Comment by LoganDark
9 hours ago
Is it more powerful than Apple silicon, or why would anyone buy this? Just for Linux?
Oh, it's System76, that's why. Open hardware. Makes sense.
Edit: Also Nvidia
9 hours ago
Is it more powerful than Apple silicon, or why would anyone buy this? Just for Linux?
Oh, it's System76, that's why. Open hardware. Makes sense.
Edit: Also Nvidia
The prefill rates are way faster on these cards compared to apple silicon, which affects TTFT and therefore usability for a lot of coding tasks, unless you fire and forget most of the time.
Mac GPUs supposedly being fastest thing on Earth obsoleting everything NVIDIA is just pure marketing. It was just faster once than some midrange laptop NVIDIA, which conveniently wasn't explicitly marked as different chip sharing the branding with the desktop variant(oof).
The real benefits to going Mac is its quiet and discreet, high wife/CEO acceptance design, and their huge GPU-assignable shared RAM.
If you're okay with your desk being the wing top of a flying airplane, and 3M Peltor or David-Clark is your favorite working time headphone brand anyway, then your build will be faster and cheaper than a maxed out Mac Studio.
For me the operating system (and ecosystem in general) is one of the biggest reasons I use a Mac, but the unified memory pool is a benefit too. I am still distraught about the gaming situation though.
It is more powerful than Apple.
I wonder why Apple has not really pushed their memory bandwidth numbers. They're starting to catch up to 2020 at this point -- cool, but still struggling to run years-old models. (FLOPS is even further behind by a year or two)
Maybe they're waiting on HBM? Given that they're skipping M6 Max to go straight for M7, I'd assume they're doing a redesign for it.
GDDR has higher latency and much lower capacity. HBM requires an interposer and also has lower capacity. It's not an easy choice. The M7 family will probably double memory bandwidth using LPDDR6.
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