Comment by api
12 days ago
No way buying a bunch of minis could be as efficient as much denser GPU racks. You have to consider all the logistics and power draw, and high end nVidia stuff and probably even AMD stuff is faster than M series GPUs.
What this does offer is a good alternative to GPUs for smaller scale use and research. At small scale it’s probably competitive.
Apple wants to dominate the pro and serious amateur niches. Feels like they’re realizing that local LLMs and AI research is part of that, is the kind of thing end users would want big machines to do.
Exactly: The AI appliance market. A new kind of home or small-business server.
I’m expecting Apple to release a new Mac Pro in the next couple years who’s main marketing angle is exactly this
Seems like it could be a thing.
Also, I’m curious and in case anyone that knows reads this comment:
Apple say they can’t get the performance they want out of discreet GPUs.
Fair enough. But yet nVidia becomes the most valuable company in the world selling GPUs.
So…
Now I get that Apples use case is essentially sealed consumer devices built with power consumption and performance tradeoffs in mind.
But could Apple use its Apple Silicon tech to build a Mac Pro with its own expandable GPU options?
Or even other brand GPUs knowing they would be used for AI research etc…. If Apple ever make friends with nVidia again of course :-/
What we know of Tim Cooks Apple is that it doesn’t like to leave money on the table, and clearly they are right now!
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It’s really the only common reason to buy a machine that big these days. I could see a Mac Pro with a huge GPU and up to a terabyte of RAM.
I guess there are other kinds of scientific simulation, very large dev work, and etc., but those things are quite a bit more niche.
> I’m expecting Apple to release a new Mac Pro in the next couple years
I think Apple is done with expansion slots, etc.
You'll likely see M5 Mac Studios fairly soon.
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I fear they no longer care about the workstation market, even the folks at ATP Podcast are at the verge of accepting it.
Power draw? A entire Mac Pro running flat out uses less power than 1 5090. If you have a workload that needs a huge memory footprint then the tco of the Macs, even with their markup may be lower.