| > with a vanishingly small fraction of flops and a small fraction of memory bandwidth Is it though? Wikipedia says [1] an M3 Max can do 14 TFLOPS of FP32, so an M3 Ultra ought to do 28 TFLOPS. nVidia claims [2] a Blackwell GPU does 80 TFLOPs of FP32. So M3 Ultra is 1/3 the speed of a Blackwell. Calling that "a vanishingly small fraction" seems like a bit of an exaggeration. I mean, by that metric, a single Blackwell GPU only has "a vanishingly small fraction" of the memory of an M3 Ultra. And the M3 Ultra is only burning "a vanishingly small fraction" of a Blackwell's electrical power. nVidia likes throwing around numbers like "20 petaFLOPs" for FP4, but that's not real floating point... it's just 1990's-vintage uLaw/aLaw integer math. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_silicon#Comparison_of_M-... [2] https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-blackwell-architecture/da... Edit: Further, most (all?) of the TFLOPs numbers you see on nVidia datasheets for "Tensor FLOPs" have a little asterisk next to them saying they are "effective" TFLOPs using the sparsity feature, where half the elements of the matrix multiplication are zeroed. |
Blackwell and modern AI chips are built for fp16. B100 has 1750 tflops of fp16. M3 ultra has ~80tflops of fp16 or about 4% that of b100