5 ms·

That's a pretty important just. They chose to go down this path at this time and shipped, now I can run the 64B Llama on a widely available $3,999 prosumer devi

That's a pretty important just. They chose to go down this path at this time and shipped, now I can run the 64B Llama on a widely available $3,999 prosumer device. How much would a PC that can do that currently cost me and can I have it by tomorrow?

smoldesu 4y ago
puts on my jaded realist hat It's a great option if you have the hardware and want the speed. It's table stakes when other vendors like Nvidia, Intel, Qualcomm and Microsoft have acceleration though. Raw-compute-for-the-buck has always been a blowout with Apple Silicon GPUs, and it's not any prettier now that 4nm 40XX series cards are available. Hell, an Intel A770 with 16gb of VRAM is still cheaper than adding 16gb of RAM to a Mac Mini. It's good stuff, but pitched a bit hard with all the marketing. From where I'm standing, it looks like Apple is playing catch-up with their GPUs and acceleration tech. tentatively removes hat of jaded realism
jokethrowaway 4y ago
You can buy a prebuilt pc with a 4090 for less - which is significantly more powerful but still in the 3xxx$. You could go cheaper with a 3090 which has the same vram and it's just slower. I think the best combo is a serious Nvidia pc for AI + a cheap MacBook air for portability.
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  There's even an Asus laptop with a 4099 for 3999$
  - fomine3 4y ago
    Laptop 4090 is desktop 4080
- MacsHeadroom 4y ago
  You need two 3090s or 4090s to fit 65B even in 4bit. It's a big one. That said, if you're fine with slower speeds then two P40s could get the job done for $150 each. (Not sure how much slower this would go though.)
KVFinn 4y ago
>How much would a PC that can do that currently cost me and can I have it by tomorrow? At the moment, seems like Apple has an edge here. On PC for single GPU you need an NVIDIA A40, which used prices for is about $2500, and not at retail stores. If you don't mind having two GPUs then two $800 3090 GPUs works, but that's a workstation build you'll have to order from Puget or something. That's probably faster than Apple. My gut instinct is that there's some low hanging fruit here and in the next couple weeks 64B Llama will run comparably or faster on any PC with a single 4090/3090 and 64 or 128 GB of system memory. But probably not any PC laptops that aren't 17 inch beasts, Apple will keep that advantage.
- brookst 4y ago
  …and for models that require 64GB of VRAM? 120GB of VRAM? You can get a 128GB UMA mac for less than a single 48GB a100, let alone a single 96GB a100. I think Apple got incredibly lucky here, but I don’t see how the PC world catches them any time soon. We’ve all known that UMA is theoretically better for ages, but Apple’s timing couldn’t be better. And scale economies mean they can sell the same chip to people who need 100GB of system RAM and people who need 100GB of VRAM. If they can get their GPU / neural performance up and sort out their terrible relationship with academic research, they could snipe ML away from nvidia. It seems very unlikely, but it’s kind of stunning that it’s even in the realm of possibility.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    > they could snipe ML away from nvidia. If Nvidia announced tomorrow that they were cancelling every datacenter deal they had, open-sourcing CUDA and publishing their entire patent library to the creative commons, I would still not believe you. This is a fun project for people with Apple Silicon machines who want to participate in the AI happenings, but I don't think you can warp it into a call for Nvidia's head. Let's wait until Apple pulls the curtains on their rackmount Mac Pros, so we can compare it with Nvidia's ARM server offerings: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/grace-cpu/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/grace-cpu/
    - 4y ago

smoldesu 4y ago

puts on my jaded realist hat It's a great option if you have the hardware and want the speed. It's table stakes when other vendors like Nvidia, Intel, Qualcomm and Microsoft have acceleration though. Raw-compute-for-the-buck has always been a blowout with Apple Silicon GPUs, and it's not any prettier now that 4nm 40XX series cards are available. Hell, an Intel A770 with 16gb of VRAM is still cheaper than adding 16gb of RAM to a Mac Mini. It's good stuff, but pitched a bit hard with all the marketing. From where I'm standing, it looks like Apple is playing catch-up with their GPUs and acceleration tech. tentatively removes hat of jaded realism

jokethrowaway 4y ago

You can buy a prebuilt pc with a 4090 for less - which is significantly more powerful but still in the 3xxx$. You could go cheaper with a 3090 which has the same vram and it's just slower. I think the best combo is a serious Nvidia pc for AI + a cheap MacBook air for portability.

jokethrowaway 4y ago
There's even an Asus laptop with a 4099 for 3999$
- fomine3 4y ago
  Laptop 4090 is desktop 4080
MacsHeadroom 4y ago
You need two 3090s or 4090s to fit 65B even in 4bit. It's a big one. That said, if you're fine with slower speeds then two P40s could get the job done for $150 each. (Not sure how much slower this would go though.)

KVFinn 4y ago

>How much would a PC that can do that currently cost me and can I have it by tomorrow? At the moment, seems like Apple has an edge here. On PC for single GPU you need an NVIDIA A40, which used prices for is about $2500, and not at retail stores. If you don't mind having two GPUs then two $800 3090 GPUs works, but that's a workstation build you'll have to order from Puget or something. That's probably faster than Apple. My gut instinct is that there's some low hanging fruit here and in the next couple weeks 64B Llama will run comparably or faster on any PC with a single 4090/3090 and 64 or 128 GB of system memory. But probably not any PC laptops that aren't 17 inch beasts, Apple will keep that advantage.

brookst 4y ago
…and for models that require 64GB of VRAM? 120GB of VRAM? You can get a 128GB UMA mac for less than a single 48GB a100, let alone a single 96GB a100. I think Apple got incredibly lucky here, but I don’t see how the PC world catches them any time soon. We’ve all known that UMA is theoretically better for ages, but Apple’s timing couldn’t be better. And scale economies mean they can sell the same chip to people who need 100GB of system RAM and people who need 100GB of VRAM. If they can get their GPU / neural performance up and sort out their terrible relationship with academic research, they could snipe ML away from nvidia. It seems very unlikely, but it’s kind of stunning that it’s even in the realm of possibility.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  > they could snipe ML away from nvidia. If Nvidia announced tomorrow that they were cancelling every datacenter deal they had, open-sourcing CUDA and publishing their entire patent library to the creative commons, I would still not believe you. This is a fun project for people with Apple Silicon machines who want to participate in the AI happenings, but I don't think you can warp it into a call for Nvidia's head. Let's wait until Apple pulls the curtains on their rackmount Mac Pros, so we can compare it with Nvidia's ARM server offerings: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/grace-cpu/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/grace-cpu/
  - 4y ago