4 ms·
I wouldn't buy a $7000 computer without a discrete GPU.
by modeless 3y ago
I wouldn't buy a $7000 computer without a discrete GPU.
- throw74775 3y agoWhat if you needed its other features?
- thx-2718 3y agoIt's a computer. I'm sure the other features are available in other packages in one form or another. That said, for business-to-business I bet these are great machines.
- bee_rider 3y agoIf one of your requirements is running macOS, I guess it will be hard to get elsewhere.
- throw74775 3y ago[flagged]
- bee_rider 3y agoThe PCIe slots look easy enough to get at.
- modeless 3y agoAnything you install is a brick unless hardware vendors port their drivers.
- whynotminot 3y agoIsn’t that true of any PCIe device? Is Apple supposed to develop their drivers too?
- modeless 3y agoApple is supposed to maintain good relationships with hardware vendors and support them in porting their drivers. Apple has done a poor job of this. They are practically enemies with Nvidia due to legal disputes and as a result I don't expect to see an Nvidia driver for Apple Silicon in the foreseeable future. Maybe AMD or Intel will write one but at least one should have happened before launch.
- whynotminot 3y agoAre they? I think you want a PC. Which is totally fine. Microsoft goes around playing nice with every Tom, Dick and Harry with a hardware device and a dream. Apple in recent memory has never been that company.
- jsheard 3y agoApple showed a lineup of compatible PCIe cards, with a variety of accelerators and I/O hardware but conspicuously no GPUs. https://i.imgur.com/28J1KfN.jpg https://i.imgur.com/28J1KfN.jpg The Apple Silicon transition ended support for external GPUs, so I think it's safe to assume they won't support internal ones either.
- jmkni 3y agoMan I'm so out of what's going on with desktop computing lol, feeling old Could somebody explain what these are?
- mixmastamyk 3y agoExpansion cards, they were supported by the original PC from the 80s and even before that.
- jmkni 3y agoI'm not that old lol, was wondering specifically what they were
- mixmastamyk 3y agoAs you can see they're still a thing, so you could be any age from 0-60.
- BXlnt2EachOther 3y agoleft to right, had to search a few of them. You're probably not out of it, it's just relatively niche professional stuff. Half of them are only relevant for media professionals for example. Sonnet card - adds storage via a couple SATA SSDs OWC 8M2 - adds storage via up to 8 NVME drives Avid HDX card, runs DSP for ProTools (audio) Kona 5, video capture and I/O Lynx E44, high-quality audio I/O Blackmagic decklink SDI 4k - SDI video capture ATTO high-speed ethernet card, maybe 50GbE ATTO Celerity Fibre Channel Adapter - Storage HBA edit to add linebreaks
- alwillis 3y agoYou’re not the target audience.
- Octoth0rpe 3y agoI would consider that for many people in your position, the desire for a discrete GPU is a proxy for the real desire, which could be one of several things: - Performance, which apple's GPUs may compete sufficiently with - Upgradeability, which apple's GPUs may not compete sufficiently with If all you care about is the performance, does it really matter if that perf is achieved via a discrete or integrated GPU?
- modeless 3y agoApple's GPU does not compete sufficiently with the discrete GPUs one would put in a $7000 PC.
- imdsm 3y agoOut of curiosity, what is your benchmark here? I have a $2000 RTX card that is great for games, but pretty poor for LLMs. For LLM development, I'd be much happier with a Studio and an M2 Ultra. How much would it cost me to get 192 GB in discreet cards I wonder?
- singhrac 3y agoI think the statement "I'd be much happier with a Studio" is a little hypothetical? Sorry if that's not true, but everywhere I've looked, it seems like these are not ML training chips, and people are just hoping they will handle LLMs well. You can absolutely build (with real support from the PyTorch folks) a 4x3090 deep learning workstation that has 96 GB of VRAM for roughly $7k. Or, more likely, you'll rent a A100 from AWS for ~$0.15/hr.
- dralley 3y agoDepends. The "integrated" GPU shares a memory address space with the CPU. Depending on the workload that can compensate quite a bit.
- emmelaich 3y agoWith all those thunderbolt ports you could add eight eGPUs.
- dvwobuq 3y agoBad news everyone, modeless isn't buying one. On the other hand I look forward to the steep discounts to be had at Apple's going out of business sale...