[dheera]

Sure, if you want to do training get an NVIDIA card. My point is that it's not worth comparing either Mac or CPU x86 setup to anything with NVIDIA in it.

For inference setups, my point is that instead of paying $10000-$15000 for this Mac you could build an x86 system for <$5K (Epyc processor, 512GB-768GB RAM in 8-12 channels, server mobo) that does the same thing.

The "+$4000" for 512GB on the Apple configurator would be "+$1000" outside the Apple world.

[KingOfCoders]

But this is how it wonderfully works. +$4000 does two things: 1. Make Apple very very rich 2. Make people think this is better than a $10k EPYC. Win-Win for Apple. At the point when you have convinced that you are the best, higher price just means people think you are even better.

[MBCook]

> The "+$4000" for 512GB on the Apple configurator would be "+$1000" outside the Apple world.

That requires an otherwise equivalent PC to exist. I haven’t seen anyone name a PC with a half-TB of unified memory in this thread.

Yeah it’s $4k. Yeah that’s nuts. But it’s the only game in town like that. If the replacement is a $40k setup from Nvidia or whatever that’s a bargain.

[kombine]

An X86 server comparable in performance to M3 Ultra will likely be a few times more energy hungry, no?