Comment by t43562
4 hours ago
It's impressive and yet it surely depends what you're doing with it? 50% better performance isn't going to make a local LLM feel quick and yet so many other aspects of computing are quite fast anyhow. I can browse the web fairly comfortably on a Raspberry Pi and it's a bit slow but manageable.
If your goal is web browsing you will want faster single core performance. Unfortunately that means Apple M series. If your goal is local LLM, I’m afraid a several-year-old GPU will smoke the fastest CPU available today.
IIRC, compared to GPUs, M-series is currently still stuck in memory bandwidths from around 2016. M7 might catch up to 2019 or so. So GPUs will be better for LLMs for a pretty decent while.
How so? I don't know of any other mainstream platform with >1TB/s memory bandwidth. Personally I don't want to deal with macOS but between the memory bandwidth and out of box Thunderbolt networking it's hard to argue that Apple doesn't have a couple significant advantages over the current alternatives.
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