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Apple M3 Ultra

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Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#911

Post by [deleted] »

kllrnohj wrote: post #347
stego-tech wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot express how dirt cheap that pricepoint is for what's on offer, especially when you're comparing it to rackmount servers. By the time you've shoehorned in an nVidia GPU and all that RAM, you're easily looking at 5x that MSRP; sure, you get proper redundancy and extendable storage for that added cost, but now you also need redundant UPSes and have local storage to manage instead of centralized SANs or NASes. F…

> By the time you've shoehorned in an nVidia GPU and all that RAM, you're easily looking at 5x that MSRP That nvidia GPU setup will actually have the compute grunt to make use of the RAM, though, which this M3 Ultra probably realistically doesn't. After all, if the only thing that mattered was RAM then the 2TB you can shove into an Epyc or Xeon would already be dominating the AI industry. But they aren't, because it…

[deleted]

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#912

Post by duped »

egorfine wrote: post #888
duped wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would a containerization environment on MacOS give you that you don't already have? Like concretely - what does containerization mean in the context of a MacOS user space? In Linux, it means something very specific: a user/mount/pid/network namespace, overlayfs to provide a rootfs, chroot to pivot to the new root to do your work, and port forwarding between the host/guest systems. On MacOS I don't know what cont…

On macOS probably I'd like chroot and pid/mount namespaces. I'd like to install OS and dependencies in a container and run my application from there so that it does not interfere with host OS. My app is GPU heavy and has lots of dependencies (OpenCV, LAPACK, armadillo, lots and lots) and I'd like to not pollute the host OS with it. Also I want to run the latest OS with all security patches on the host while having a…

What you want is virtualization, not containerization. And you have this already. Since MacOS doesn't have a stable syscall interface, decoupling the host/guest in a mount namespace and chroot would lead to horrible breakages when the system libraries of your container are out of date with your host OS. So you would have to share the host OS and a big portion of the userspace to begin with.

Or you can package your app as a .app and not worry about it, there's no "pollution" when everything is bundled.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#914

Post by officeplant »

brailsafe wrote: post #658
officeplant wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loved my M1 mini, loved my M2 air. I've moved on to 2024 HP Elitebook with an AMD R7 8840U, 1TB replaceable NVME, 32gb of socketed DDR5. 14in laptop with a serviceable enough 1920x1200 matte screen. $800 and a 3 hour drive to the nearest Microcenter. I gave Apple another try (refused apple from 2009-2020 because of the nvidia era issues) and I just can't stomach living off of piles of external drives anymore to make…

Surely you're using that thing as a laptop in a minority of cases though, looks like it's basically just specs you bought. That's fine, but if that's all you want then it seems like rather than trying to give a mac a reasonable go of it as opposed to whatever else, you were trying to instead explore a fundamental difference in how you value technology products, which is quite a different battle.

Not at all. Sure when I'm at home its docked, but so far in Linux battery life has been fantastic. Not Apple fantastic sure, but I can get a good 5 hours of heavy use, up to around 8 hours of web browsing and video streaming. I often use it on the road, throw back quake3 lan parties, coffee shop creative sessions.

I just want decent enough power and no thermal throttling if I do have to hammer it. I make music so the extra ram and space for sample libraries is a big benefit and why I had to keep external SSD's around with my Macs.

My Macbook Air needed a usb fan ziptied to the laptop stand to not throttle at times.

>it seems like rather than trying to give a mac a reasonable go of it as opposed to whatever else, you were trying to instead explore a fundamental difference in how you value technology products

I re-evaluate how I feel about technology pretty often and its caused some shifts for sure. My side hobby is ARM/RiscV low power computing and Apple's move to ARM tickled that hyper efficiency side of my brain, but ultimately failed to keep me interested because of all the downsides upgrade/repairability wise.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#915

Post by scarface_74 »

BobAliceInATree wrote: post #897
enether wrote: post #886

Can anyone with older Mac Studios/Minis comment - do you also notice a "throttling" of the hardware? I'm not sure if this is me not maintaining it properly (e.g fans having dust block them) - but I've always got this sense that Apple throttles their older devices in some indirect ways. I experience it the most with iPhones - my old iPhone is pretty slow doing basic things despite nothing really changing on it (just t…

> (just the OS updating?) "Just the OS updating" is not insignificant. Software developers, in general, are not known for making sure latest versions of their software run smoothly on older hardware. Also, performance on iPhones is throttled when your battery is very old. There was a whole class-action lawsuit about it. https://support.apple.com/en-us/106348

You realize the alternative is the iPhone shutting down completely?

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#916

Post by seec »

stego-tech wrote: post #681
hinkley wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss the XServe almost as much as I miss the Airport Extreme.

I feel like Apple and Ubiquiti have a missed collaboration opportunity on the latter point, especially with the latter's recent UniFi Express unit. It feels like pairing Ubiquiti's kit with Apple's Homekit could benefit both, by making it easier for Homekit users to create new VLANs specifically for Homekit devices, thereby improving security - with Apple dubbing the term, say, "Secure Device Network" or some marketi…

Ubiquiti was founded by some Apple employees after they closed their Airport division. I sincerely doubt they want to go through the trouble of collaborating with a company that was too greedy to keep investing in their network hardware.

Ubiquiti is decently priced, especially for niche hardware, unlike Apple. Fundamentally they diverge on the way to do things...

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#917

Post by pmarreck »

tomn wrote: post #454
pmarreck wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lack of robust python support There is no such thing. Tell me, which combination of the 15+ virtual environments, dependency management and Python version managers would you use? And how would you prevent "project collision" (where one Python project bumps into another one and one just stops working)? Example: SSL library differences across projects is a notorious culprit. Python is garbage and I don't understand w…

This is incoherent to me. Your complaints are about packaging, but the elixir wrapper doesn't deal with that in any way -- it just wraps UV, which you could use without elixir. What am I missing? Also, typically when people say things like > Tell me, which combination of the 15+ virtual environments, dependency management and Python version managers It means they have been trapped in a cycle of thinking "just one mor…

> mostly just work

that's not good enough. If I'm in the business of writing Python code, I (ideally) don't want to _also_ be in the business of working around Python design deficiencies. Either solve the problem definitively, or do not try to solve the problem at all, because the middle road just leads to endless headaches for people WHILE ALSO disincentivizing a better solution.

Node has better dependency management than Python- And that's really saying something.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#918

Post by pmarreck »

kstrauser wrote: post #537
tomn wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incoherent to me. Your complaints are about packaging, but the elixir wrapper doesn't deal with that in any way -- it just wraps UV, which you could use without elixir. What am I missing? Also, typically when people say things like > Tell me, which combination of the 15+ virtual environments, dependency management and Python version managers It means they have been trapped in a cycle of thinking "just one mor…

I agree. Python certainly had its speedbumps, but it's utterly manageable today and has been for years and years. It seems like people get hung up on there not being 1 official way to do things, but I think that's been great, too: the competition gave us nice things like Poetry and UV. The odds are slim that a Rust tool would've been accepted as the official Python.org-supplied system, but now we have it. There are r…

I've seen issues with pip + virtualenv (ssl lib issues, IIRC). I've always used those at minimum and have still run into problems. (I like to download random projects to try them out.) I've also seen issues with python projects silently becoming stale and not working, or python projects walking over other python projects because pip + virtualenv does NOT encompass all Python deps to the metal. This also doesn't mean you can have 2 commandline Python apps available in the same commandline environment, because PATH would have to prefer one or the other at some point.

Here's a question- If you don't touch a project in 1 year, do you expect it to still work, or not? If your answer is the latter, then we simply won't see eye-to-eye on this.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#919

Post by exabrial »

exabrial wrote: post #203
InTheArena wrote: post #29

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.…

If Apple supported Linux (headless) natively, and we could rack m4 pros, I absolutely would use them in our Colo. The CPUs have zero competition in terms of speed, memory bandwidth. Still blown away no other company has been able to produce Arm server chips that can compete.

I think it's interesting everyone that dissented mentioned power consumption.

Our business "only" sees about 1,000-25,000 req/min, our message brokers transmit MAX 25k msg/s. Easily handled by a rack of 10 servers for redundancy.

We are not Google and we don't pretend to be, so we don't care about power, as the difference is a few dollars a month.

Re: Apple M3 Ultra

#920

Post by pmarreck »

mapcars wrote: post #254
pmarreck wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lack of robust python support There is no such thing. Tell me, which combination of the 15+ virtual environments, dependency management and Python version managers would you use? And how would you prevent "project collision" (where one Python project bumps into another one and one just stops working)? Example: SSL library differences across projects is a notorious culprit. Python is garbage and I don't understand w…

> at least be able to use Python, but in a very controlled, not-insane way Thats funny, about 10 years ago I started my career in a startup that had Python business logic running under Erlang (via custom connector) which handled supervision and task distribution, and it looked insane for me at the time. Even today I think it can be useful but is very hard to maintain, and containers are a good enough way to handle py…

> containers are a good enough way to handle python

I disagree. My take on that is that they are an ugly enough way to handle Python. And, among other problems, don't permit you to easily mess with the code (one of many reasons why this is ugly). Need access to something stateful from the container app? That's another PITA.

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