Apple today announced the new Mac Studio, the most powerful Mac ever made, featuring M4 Max and the new M3 Ultra chip.

  • BCsven@lemmy.ca
    20·
    4 days ago

    It would be bad if it was the least powerful Mac ever, It makes mW laugh they need to tell people it is the most powerful everytime

      • TehPers@beehaw.orgEnglish
        3·
        4 days ago

        A single 128GB mainboard is $2000, so four of them is $8000. Not the same as a machine with 512GB of unified memory.

        For the M4 Mac Studio, it costs $4800 to upgrade from 32GB to 128GB. I believe everything else “base model” is $2000, for a total of $6800, but this is also a full working computer and not just a mainboard.

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
    8·
    4 days ago

    Holy shit.

    M3 Ultra chip with 32-core CPU, 80‑core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine, 512 RAM

    Still a ton of money, but I’m salivating. M4 is only Max at this point, but now I’m dreaming about what that might become.

    I wonder if this will be the game plan going forward, with the Ultra chip lagging by a year. Seems a likely cadence.

    • jarfil@beehaw.org
      5·
      4 days ago

      M3 Ultra chip with 32-core CPU, 80‑core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine, 512 RAM

      That RAM is nice, but core count doesn’t say much at this point: there are different cores with different architectures, multithreading, pipelining, caches, speeds, etc.

      I’d rather see a TOPS comparison:

      • M3: claims 18 TOPS
      • M4: up to 38 TOPS
      • nVidia H100: up to 3900 TOPS/TFLOPS (INT8/FP8)

      Meta is claiming to have 350,000 H100s, to put things into perspective.

      • IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org
        4·
        4 days ago

        I mean, sure, but largely GPU-based TOPS isn’t that good a comparison with a CPU+GPU mixture. Most tasks can’t be parallelized that well, so comparing TOPS between an APU and a TPU/GPU is not apples to apples (heh).

        • jarfil@beehaw.org
          4·
          3 days ago

          Agreed, but my point is that stating “x-core CPU, y-core GPU, z-core NPU”, is basically non-information.

          • CPUs run general logical processing
          • GPUs run integer/float matrices
          • NPUs run minimal effort matrices for inference

          I’d like to see the TOPS for each of those, instead of a “core count” that tells me nothing about actual performance. Even the TOPS are orientative… but would be a good start.

    • sanzky@beehaw.org
      2·
      4 days ago

      I think the next ultras won’t use the fusion thing and will be just a larger die. (the m4 max does not seem to have the connector) so it might take them a bit to sort it out.