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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#581

Post by Dylan16807 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #252
GeekyBear wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't streaming models from storage into limited memory a case where it was impressive that you could make the elephant dance at all? If you want to get usable speeds from very large models that haven't been quantitized to death on local machines, RDMA over Thunderbolt enables that use case. Consumer PC GPUs don't have enough RAM, enterprise GPUs that can handle the load very well are obscenely expensive, Strix Halo…

The bad performance you saw was with very limited memory and very large models, so streaming weights from storage was a huge bottleneck. If you gradually increase RAM, more and more of the weights are cached and the speed improves quite a bit, at least until you're running huge contexts and most of the RAM ends up being devoted to that. Is the overall speed "usable"? That's highly subjective, but with local inference…

> If you gradually increase RAM, more and more of the weights are cached and the speed improves quite a bit

It'll increase a lot based on the zero-ram baseline. But it's still complete garbage compared to fitting the model in RAM. Even if you fit most of it in RAM you're still probably an order of magnitude slower than fitting all of it in RAM, most of your time spent waiting for your SSD.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#582

Post by pchristensen »

chirau wrote: post #527
pchristensen wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$3.5k is a lot of money, but not a ton by American hobby standards. It's easy to spend multiples, even orders of magnitude more than that on hobbies like fishing, wine, sports tickets, concerts, scuba, travel, being a foodie, golf, marathons, collectibles, etc. It's out of reach for lots of people, even in developed countries. But it's easily within reach for loads of people that care more about computing than other…

I live in America, I am very well compensated. Have been for 15 years now. $3500 is a lot of money. A lot. There is a tiny bubble of us tech folks who think it is accessible to most people. It is not. It is also the same reason Macs are still a niche. Don't take your circles to be the standard, it is very very far from it, especially if you think $3500 is not a lot of money. It is easy to confirm this, just look at t…

The first words I said: "$3.5k is a lot of money..."

There are tens of millions of top 10% income adults in America. So something can be both unaffordable to most people, and also easily accessible to very many people.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#583

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jeffffff wrote: post #432
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A huge reason for this is Apple needs unified memory to keep their money maker (laptops) profitable and performant None of the things people care about really get much out of "unified memory". GPUs need a lot of memory bandwidth, but CPUs generally don't and it's rare to find something which is memory bandwidth bound on a CPU that doesn't run better on a GPU to begin with. Not having to copy data between the CPU an…

> None of the things people care about really get much out of "unified memory". GPUs need a lot of memory bandwidth, but CPUs generally don't and it's rare to find something which is memory bandwidth bound on a CPU that doesn't run better on a GPU to begin with. Not having to copy data between the CPU and GPU is nice on paper but again there isn't much in the way of workloads where that was a significant bottleneck.…

> the bottleneck in lots of database workloads is memory bandwidth.

It can be depending on the operation and the system, but database workloads also tend to run on servers that have significantly more memory bandwidth:

> i wish aws and the other cloud providers would offer arm servers with apple m-series levels of memory bandwidth per core, it would be a game changer for analytical databases.

There are x64 systems with that. Socket SP5 (Epyc) has ~600GB/s per socket and allows two-socket systems, Intel has systems with up to 8 sockets. Apple Silicon maxes out at ~800GB/s (M3 Ultra) with 28-32 cores (20-24 P-cores) and one "socket". If you drop a pair of 8-core CPUs in a dual socket x64 system you would have ~1200GB/s and 16 cores (if you're trying to maximize memory bandwidth per core).

The "problem" is that system would take up the same amount of rack space as the same system configured with 128-core CPUs or similar, so most of the cloud providers will use the higher core count systems for virtual servers, and then they have the same memory bandwidth per socket and correspondingly less per core. You could probably find one that offers the thing you want if you look around (maybe Hetzner dedicated servers?) but you can expect it to be more expensive per core for the same reason.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#584

Post by sib »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #529
embedding-shape wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems I misunderstood what a "enthusiast" is, I thought it was about someone "excited about something" but seems the typical definition includes them having a lot of money too, my bad.

I'm an immigrant to Canada, and yes, English has both literal meanings and colloquial meanings. In the most literal meaning, absolutely, "Enthusiast" just means a person who likes something, is excited about something. When it comes to market and products though, typically you'll see the word "Enthusiast" as mid-tier - something like: Consumer --> Enthusiast --> Professional (may have words like "Prosumer" in there a…

>> So while a consumer photographer, may use their phone or compact or all-in-one camera, enthusiast photographer will probably spend $3000 - $5000 in camera gear.

It's interesting that you chose photographers as the example here. In many cases that I've seen, enthusiast photographers spend much more than professional photographers on their gear because the photographers make their money with their gear and therefore need to justify it, while the enthusiasts are often tech people, successful doctors, etc., who spend lots and lots on money on their hobbies...

In any case, your point stands, that "enthusiast" computer users would easily spend $3-4K or more on gear to play games, train models, etc.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#585

Post by steve_adams_86 »

nottorp wrote: post #577
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around the year 2001 I recall watching 3d studio Max R3 tutorials in which the teacher had an electric purple desktop which possessed an entire 4 gigs of ram. It blew my mind. My computer had 128mb and an ATI Rage 128 Pro. I was young and dumb and never would have guessed I'd own a computer with 32gb of RAM that felt pitifully underpowered for today's tasks.

Humm purple and 4 gigs of ram in 2001 sounds like SGI. But those purple SGIs ran Irix so no 3d studio.

You're right! Crazy, that brings me back. I wonder why he showed it off. I wish I could find it. He probably wasn't using it for the tutorial at all, just nerding out and talking about how beefy computers handle rendering and complex geometry better.

I was constantly constrained by my computers back then. Trying to navigate complex scenes or model very detailed meshes could get soooo slow. But man I loved it so much.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#586

Post by rudedogg »

aurareturn wrote: post #232
rudedogg wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their rule of only releasing major software updates once a year in June is holding them back IMO. Their local LLM apis were dated before macOS/iOS 26 was even released. Just because something worked 20 years ago doesn’t mean it works today, but I’m sure it’s hard to argue against a historically successful strategy internally.

Huh? What local LLM apis? It uses Metal.

The application development APIs, ie: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technologyoverview...

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#587

Post by sib »

chirau wrote: post #527
pchristensen wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$3.5k is a lot of money, but not a ton by American hobby standards. It's easy to spend multiples, even orders of magnitude more than that on hobbies like fishing, wine, sports tickets, concerts, scuba, travel, being a foodie, golf, marathons, collectibles, etc. It's out of reach for lots of people, even in developed countries. But it's easily within reach for loads of people that care more about computing than other…

I live in America, I am very well compensated. Have been for 15 years now. $3500 is a lot of money. A lot. There is a tiny bubble of us tech folks who think it is accessible to most people. It is not. It is also the same reason Macs are still a niche. Don't take your circles to be the standard, it is very very far from it, especially if you think $3500 is not a lot of money. It is easy to confirm this, just look at t…

There are something like 24 million millionaires in the United States... Estimates are that Americans spent $157 billion on pets in 2025.

There are a lot of people who could easily choose to spend $3,500 on a computer.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#588

Post by valzam »

chatmasta wrote: post #383
tantalor wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> home inference machines. The market for this use case is tiny

For now. In a few years it will be part of every day life, because people will see Apple users enjoying it without thinking about it. You won’t consider it a “home inference machine,” just a laptop with more capabilities than any other vendor offers without a cloud subscription.

The average person self hosts literally nothing, why would it be different for inference? Which benefits severely from economies of scale and efficient 24/7 utlization

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#589

Post by AnthonyMouse »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #464
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A huge reason for this is Apple needs unified memory to keep their money maker (laptops) profitable and performant None of the things people care about really get much out of "unified memory". GPUs need a lot of memory bandwidth, but CPUs generally don't and it's rare to find something which is memory bandwidth bound on a CPU that doesn't run better on a GPU to begin with. Not having to copy data between the CPU an…

>The sad part is that DDR5 is the thing that doesn't need to be soldered, unlike GDDR. But then Apple solders it anyway. Apple needs to solder it because they are attaching it directly to the SOC to minimize lead length and that is part of how they are able to get that bandwidth.

Systems with socketed RAM have had on-die memory controllers for more than two decades. CAMM2 supports the same speeds as Apple is using in the M5.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#590

Post by AnthonyMouse »

nsteel wrote: post #528
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A huge reason for this is Apple needs unified memory to keep their money maker (laptops) profitable and performant None of the things people care about really get much out of "unified memory". GPUs need a lot of memory bandwidth, but CPUs generally don't and it's rare to find something which is memory bandwidth bound on a CPU that doesn't run better on a GPU to begin with. Not having to copy data between the CPU an…

Except they don't use DDR5. LPDDR5 is always soldered. LPDDR5 requires short point-to-point connections to give you good SI at high speeds and low voltages. To get the same with DDR5 DIMMs, you'd have something physically much bigger, with way worse SI, with higher power, and with higher latency. That would be a much worse solution. GDDR is much higher power, the solution would end up bigger. Plus it's useless for sy…

> LPDDR5 is always soldered.

No it isn't:

https://www.newegg.com/crucial-32gb-ddr5-7500-cas-latency-cl...

CAMM2 is new and most of the PC companies aren't using it yet but it's exactly the sort of thing Apple used to be an early adopter of when they wanted to be.

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