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> support for more than half a terabyte of unified memory Soldered?
Soldered? Figure out a way to make it unified without also soldering it, and you'll be a billionaire. Or are you just grinding a tired, 20-year-old axe.
Previous model of M2 Ultra had max memory of 192GB. Or 128GB for Pro and some other M3 model, which I think is plenty for even 99.9% of professional task. They now bump it to 512GB . Along with insane price tag of $9499 for 512GB Mac Studio. I am pretty sure this is some AI Gold rush.
Maybe .1% of tasks need this RAM, why are they charging so much?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a single Apple SoC where they’ve provided removable ram? Not that I can recall.
Is there even an existing replaceable memory standard that would meet the current needs of Apple's "Unified Memory" architecture? I'm not an expert but I'd suspect probably not. The bus probably looks a lot more like VRAM on GPUs, and I've never seen a GPU with replaceable RAM.
512GB unified memory is absolutely wild for AI stuff! Compared to how many NVIDIA GPUs you would need, the pricing looks almost reasonable.
(sorry, should have specified that the NPU and GPU cores need to access that ram and have reasonable performance). I specified it above, but people didn't read that :-)
Additionally, I would assume this is a very low-volume product, so it being on N3B isn't a dealbreaker. At the same time, these chips must be very expensive to make, so tying them with luxury-priced RAM makes some kind of sense.
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.…
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 Ultra configuration; as evidenced by the announcement today.
Previous model of M2 Ultra had max memory of 192GB. Or 128GB for Pro and some other M3 model, which I think is plenty for even 99.9% of professional task. They now bump it to 512GB . Along with insane price tag of $9499 for 512GB Mac Studio. I am pretty sure this is some AI Gold rush.
Maybe .1% of tasks need this RAM, why are they charging so much?
Ultra disappointing, they waited 2 years just to push out a single gen bump, even my last year's iPad Pro runs M4.
For AI workflows that's quite a lot cheaper than the alternative in GPUs.
Hard to drop that much cash on an outdated chip.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a single Apple SoC where they’ve provided removable ram? Not that I can recall.
Is there even an existing replaceable memory standard that would meet the current needs of Apple's "Unified Memory" architecture? I'm not an expert but I'd suspect probably not. The bus probably looks a lot more like VRAM on GPUs, and I've never seen a GPU with replaceable RAM.
The memory bus is the same as for modules, it's just very short. The higher end SoCs have more memory bandwidth because the bus is wider (i.e. more modules in parallel).
You could blame DDR5 (who thought having a speed negotiation that can go over a minute at boot is a good idea?), but I blame the obsession with thin and the ability to overcharge your customers.
> I've never seen a GPU with replaceable RAM
I still have one :) It's an ISA Trident TVGA 8900 that I personally upgraded from 512k VRAM to one full megabyte!!!