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New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

apple.com

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Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#541

Post by dannyw »

mswphd wrote: post #279
jmalicki wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not a non-mac cheaper desktop/workstation and a Mac laptop for use? E.g. what most major tech companies have - a laptop that is for VSCode via ssh/web browsing, and a beefy Linux dev box you ssh into for everything else? It's way cheaper, and what I use at home too - a lot cheaper than a Mac studio for everything, especially with RAM and storage.

if you do want to do local LLM stuff, mac studio is significantly better than most linux dev boxes.

Better than a DGX Spark running Linux? Absolutely not (I own both).

Real-world matmul is about 4x higher on a DGX Spark than a M3 Ultra.

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#542

Post by twobitshifter »

mrheosuper wrote: post #488
twobitshifter wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the newest Qwen 3.8 27B model you can get opus on just about any new Mac.

It can fit into 16GB macbook ?

It can but not well, you really want at least 24 GB and preferably 64 GB for the full model

https://ofox.ai/blog/qwen-3-8-27b-run-locally-vram-gguf-2026...

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#543

Post by jagged-chisel »

geophile wrote: post #372
osmukka wrote: post #179

Reading this press release was almost physically painful, because of how much Apple loves to use the phrase "up to". In total it appears 46 times.

A silly hobby of mine has been to track Apple's use of the word "computer". They don't use it. The only use of the word that I can find, on apple.com, is in legal boilerplate. I want a computer dammit, not an appliance.

They also don't use "appliance." Nor do their computers behave as appliances.

It's just branding - they don't want to sell you a generic "computer" - they want to sell you a Mac. It's really not all that different from a computer. Might look a little nicer[1]. Uses a custom processor. But you can write software for it like a computer. And it can display things on a monitor like a computer.

They do have wrist, pocket, and tablet versions of computers, but those might be considered more like appliances.

1 - taste being subjective and all

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#544

Post by angoragoats »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #498
angoragoats wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is much more likely for your model to fit in large unified memory of a Mac than the smaller more limited memory of a GPU. I bristle at general statements like this when it obviously depends on the specific Mac and GPU in question. But yes, comparing a maxed out M5 Ultra with an RTX 6000, the Mac has much more memory. > Even going with two 5090s, you now have to shard your model and that is a PITA. Every modern t…

Sharding a dense model using Tensor Parallelism (TP) across dual RTX 5090s has a significantly worse performance penalty over PCIe than sharding an MoE model. If you are using multiple GPUs, MoE is basically going to be your only workable choice unless you can leverage pipeline parallelism (only half your GPUs can work on a prompt at a time, so you need to process prompts back to back in a pipeline setup, and they be…

Have you ever actually set up a multi-GPU system for inference? Based on my experience you are drastically overstating the problem. Both tensor and pipeline parallelism (without NVLink) produce a machine which is faster than any Mac on the planet, which is what we’re discussing here. Yes, each has pros and cons, and neither scales perfectly linearly. But it works great regardless.

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#545

Post by abhinavk »

msdz wrote: post #200
matt-p wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another option is a 'maxed out' mini e.g M5 Pro/64GB. Mini is super easy to travel with if you know there'll be a 'dock' at the far end e.g office home or whatever.

So I can somewhat speak to this, as I actually did this for a while c. 2021 and 2022. The issue (apart from my Mac mini still having the old, bigger form factor back then) is that this requires a full shutdown (obviously), and that is more friction than opening a closed laptop lid. It just takes a moment for every app and background service etc. to settle back in after, and depending on how your brain works, you migh…

Does macOS not have hibernate/suspend-to-disk?

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#547

Post by ezst »

t_mahmood wrote: post #254
meric_ wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im curious, how often is SSD / storage speed performance really useful? I feel like for many people it's akin to gigabyte wifi in that its nice to have, but not really particularly necessary

When I was booting from a spinning disk, at that time it took over a minute to boot. I upgraded the system to SSD later, and that same system took less than 20s. That was 10 years ago. Another example as a developer, one particular large project took an hour to build on a spinning disk, on a SSD it takes 2mins So, yeah, it's really noticable improvement

The big deal of a decade ago about SSDs wasn't throughput, but random read/writes. HDDs can be astonishingly fast, but by their very mechanical nature, they suck at jumping from sectors to sectors to gather small files, which is typical of booting an OS.

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#548

Post by knollimar »

geophile wrote: post #372
osmukka wrote: post #179

Reading this press release was almost physically painful, because of how much Apple loves to use the phrase "up to". In total it appears 46 times.

A silly hobby of mine has been to track Apple's use of the word "computer". They don't use it. The only use of the word that I can find, on apple.com, is in legal boilerplate. I want a computer dammit, not an appliance.

What's a computer?

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#550

Post by aurareturn »

angoragoats wrote: post #539
aurareturn wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac Studio winning in memory capacity is just a fact. That's why I'm confused.

Yes, I agree. What about the other metrics, including performance per watt which I’ve now mentioned four times and you’ve ignored the previous three times?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwIZ5VI3Eus

This is a good video to watch.

  Yes, I agree.
Glad you agree. I was just confused why you were questioning it. The big biggest advantage for Apple Silicon is that you can get much more VRAM per $ over Nvidia cards. No controversy.
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