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IMO its more nuanced. They're likely in production ramp-up of the M5 Ultra Mac Studio, for release in the next ~3 months; they have pre-purchased bins of memory
by 827a 7mo ago
IMO its more nuanced. They're likely in production ramp-up of the M5 Ultra Mac Studio, for release in the next ~3 months; they have pre-purchased bins of memory from the supply-constrained major memory supplies; and they need as much as they can get because they want to push an M5 Ultra config to 768gb to continue the "you can run local models" story that the M5 Max Macbook Pro started telling last week.
Going beyond 512gb and into 768gb memory is something of a threshold that will allow Apple to claim local capability for significantly more models. Qwen3-235B, Minimax M2.5, and GLM 4.7 could kind of run with no quantization on 512gb, but they'll comfortably run at 768gb. DeepSeek-V3.2 and GLM 5 may also work at some level of quantization.
- taf2 7mo agoI hope you are right
- criddell 7mo agoIs Apple telling the "you can run local models" story, or is it third parties?
- wahnfrieden 7mo agoYes Apple promotes local model capabilities in their marketing
- 827a 7mo agoYes: > A powerful Neural Accelerator is built into each GPU core of the M5 family of chips, which dramatically speeds up AI tasks like image generation from diffusion models, large language model (LLM) prompt processing, and on-device transformer model training. [1] [1] https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/
- bytesandbits 7mo agoApple
- bytesandbits 7mo agohttps://machinelearning.apple.com/research/exploring-llms-mlx-m5 https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/exploring-llms-ml...
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- lolive 7mo agoWhat’s the price of that beast? #meCryingTearsOfBlood
- 827a 7mo agoApple will be the first company to pioneer a new "work for tokens" program; simply commit yourself to six months of servitude with The Company to pay off your new Mac Studio purchase.
- unfocused 7mo agoLess than $10,000, depending on what CPU and storage you select.
- alsetmusic 7mo agoHeh heh, I see you're new to Apple's incredible shamelessness in price-gouging memory. Just kidding, I'm sure you're aware. I just wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see them go well beyond that.
- bombcar 7mo agoLet's assume a Mac Studio M5 would start at $1999, and that a M5 Max upgrade 128 GB would be about the 1000 it is now. Then an M5 Ultra 768 would be something like $1999 + 1000 + $4000 - cheaper than the current top of the line (which will never happen) so I'd presume about the same $10,000. Or they could finally make the Mac Pro respectable and have it two M5 Ultra Mac Studios stuck together (or give it NUMA RAM: on chip + expandable).
- rewgs 7mo agoMy theory is that they're going to release a new Mac Pro that's about half the size of the current one. Enough space for some PCIe slots, but otherwise smaller given the enormous amount of wasted space in that thing since moving from Intel to Apple Silicon. Guessing the rack-mount model, should they continue selling it, will be 3 or 4u instead of 5u. I know everyone thinks they're going to just kill it, but I don't see it. Apple's move under Tim Cook has been to exhaust supplies (see: filling the Intel Mac Pro chassis with air and not updating the CPU), letting people predict its death (see: 2013 -> 2019 Mac Pro silence), and then redesigning it into something people want while utilizing it as an opportunity to segment specs across their SKUs. The Studio will remain the high-powered creator machine, whereas the Mac Pro will be retooled into an AI beast.
- thefounder 7mo agoWhy people buy the Studio with the high ram config is actually the unified memory. This is unique to Apple. I'm not sure what Mac Pro would do with PCIe cards . It would be useless for AI because what you want is unified memory that can be used by the GPU/AI not just ram.
- rewgs 7mo agoPCIe cards would indeed be useless for AI unless Apple supports third-party GPUs, but there are certainly some pro creators that would still prefer to have them. I myself work in large-template film/game scoring and while we all love our Mac Studios, they're usually housed in a Sonnet chassis so that we can continue to use PCIe cards. Had Apple kept them in parity with the Studio w/r/t CPU and RAM, the rack-mount version of the Pro would've been a no-brainer.
- 827a 7mo agoIts not entirely unique to Apple: the Ryzen AI Max platform (in the e.g. Framework Desktop) is a unified memory platform. The PlayStation 5 also has a unified memory architecture (which given the chiplet was made by AMD, not too surprising) (people sleep on PlayStation hardware engineering; they're far better at skating to where the puck is headed than most hardware tech companies. remember Cell?)
- thefounder 7mo agowhy just 768gb and not a ~1TB ?
- halJordan 7mo agoYou have to ask why Apple is going to nickel and dime you?