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Interesting that they’re releasing M3 Ultra after the M4 Macs have already shipped. I wonder if the plan is to only release Ultras for odd number generations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
CAMM2 could kinda work, but each module is only 128-bit so I think the furthest you could possibly push it is a 512-bit M Max equivalent with CAMM2 modules north, east, west and south of the SOC. There just isn't room to put eight modules right next to the SOC for a 1024-bit bus like the M Ultra.
These machines have a 512 bit interface, so presumably even worse.
> support for more than half a terabyte of unified memory — the most ever in a personal computer AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3995WX released over four years ago and supports 2TB (64c/128t) > Take your workstation's performance to the next level with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3995WX 2.7 GHz 64-Core sWRX8 Processor. Built using the 7nm Zen Core architecture with the sWRX8 socket, this processor is designed to deliv…
Its a very specific claim that isnt comparing itself to DIMMs
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It's over half a _tera_byte; exactly half of _tebi_byte if you wanna be a fundamentalist.
It is exactly the opposite. Every computer architecture in production addresses memory in the powers of two. SI has no business in memory size nomenclature as it is not derived from fundamental physical units. The whole klownbyte change was pushed through by hard drive marketers in 1990s.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's over half a _tera_byte; exactly half of _tebi_byte if you wanna be a fundamentalist.
It is exactly the opposite. Every computer architecture in production addresses memory in the powers of two. SI has no business in memory size nomenclature as it is not derived from fundamental physical units. The whole klownbyte change was pushed through by hard drive marketers in 1990s.
What does it mean to "address memory in powers of two" ? There are certainly machines with non-power-of-two memory quantities; 96 GiB is common for example.
> The whole klownbyte change was pushed through by hard drive marketers in 1990s.
The metric prefixes based on powers of 10 have been around since the 1790s.
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.
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 everything fits in memory, but it's secondary to having enough VRAM in the first place.
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.…
Please elucidate.
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A server with 512GB of high-bandwidth GPU addressable RAM in a server is probably a six figure expenditure. If memory is your constrain, this is absolutely the server for you. (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 :-)
A basic brand new server can easily do 512gb. Not as fast as soldered memory but it should be maybe mid to high 5 figures