4 ms·
Pretty sure this has absolutely nothing to do with Deepseek and even local LLM at large, which has been a thing for a while and an obvious use case original Lla
by tgma 2y ago
Pretty sure this has absolutely nothing to do with Deepseek and even local LLM at large, which has been a thing for a while and an obvious use case original Llama leak and llama.cpp coming around.
Fact is Mac Pros in the Intel days supported 1.5TB RAM in some configurations[1] and that was 6 years ago expectations of their high end customer base. They needed to address the gap for those customers so they would have shipped such a product regardless. Local LLM is cherry-on-top. Deepseek in particular almost certainly had nothing to do with it. They will still need to double their supported RAM in their SoC to get there. Perhaps in a Mac Pro or a different quad-Max-glued chip.
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/101639 https://support.apple.com/en-us/101639
- saagarjha 2y agoThe thing that people are excited about here is unified memory that the GPU can address. Mac Pro had discrete GPUs with their own memory.
- water9 2y agoIntel integrated graphics, technically also used unified memory with the standard dram
- McDaveNZ 2y agoDid the Xeons in the Mac Pro even have integrated graphics?
- kergonath 2y agoThose also have terrible performance and worse bandwidth. I am not sure they are really relevant, to be honest.
- icedchai 2y agoSo did the Amiga, almost 40 years ago...
- vaxman 2y agoYou mean this? ;) http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Amiga_1000_PAL.jpg http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Amiga_1000_PAL.jpg RIP Jay Miner who watched his unified memory daughters Agnus, Denise and Paula be slowly murdered by Jack Tramiel's vengeance against Irving Gould. [Why couldn't the shareholders have stormed their boardroom 180 days before the company ran out of cash, installed interim management who, in turn, would have brought back the megalomaniac Founder that would, until his dying breath, keep spreading their cash to the super brilliant geniuses that made all the magic chips happen and then turn the resulting empire over to ops people to make their workplace so uncomfortable they all retire early and live happily ever after on tropical islands and snowy mountain tops?]
- icedchai 2y agoYep! Though one could argue the Amiga wasn't true unified memory due to the chip RAM limitations. Depending on the Agnus revision, you'd be limited to 512, 1 meg, or 2 meg max of RAM addressable by the custom chips ("chip RAM".)
- vaxman 2y agofun fact: M-series that are configured to use more than 75% of shared memory for GPU can make the system go boom...something to do with assumptions macOS makes that can be fixed by someone with a "private key" to access kernel mode (maybe not a hardware limit).
- icedchai 2y agoI messed around with that setting on one of my Macs. I wanted to load a large LLM model and it needed more than 75% of shared memory.
- tgma 2y agoI understand why they are excited about it—just pointing out it is a happy coincidence. They would have and should have made such a product to address the need of RAM users alone, not VRAM in particular, before they have a credible case to cut macOS releases on Intel.