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Couldn't you buy a Mac Ultra with more memory for the same price?
by brian_herman 10mo ago
Couldn't you buy a Mac Ultra with more memory for the same price?
- simlevesque 10mo agoCuda is king
- MangoToupe 10mo agoStill? Really? Why?
- baby_souffle 10mo agoInertia. Almost everybody else was asleep at the wheel for the last decade and you do not catch up to that kind of sustained investment overnight.
- embedding-shape 10mo agoFor how shit it all is, it's still the easiest to use, with most available resources when you inevitable need to dig through stuff. Just things like nsight GUI and available debugging options ends up bringing together a better developer experience compared to other ecosystems. I do hope the competitors get better though because the current de facto monopoly helps no-one.
- whywhywhywhy 10mo agoBetter support than MPS and nothing Apple is shipping today can compete with even the high end consumer CUDA devices in actual speed.
- MangoToupe 10mo agoPresumably the second point is irrelevant if you're choosing among devices with unified memory.
- bigyabai 10mo agoIt is not. Unified memory is not a panacea, it says nothing about the compute performance of the hardware. The Spark's GPU gets ~4x the FP16 compute performance of an M3 Ultra GPU on less than half the Mac Studio's total TDP.
- MangoToupe 10mo agoright, but that doesn't describe a "high end consumer CUDA device". Nothing under that description has unified memory.
- bigyabai 10mo agoEvery CUDA-compatible GPU has had support for unified memory since 2014: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/unified-memory-cuda-beginners/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/unified-memory-cuda-beginn... Can you be a bit more specific what technology you're actually referring to? "Unified memory" is just a marketing term, you could mean unified address space, dual-use memory controllers, SOC integration or Northbridge coprocessors. All are technologies that Nvidia has shipped in consumer products at one point or another, though (Nintendo Switch, Tegra Infotainment, 200X MacBook to name a few).
- nl 10mo agoThey mean the ability to run a large model entirely on the GPU without paging it out of a separate memory system.
- jsheard 10mo agoThis Asus box costs $3000, and the cheapest Mac Studio with the same amount of RAM costs $3500, or $3700 if you also match the SSD capacity. You do get about twice as much memory bandwidth out of the Mac though.
- chrsw 10mo agoWhat's the cheapest way to get the same memory and memory bandwidth as a Mac Studio but also CUDA support?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- embedding-shape 10mo agoCUDA is only on nvidia GPUs, I guess a RTX Pro 6000 would get you close, two of them are 192GB in total. Vastly increased memory bandwidth too. Maybe two/four of the older A100/A6000 could do the trick too.
- deeviant 10mo agoRTX pro does not have NV-link, because money, however. Otherwise, people might not have to drop 40,000 for true inference GPU.
- bigyabai 10mo agoSomehow, it is still cheaper to own 10x RTX 3060s than it is to buy a 120gb Mac.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- woodson 10mo agoThe Mac will be much smaller and use less power, though.
- aljgz 10mo agoMy reasons for not choosing an Apple product for such a use-case: 1- I vote with my wallet, do I want to pay a company to be my digital overlord, doing everything they can to keep me inside their ecosystem? I put too much effort to earn my freedom to give it up that easily. 2- Software: Almost certainly, I would want to run linux on this. Do I want to have something that has or eventually will have great mainstream linux support, or something with closed specs that people in Asahi try to support with incredible skills and effort? I prefer the system with openly available specs. I've extensively used mac, iphone, ipad over time. The only apple device I ever bought was an ipad, and I would never buy it, if I knew they deliberately disable multitasking on it.
- dbtc 10mo agoNot disagreeing with any of your points, but this is a good trend right? https://github.com/apple/container https://github.com/apple/container > container is a tool that you can use to create and run Linux containers as lightweight virtual machines on your Mac. It's written in Swift, and optimized for Apple silicon.
- bigyabai 10mo agoThat would have been an impressive piece of technology in 2015, when WSL was theoretical. To release it in 2025 is a very bad trend, and it reflects Apple's isolation from competition and reluctance to officially support basic dev features. Container does nothing to progress the state of supporting Linux on Apple Silicon. It does not replace macOS, iBoot or the other proprietary, undocumented or opaque software blobs on the system. All it does is keep people using macOS and purchasing Apple products and viewing Apple advertisements.