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New Mac Mini with M4

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Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#481

Post by int_19h »

angoragoats wrote: post #288
Y-bar wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that they said the _Mac Studio_ which in the M2 model has between 400GB/s and 800GB/s memory bandwidth. https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/specs/ Edit: since my reply you have edited your comment to mention the Studio, but the fact remains that the M2 Max has at least ~40% greater bandwidth than the number you quoted as an example.

Yeah, sorry, I realized that as well so I edited my post to add a higher end example with multiple 3090s or similar cards. A single 3090 has just under 1TiB/sec of memory bandwidth. One more edit: I'd also like to point out that memory bandwidth is important, but not sufficient for fast inference. My entire point here is that Apple silicon does have high memory bandwidth for sure, but for inference it's very much hel…

It's still "fast enough" for even 120b models in practice, and you don't need to muck around with building a multi-GPU rig (and figuring out how to e.g. cool it properly).

It's definitely not what you'd want for your data center, but for home tinkering it has a very clear niche.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#482

Post by timeon »

ikety wrote: post #460
timeon wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With educational pricing I think this easily beats any sort of desktop > go-to recommendation I'll give to anybody wanting an entry-level desktop Can anybody get it with educational pricing?

yes, there's no verification system. You simply just state that you are a student

I had no idea. I'm not going to abuse it but still interesting.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#483

Post by cultofmetatron »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #451
supportengineer wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you have to run Windows, which is a deal breaker for most people.

Why would you need to run Windows? Linux should work mini computers just fine.

I have a minisforum minipc. first thing I did was wipe windows and put popos on it. super happy with it. That said, getting anyone who isn't used to linux to usd anything other than windows as easy as pulling your teeth. People go towards whats familiar; Even when what's familiar is objectively trash that spies on you.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#484

Post by nozzlegear »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #373
e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #330

With educational pricing this thing starts as $500, and at 16GB of RAM (finally) I think this easily beats any sort of desktop PC you can buy at that price (let's exclude custom builds, they're not the same market). I think this just became the go-to recommendation I'll give to anybody wanting an entry-level desktop computer of any kind. In fact I might buy one for my parents right now to replace the old mac mini the…

[flagged]

> I don't think Apple fanboys understand

Why start off by calling people fanboys? It seems like you're looking for an argument instead of a genuine conversation.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#485

Post by rtkwe »

angoragoats wrote: post #246
rtkwe wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's $800 to go up to 2TB from the 256GB model which is just criminally over priced. I can get double that for half the price with a Gen 4 NVMe drive. Weirdly the 8TB drive on the Pro is at least in line with the top of the line 8TB NVMe SSDs you can buy though there are cheaper options at about $600 vs the $1200 Apple is charging.

> I can get double that for half the price with a Gen 4 NVMe drive It's worse than that -- 4TB gen 4 drives can be had for well under $300, sometimes $225-250, and that's for buying a drive outright, not "trading up" from a 256GB device. I think it'd be more accurate to say that you can get double the capacity for a _quarter_ of the price.

I was ballparking it based on my recent buy of a Samsung 990 Pro 4TB and inflated the price a little in my head to closer to $400 than the $330 it actually was.

I also, as a side note, try to give the loosest most favorable (to my opposite) comparison because when I err on my side it becomes a "well actually" debate a lot of the time about how it's "not quite X times as many it's more like X-1 (so I'm not even going to touch that X-1 is still quite bad)" that is really tedious and annoying especially when the favorable version of the comparison is still quite bad for their point/side.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#486

Post by throwaway48476 »

superjan wrote: post #346
jsheard wrote: post #8

16GB base RAM across the board, following the iMac. AI is certainly good for pushing up the baseline RAM that manufacturers can get away with shipping if nothing else.

The RAM is expandable as well… however I am curious how well the extra RAM performs. Part of the M-series performance gain is from having the RAM dies very close to the processor.

It performs the same. You don't get any extra ram channels for upgrading the capacity.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#487

Post by nervousvarun »

supportengineer wrote: post #419
goosedragons wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's still good deals in mini PC land. Yes, the M4 is faster but there's loads of mini PCs with decent CPUs, 32GB RAM and a 1TB of SSD storage for under $600. I think for a lot of people for basic usage they'll get more value out of the larger and upgradable SSDs than the faster CPU. https://www.amazon.com/BOSGAME-5700U-Displays-Computers-Emul... https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-SER5-Desktop-Computer-Graphic...

But you have to run Windows, which is a deal breaker for most people.

Just looked and Windows is running 73% of desktops/laptops. Can you provide a source showing "most people" find Windows a deal breaker? https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#488

Post by [deleted] »

abhinavk wrote: post #425
acchow wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know ancient iGPUs had that thing for setting the GPU memory size in the BIOS, but that's aaaaaancient and completely obsolete. If you still have that, just set it to the minimum value. The rest of memory will be unified. I hadn’t used a PC in so long, I still thought that bios setting decided the division. TIL. Lucky we have Asahi Lina to clarify the details.

It shows up as "Shared GPU memory" in Task Manager. What BIOS sets is the Dedicated i.e. reserved video memory in RAM. e.g. My Ryzen iGPU reserves 2GB/32GB for itself (which Windows can't see) via BIOS and use 9 more as shared "unified" memory.

[deleted]

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#489

Post by cpuguy83 »

angoragoats wrote: post #261
nextos wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For inference, Apple chips are great due to a high memory bandwidth. Mac Studio is a popular choice in the local Llama community for this particular reason. It's a cost effective option if you need a lot of memory plus a high bandwidth. The downside is poor training performance and Metal being a less polished software stack compared to CUDA. I wonder if a little cluster of Mac Minis is a good option for running concu…

The memory bandwidth on Apple silicon is only sometimes comparable to, and in many cases worse than, that of a GPU. For example, an nVidia RTX 4060 Ti 16GB GPU (not a high-end card by any means) has memory bandwidth of 288GiB/sec, which is more than double that of the M4 CPU. On the higher end, building a machine with 6 to 8 24GB GPUs such as RTX 3090s would be comparable in cost (as well as available memory) to a hi…

And yet the GPU costs about as much as the whole Mac Mini and wouldn't even come close to fitting inside one.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#490

Post by throwaway48476 »

Etheryte wrote: post #358
bee_rider wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible that they do everything they can on the decide, but still have to do lots in the cloud, right? For some definition of lots, at least…

I mean, there is no need to speculate about any of this, they've put out a number of articles that outline their whole approach. I'm not really sure where the ambiguity lies?

They have a new bug bountry program for their confidential compute platform... in the cloud.
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