[petercooper]

They could treat the extreme spec machines separately from the prosumer ones, like they did with the Xserve. Let business customers spec up to 768GB (say) who are prepared for a $20-25k price tag, while keeping them away from the stores and usual consumer supply chains (Amazon et al). It may not be a big enough market segment for them to care about anymore, though.

[SXX]

They can do it, but that gonna need to be different SKU not Mac Studio. Otherwise news will be full of discussions about Apple price hike from $8000 to $24,000 or who the hell knows $48,000.

So yeah the only way I see them selling it is usual "call us" enterprise price tag.

But since its not what Apple usually do its easier to sell 4x Mac Studio 256GB RAM boxes with interconnect for lets say $12,000 - $15,000 each.

[matt-p]

I don't think it's needs 'call us' just a separate SKU, I mean if they called it Xserve Ultra and it was just a studio in a 1u format with dual PSUs and extra RAM, it would fly off the shelves.

[AnthonyMouse]

Isn't that the same thing you can get from ordinary 2S Epyc/Xeon servers at a similar price that have 24 memory channels (when the M3 Ultra has the equivalent of 16)?

And the reason people rarely use that for AI is that the enterprise GPUs from AMD and Nvidia are only moderately more expensive but are significantly faster because they use HBM instead of DDR5.

[matt-p]

Yeah kind of, I think a 24 channels DDR5 works out approx 1TB/s, but the cost is astronomical, a M5 studio would probably beat that performance for around half the cost. You also get to use the GPU/NPU cores of the mac vs CPU only on the servers. M5 ultra studio with 128GB RAM could probably beat out a sever with a RTX 6000 pro at half the price.

[AnthonyMouse]

24 channels of DDR5-6400 is 1.2TB/s, M3 ultra is 0.8TB/s. They both use DDR5-6400.

> a M5 studio would probably beat that performance for around half the cost.

A barebones 2S system with no CPUs or memory is ~$2000, a pair of 16 core CPUs another ~$1000 each, and then however much memory you want. The price seems pretty comparable. The "problem" with doing this is actually that 128GB is too little memory, because you want to populate all the channels, but even using 16GB sticks, 24x16GB is already 384GB.

> You also get to use the GPU/NPU cores of the mac vs CPU only on the servers.

You only need enough cores to make sure the bottleneck is memory bandwidth.

[matt-p]

M3 ultra is obviously 1-2 generations behind and new the studio is expected 'any day now. Even if this was M4 Ultra it would still be ~comparable to any EPYC system in bandwidth, but get to use the GPU for compute so potentially faster than the EPYC. Total Cost of Ownership in the Epyc is going to be WAY higher because of electricity costs, the EYPC is going to be consuming probably 5X the electricity and is probably not going to sit quietly on your desk. More RAM though, but again it's more about the ratio of RAM (size) to RAM (Memory Bandwith) to Compute and you may find a model bigger than e.g 70b suddenly is bottlenecked by the CPUs or memory bandwidth and therefore the extra RAM (size) is wasted. But maybe not, different use cases will yeild different results I guess.

> A barebones 2S system with no CPUs or memory is ~$2000, a pair of 16 core CPUs another ~$1000 each, and then however much memory you want.

As you say, the thing is it's not 'however much memory you want' it's 24 sticks which at $300 a stick for 16GB is $7200, then you also need at least one NVME disk so you're looking at what $13,000?

[spwa4]

> but even using 16GB sticks, 24x16GB is already 384GB.

Question: you need 16GB sticks because they're the smallest doublesided ones, which you need for maximum BW, right? Otherwise why not 8G?

[porphyra]

Imagine if they bring back the Mac Pro with 768GB of ram to compete with the $100k DGX Station.

[matt-p]

A very good idea, the Mac Pro also had a rack mount option didn't it? That would be the kind of thing you could sell as many as you could make.

[bigyabai]

> That would be the kind of thing you could sell as many as you could make.

People said that about the M1 Ultra Mac Pro, a few years before it was discontinued. I don't think there are many HPC customers looking at Apple hardware.

[newsclues]

The timing of the demise of the Mac Pro has been about as bad as the Steam Machine launch timing.

[icedchai]

You mean the Mac Pro that was still on the M2 and hadn't been updated for 3+ years?

[rdsubhas]

> Let business customers spec up to 768GB who are prepared for a $20-25k price tag

There is a clear difference between $25k and $100k.

64 iPhones at retail price is already around $64k. For something at 768GB to be profitable at Apple's terms, this has to retail at $100k for it to be profitable. That was the OP's point.

[waffletower]

They'll sell more $20-25k Macs when Goldman green lights Apple Card credit limits that will fit one of them.

[zerohp]

Apple Card already offers credit limits high enough for it

[andy_ppp]

Honestly you're still looking at (from my understanding) ~3 minutes prefill (TTFT) even with architectural improvements and so on with a 32k context window (against a large model). How is this going to be competitive with Nvidia and all of the tricks massive scale get's you to parallelise context across many machines?

[mrngld]

Is it supposed to be? I think the point with some of these Macs is you get the capability in something the size of a heatsink from Intel's Netburst architecture era, or a Macbook light enough to stick in a backpack and take with you to lunch.

If you're talking about chaining together multiple GPUs you're talking about a different game -- I suspect, anyway. Seems like a high-spec Mac would be good for development and testing. Arrays of GPUs, better aimed at production use.