4 ms·

$3,999.00 is the entry price for the M2 Ultra. The M1 Ultra is supported by Asahi Linux and I have to say the memory bandwidth makes things like running llama.c

$3,999.00 is the entry price for the M2 Ultra. The M1 Ultra is supported by Asahi Linux and I have to say the memory bandwidth makes things like running llama.cpp way faster than Intel CPUs. The rust GPU driver is also a joy to use. Compared to the price of Two very good nvidia cards and the PC to host it I think the price is reasonable for running Linux on high end Apple Hardware. Another thing is that the memory consumption is under 20W when idle and 100W when compiling the Linux Kernel. I think you make up the money just in electricity after a few years.

mk_stjames 3y ago
I was doing a lot of playing around in Stable Diffusion when it first dropped, with scripts generating a lot- some stuff I left overnight, 12+ hour runs. My M1 Pro Macbook at doing SD inference averages about 60-70 watts, or around that I think. The inference speed is about 0.9 iterations/s (1.1s/it). Later I had time and got SD running on a workstation of mine- an HP Z840 with dual Xeons and an RTX 3090. The 3090 eats 350 watts alone, and the rest of the system sucks another 250 watts or so, for a total of 600W. The generation speed (same Euler sampler) is about 9 iterations/s. So, 10x faster than my Macbook, nearly exactly. While using 10x the power. Utilizing larger batching with the extra 3090 vram can actually result in even more throughput. But I find it interesting that it winds up being nearly the same in images-per-$.
PragmaticPulp 3y ago
> Compared to the price of Two very good nvidia cards and the PC to host it I think the price is reasonable Apple’s marketing about how they compare to nVidia GPUs has been exaggerated, to put it lightly. A pair of high end nVidia GPUs will be substantially faster than an M2 Ultra. They don’t really compare. > I think you make up the money just in electricity after a few years. You might want to check those numbers. At least where I live, I’d have to burn almost a thousand watts constantly at idle 24/7 for several years to start marking up the electricity premium. The power savings is great, but it’s not going to justify spending thousands of dollars more. I love the quietness of my M1/M2 machines, but I’m under no illusions that I’m saving money by using them.
- USB5 3y ago
  >A pair of high end nVidia GPUs will be substantially faster than an M2 Ultra By how much?
rejectfinite 3y ago
Sure but can you play Diablo 4 on it?

mk_stjames 3y ago

I was doing a lot of playing around in Stable Diffusion when it first dropped, with scripts generating a lot- some stuff I left overnight, 12+ hour runs. My M1 Pro Macbook at doing SD inference averages about 60-70 watts, or around that I think. The inference speed is about 0.9 iterations/s (1.1s/it). Later I had time and got SD running on a workstation of mine- an HP Z840 with dual Xeons and an RTX 3090. The 3090 eats 350 watts alone, and the rest of the system sucks another 250 watts or so, for a total of 600W. The generation speed (same Euler sampler) is about 9 iterations/s. So, 10x faster than my Macbook, nearly exactly. While using 10x the power. Utilizing larger batching with the extra 3090 vram can actually result in even more throughput. But I find it interesting that it winds up being nearly the same in images-per-$.

PragmaticPulp 3y ago

> Compared to the price of Two very good nvidia cards and the PC to host it I think the price is reasonable Apple’s marketing about how they compare to nVidia GPUs has been exaggerated, to put it lightly. A pair of high end nVidia GPUs will be substantially faster than an M2 Ultra. They don’t really compare. > I think you make up the money just in electricity after a few years. You might want to check those numbers. At least where I live, I’d have to burn almost a thousand watts constantly at idle 24/7 for several years to start marking up the electricity premium. The power savings is great, but it’s not going to justify spending thousands of dollars more. I love the quietness of my M1/M2 machines, but I’m under no illusions that I’m saving money by using them.

USB5 3y ago
>A pair of high end nVidia GPUs will be substantially faster than an M2 Ultra By how much?

rejectfinite 3y ago

Sure but can you play Diablo 4 on it?