[rbanffy]

> The M2 GPU is in the same league as a 300$ mid-range nVidia card

It still has the advantage of a much larger memory pool.

I did a quick comparison exercise - I priced two workstations with similar configurations, one from Dell, the other from Apple. While there are x86 (and ARM) machines that'll blow the biggest M2 out of the water, the prices, as far as Apple can go, aren't much different.

https://twitter.com/0xDEADBEEFCAFE/status/166747612998729728...

[jeroenhd]

If you buy anything labeled as "workstation", you're paying twice the price already.

The article describes the M2 being blown out of the water by a 4080 and a 13900KS. That's about $2000 + RAM, motherboard, and power supply. Plus you can use the built in GPU in your CPU for acceleration things like transcodes.

You can get a pre-built gaming PC with a 4090 for about $4000, that'll crush the M2 in compute if you use any kind of GPU acceleration.

Of course the M2 has some other advantages (the unified memory and macOS) and some other disadvantages (you're stuck with the amount of RAM you pick at checkout, macOS, you have to sacrifice system RAM for GPU RAM) so it all depends on your use case.

I think the M2 still reigns supreme for mobile devices, though AMD is getting closer and closer with their mobile chips, but if you've got a machine hooked into the wall you'll have to pay some pretty excessive electricity rates for the M2 to become competitive.

[DaiPlusPlus]

> If you buy anything labeled as "workstation", you're paying twice the price already.

The price of workstation-class machines also includes the cost of higher build-quality and stability, things like same-day support and service - at least the option for a long-term (5-6 year) warranty, and FRUs - you don't get that with consumer-grade computers - and those things matter when a machine is something you depend on professionally.

[sounds]

Your random acronym decrypter:

FRU: Field-Replaceable Unit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-replaceable_unit

What the poster means is that a "workstation" is designed with quickly swappable components, often not even needing to use any tools. Businesses may benefit from this.

While it doesn't necessarily mean the swappable components are standardized or easy to procure, they usually are. That's a separate item that "workstation" machines typically offer: longer availability of replacement parts.

[Nullabillity]

$4k will buy you a hell of a lot of troubleshooting time before "same-day service" actually wins out.

[xbar]

I agree with your take. My plugged into the wall machine is a 128GB 13900k 4090 system. My mobile machine is an Apple Silicon Macbook Pro. There are some tasks that are still better on the unified memory of the Macbook, but only a handful. There are many tasks that are more pleasant on the Macbook because of the absurd power efficiency (DAW, Final Cut Pro).

Both machines have a quality that I appreciate: they are never, ever slow.

[avidphantasm]

You’re forgetting the benefit of everything just working and never having to thinking about effing with drivers ever. To me, it’s priceless. Anything truly performance bound (CPU or GPU) is going to be done on HPC systems, not on a fake Windows “workstation”.

[rbanffy]

> If you buy anything labeled as "workstation", you're paying twice the price already.

We are not comparing MacPros to low-end desktops.

> You can get a pre-built gaming PC with a 4090 for about $4000, that'll crush the M2 in compute if you use any kind of GPU acceleration.

Yes, but the gaming PC will not as well built as the workstation-grade machine. And pretty much any GPU you can install on a gaming PC you can install on a MacPro - it's just that it won't be there out of the (Apple branded) box.

> you're stuck with the amount of RAM you pick at checkout

Sadly, this has been Apple for some time now - you buy the machine as it will be used for its whole intended lifetime. With the MacPro you can at least add internal storage and one or more GPU cards.

[goosedragons]

AFAIK the 2023 Mac Pro doesn't support PCIe GPUs for the same reason AS Macs don't support eGPUs. It has PCIe slots you can use for other things like capture cards or whatever but not GPUs.

RAM was something you could upgrade with the 2019 Mac Pro and something you could get a lot of. 1.5TB worth. The new Mac Pro caps out at 192GB which is barely better than consumer AMD/Intel systems at the moment.

[rbanffy]

I agree some MacPro users will be forced to move to workstation or server-grade PCs, but I am sure Apple knows that and they considered having integrated memory inconsequential for the majority of their users.

Also, remember, terabytes of RAM cost A LOT of money. The Dell I priced for comparison can go way higher than 192GB, but it’ll also cost you a lot more than 7K.

[kitsunesoba]

> It still has the advantage of a much larger memory pool.

I wonder if given roughly equal power to the GPUs in current gen consoles (PS5/XBSX), it'd yield some advantage in porting console games since those consoles also have a large shared pool of memory (16GB), and neither AMD nor Nvidia want to give up using VRAM as an upsell.

[jeroenhd]

With the M2 Ultra prices, it'd be cheaper to buy a 4090 than to go the Apple route. With the M2 pro you'll probably still be better off with a 4080 unless you really need more than 16GB of VRAM.

I don't know the M2's efficiency for things like machine learning, but the M1's machine learning performance seemed to have been beaten 4-5x by the 3060Ti so I'm pretty sure "more VRAM" is all it's got going for it in ML tasks.

[kitsunesoba]

Well yeah, the market here would be people who already have a reasonably powerful Mac and would rather have that fill their gaming needs instead of having to build or buy a separate dedicated device for that.

But what I was really getting at is the trouble that game studios have been encountering lately when porting PS5 and Xbox titles to Windows, which is that these games are so reliant on those consoles' 16GB shared memory pool that they perform terribly on PCs. The impact is double, because not only are most GPUs in usage right now anemic when it comes to VRAM (even my last-gen high end 3080 Ti comes up short at only 12GB), traditional PCs also have to copy data between RAM and VRAM. Significant re-architecting for the Windows port is required to work around this.

M-series Macs are much more similar to current gen consoles with their shared memory pool, which in theory could make porting from console to Mac (at least when targeting Macs with 16GB+ of RAM) more straightforward than porting to Windows. While some work would need to be done to support Metal, the two most popular engines already do much of that legwork and the work that remains can be shared across multiple titles.

[rbanffy]

I can’t imagine using my work computer for gaming, as maintaining the software install has so many different requirements, but, then, I’m no PC gamer and would rather have a console plugged into the big TV in the living room than on my desktop monitors. It’s also much less of a hassle maintaining a console than a gaming PC.

As a side-note, my living room TV is a rather small 43 inch one (limited in size by the surrounding overflowing book shelves) but, if I were a gamer, I’d probably have gone with a 60+ inch or wall projector.

If I lived alone, I’d get an Apple Vision Pro instead of the humongous TV, as it’d be cheaper.

[avidphantasm]

Cheaper in terms of money, but in terms of time? I have a hard time justifying anything that requires configuration and dicking around. I’m a grown-up and don’t have “free time”. I need things that just work. For me, that’s not Intel and Windows or Intel and Linux. It’s macOS, which is the only true workstation platform left.

[TylerE]

This is exactly why I went from a monster PC rig to a Mac Studio. Just got tired of random components dying every year or so.

[lostmsu]

My previous rig is approaching 6 years, and the only dead component is a cheap external USB drive. The rig was mining 24/7 when it wasn't used for development or gaming. You must be doing something very wrong.

[doctorpangloss]

> It still has the advantage of a much larger memory pool.

Why do you think NVIDIA doesn't "just add" "more memory"? To its $40,000 H100s, which top out at "just" 80GB?

The answer isn't price segmentation.

[411111111111111]

Yes, it's not price segmentation, it's planned obsolescence.

The 3080 series would be fine for likely beyond the 50x0 series gpu-wise, but current games are already starting to stutter unless you downgrade textures because of its limited VRAM

[doctorpangloss]

The performance of the chip is matched to the memory size.

I think it’s a U shaped curve.

Beyond 80GB, today, the larger chip would maybe all of these: yield less, scale worse, take too much power, etc.

Like this matching of compute resources to RAM is partly the difference between CPUs and GPUs.

Anyway, it’s just to say that it isn’t a business decision. The extra RAM in the M2 doesn’t help the GPU much for the same tasks the H100 excels at, because it isn’t performant enough to use that RAM anywhere near the same way an H100 would, and if it were, there would have to be less RAM. The H100 doesn’t even have a graphics engine. It’s complicated.

[wtallis]

> The performance of the chip is matched to the memory size.

That may be approximately true if you only look at a single generation of consumer graphics cards at a time. If you compare across generations or include non-gaming workloads the correlation falls apart.