Comment by SXX
2 months ago
They can do it, but that gonna need to be different SKU not Mac Studio. Otherwise news will be full of discussions about Apple price hike from $8000 to $24,000 or who the hell knows $48,000.
So yeah the only way I see them selling it is usual "call us" enterprise price tag.
But since its not what Apple usually do its easier to sell 4x Mac Studio 256GB RAM boxes with interconnect for lets say $12,000 - $15,000 each.
I don't think it's needs 'call us' just a separate SKU, I mean if they called it Xserve Ultra and it was just a studio in a 1u format with dual PSUs and extra RAM, it would fly off the shelves.
Isn't that the same thing you can get from ordinary 2S Epyc/Xeon servers at a similar price that have 24 memory channels (when the M3 Ultra has the equivalent of 16)?
And the reason people rarely use that for AI is that the enterprise GPUs from AMD and Nvidia are only moderately more expensive but are significantly faster because they use HBM instead of DDR5.
Yeah kind of, I think a 24 channels DDR5 works out approx 1TB/s, but the cost is astronomical, a M5 studio would probably beat that performance for around half the cost. You also get to use the GPU/NPU cores of the mac vs CPU only on the servers. M5 ultra studio with 128GB RAM could probably beat out a sever with a RTX 6000 pro at half the price.
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Imagine if they bring back the Mac Pro with 768GB of ram to compete with the $100k DGX Station.
A very good idea, the Mac Pro also had a rack mount option didn't it? That would be the kind of thing you could sell as many as you could make.
> That would be the kind of thing you could sell as many as you could make.
People said that about the M1 Ultra Mac Pro, a few years before it was discontinued. I don't think there are many HPC customers looking at Apple hardware.
The timing of the demise of the Mac Pro has been about as bad as the Steam Machine launch timing.
You mean the Mac Pro that was still on the M2 and hadn't been updated for 3+ years?