Comment by hrmtst93837
11 hours ago
> M5 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory with up to 307GB/s of memory bandwidth, while M5 Max supports up to 128GB of unified memory with up to 614GB/s of memory bandwidth.
This is the important statement. 614GB/s is quite decent, however a NVIDIA RTX 5090 already offers 1,792 GB/s (roughly 3x) of memory bandwidth, for comparison.
You're right a $3600 graphics card is worse than a $2600 laptop; but from my perspectives they're very different products. Not least of all because even at $3600 for a RTX 5090 you still have the whole rest of the computer left to purchase.
Max version with the 614GB/s is a $3599 laptop
The RTX 5090 only has 32gb of VRAM. So the tradeoff is NVIDIA is for blazing speed in a tiny memory pool, but Apple Silicon has a larger memory pool at moderate speed.
Or, there's the DGX Spark, which effectively neutralizes both of these trade-offs, and is the same price as the RTX 5090.
For reference, DGX Spark is at 273 GB/s
It's not 5090 performance though.
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I imagine the upcoming M5 Ultra will be competitive in this regard. The M3 Ultra already has 819GB/s and it's two generations behind.
> NVIDIA RTX 5090 already offers 1,792 GB/s
You can buy two m5 pro base model for the same price as a single 5090...
That's a fun comparison, but can you run those 2 m5 pros in parallel to accomplish 2x the work? Otherwise, you just told me you can buy 2 toyota corollas for the price of 1 F-150 while trying to convince me you can haul your boat behind both corollas at the same time.
You can also buy a 64gb mini, save $1k and do more work than what you could do with a single 5090.
In Europe I can get a 128gb mac studio m4 max for 300 euros more than a 5090 (for which you still need to buy a power supply, motherboard, cpu , &c.)
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