[anonym29]

>The 128 GB Strix Halo system was tempting me, but I think I'm going to hold out for the Medusa Point

I was initially thinking this way too, but I realized a 128GB Strix Halo system would make an excellent addition to my homelab / LAN even once it's no longer the star of the stable for LLM inference - i.e. I will probably get a Medusa Halo system as well once they're available. My other devices are Zen 2 (3600x) / Zen 3 (5950x) / Zen 4 (8840u), an Alder Lake N100 NUC, a Twin Lake N150 NUC, along with a few Pi's and Rockchip SBC's, so a Zen 5 system makes a nice addition to the high end of my lineup anyway. Not to mention, everything else I have maxed out at 2.5GbE. I've been looking for an excuse to upgrade my switch from 2.5GbE to 5 or 10 GbE, and the Strix Halo system I ordered was the BeeLink GTR9 Pro with dual 10GbE. Regardless of whether it's doing LLM, other gen AI inference, some extremely light ML training / light fine tuning, media transcoding, or just being yet another UPS-protected server on my LAN, there's just so much capability offered for this price and TDP point compared to everything else I have.

Apple Silicon would've been a serious competitor for me on the price/performance front, but I'm right up there with RMS in terms of ideological hostility towards proprietary kernels. I'm not totally perfect (privacy and security are a journey, not a destination), but I am at the point where I refuse to use anything running an NT or Darwin kernel.

[jtbaker]

That is sweet! The extent of my cluster is a few Pis that talk to the Mac Mini over the LAN for inference stuff, that I could definitely use some headroom on. I tried to integrate it into the cluster directly by running k3s in colima - but to join an existing cluster via IP, I had to run colima in host networking mode - so any pods on the mini that were trying to do CoreDNS networking were hitting collisions with mDNSResponder when dialing port 53 for DNS. Finally decided that the macs are nice machines but not a good fit for a member of a cluster.

Love that AMD seems to be closing the gap on the performance _and_ power efficiency of Apple Silicon with the latest Ryzen advancements. Seems like one of these new miniPCs would be a dream setup to run a bunch of data and AI centric hobby projects on - particularly workloads like geospatial imagery processing in addition to the LLM stuff. Its a fun time to be a tinkerer!