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> Pursue what though? A Mac variant that trades CPU cores for GPU/ML cores while having 192GB+ of UMA memory. > I struggle to imagine the “opportunities” Two
by brookst 4y ago
> Pursue what though?
A Mac variant that trades CPU cores for GPU/ML cores while having 192GB+ of UMA memory.
> I struggle to imagine the “opportunities”
Two of them: 1) academic / R&D compute, where people could have at least A6000 class GPU on the desktop, and 2) cloud inference servers, probably for Apple’s own services.
I’m not saying they will or should do those things, just that the apple silicon arch is well positioned if they choose to. Bolting on exponentially better GPU is not especially difficult, and they’ve got an OS that would bring existing apps and libraries right over.
Look at it this way: is there a path to UMA on Windows / Linux? If not, those systems will always duplicate RAM and require users to decide in advance whether to allocate RAM budget to OS or ML.
- smoldesu 4y agoAcademics might buy in, but they're a small market and still fairly easy to poach with quality server hardware. You may be right about Apple using them for cloud inferencing though, seeing how they'd rather pound sand than patch up their relationship with Nvidia. Whichever way you look at it though, neither of those are really opportunities. Apple boxed themselves into the consumer market, and now has to compete with professionally-priced products.
- brookst 4y agoI think you vastly overestimate the emotionality of corporate execs.