandwidth bound during decoding. This chip is going to have a much worse memory b/w than the nvidia chips.

My guess is that these chips could be compute-bound though given how little compute capacity they have.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#279

Post by devmor »

kstrauser wrote: post #267
devmor wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I run Docker and Podman on my Macs. The same way Windows users run them. In a linux VM. You don't get real on-hardware containerization.

Ah, I see what you’re saying. Basically, Darwin doesn’t support cgroups, so Docker runs Linux in a VM to get that.

I don't think it supports userland namespaces either, which is another important part of container isolation.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#280

Post by opan »

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.

Haven't the Max/Ultra type chips always come much later, close to when the next number of standard chips came out? M2 Max was not available when M2 launched, for example.
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