971–980 of 1001 posts
Why did Apple call it M3 Ultra when it's supposed to be more performant than the current top of the line M4 Max? Why not just call it M4 Ultra?
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What's the bargain? There is also "parity" in other products like a MacBook Pro from £1,599 / $1,599 or an iPhone 16 from £799 / $799. £9,699 / $9,499 is worse than that!
The bargain is the lower price in the UK compared to US, once US sales tax is added. It's not like the pound is strong. It's just cheaper in the UK. And you're right, all Apple products are better value in that UK. I'm not used to any electronics being good value in the UK.
You know that £9,699 are over $12k, right?
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I’m missing the point. What is it you’re concluding from these dates?
I was referring to the additional year of delay between the M3 Max and M3 Ultra announcements when compared to the M1 and M2 generations. The theory that the M3 Ultra was being produced, but diverted for internal use makes as much sense as any theory I've seen. It makes at least as much sense as the "TSMC had difficulty producing enough defect free M3 Max chips" theory.
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Is this on chip memory? From the 800GB/s I would guess more likely a 512bit bus (8 channel) to DDR5 modules. Doing it on a quad channel would just about be possible, but really be pushing the envelope. Still a nice thing. As for practicality, which mainstream applications would benefit from this much memory paired with a nice but relative mid compute? At this price-point (14K for a full specced system), would you pre…
NVIDIA project DIGITS has 128 GB LPDDR5x coherent unified system memory at a 273 Gb/s memory bus speed.
So M3 preference will depend on whether a niche can significantly benefit from a monolitic lower compute high memory vs higher compute but distributed setup.
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NVIDIA RTX 4090: ~1,008 GB/s NVIDIA RTX 4080: ~717 GB/s AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX: ~960 GB/s AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT: ~800 GB/s How's that slow exactly ? You can have 10000000Gb/s and without enough VRAM it's useless.
I have a 4090 and, out of curiosity, I looked up the FLOPS in comparison with Apple chips. Nvidia RTX 4090 (Ada Lovelace) FP32: Approximately 82.6 TFLOPS FP16: When using its 4th‑generation Tensor Cores in FP16 mode with FP32 accumulation, it can deliver roughly 165.2 TFLOPS (in non‑tensor mode, the FP16 rate is similar to FP32). FP8: The Ada architecture introduces support for an FP8 format; using this mode (again w…
M3 Max GPU benchmarks around 14 TFLOPs, so the Ultra should score around 28 TFLOPs.
Double the numbers for FP16.
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and that no one is developing games for MacOS.
(1) That’s obviously not actually true. (2) “No one” is developing games for Linux either, but the Steam Deck works great. Why? Wine, which you can run on macOS too.
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Not that dramatic of an increase actually - the M2 Max already had 400GB/s and M2 Ultra 800GB/s memory bandwidth, so the M3 Ultra's 819GB/s is just a modest bump. Though the M4's additional 146GB/s is indeed a more noticeable improvement.
Also should note that 800/819GB/s of memory bandwidth is actually VERY usable for LLMs. Consider that a 4090 is just a hair above 1000GB/s
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Nope, it was common in 8 and 16 bit home computers, and in respect to PCs themselves graphics memory was mapped into the main memory until the arrival of 3D dedicated cards. And even with 3D, integrated GPUs have existed for years.
The CPUs with iGPUs didn't also have the memory on-chip. The Nintendo 64 did. Not sure about the old home computers, but I thought those had separate memory usually.
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I cannot believe I’m saying that, but: for apple that’s rather cheap. Threadripper boxes with that amount of memory do not come a lot cheaper. Considering what apples pricing when it comes to memory in other devices, 4K for the 96GB to 512GB upgrade is a bargain.
It's not that much cheaper that with earlier comparable models. Apple memory prices have been $25/GB for the base and Pro chips and $12.5/GB for the Max and Ultra chips. With the new Studios, we get $12.5/GB until 128 GB and $9.375/GB beyond that. If you configure a Threadripper workstation at Puget Systems, memory price seems to be ~$6/GB. Except if you use 128 GB modules, which are almost $10/GB. You can get 768 GB…
Meanwhile, this thing has a faster CPU, GPU, and 512GB of 800GB/s VRAM for $9,500.