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- GPU is integrated into the SoC - Surprisingly, it is possible to plug a drive into a TB/USB port …so what do you actually need PCIe for?
by aprilnya 6mo ago
- GPU is integrated into the SoC
- Surprisingly, it is possible to plug a drive into a TB/USB port
…so what do you actually need PCIe for?
- gizajob 6mo agoThings that aren’t graphics cards, such very high bandwidth video capture cards and any other equipment that needs a lot of lanes of PCI data at low latency.
- HeWhoLurksLate 6mo agobut what about second GPU?
- wtallis 6mo agoMultiple GPUs was tried, by the whole industry including Apple (most notably with the trash can Mac Pro). Despite significant investment, it was ultimately a failure for consumer workloads like gaming, and was relegated to the datacenter and some very high-end workstations depending on the workload. Multi-GPU has recently experienced a resurgence due to the discovery of new workloads with broader appeal (LLMs), but that's too new to have significantly influenced hardware architectures, and LLM inference isn't the most natural thing to scale across many GPUs. Everybody's still competing with more or less the architectures they had on hand when LLMs arrived, with new low-precision matrix math units squeezed in wherever room can be made. It's not at all clear yet what the long-term outcome will be in terms of the balance between local vs cloud compute for inference, whether there will be any local training/fine-tuning at all, and which use cases are ultimately profitable in the long run. All of that influences whether it would be worthwhile for Apple to abandon their current client-first architecture that standardizes on a single integrated GPU and omits/rejects the complexity of multi-GPU setups.
- jltsiren 6mo agoHigh-end Macs have moved to PCIe 5.0 speeds in their internal drives. Thunderbolt 5 is not fast enough to get the same performance from external ones. Thunderbolt is also too slow for higher-end networks. A single port is already insufficient for 100-gigabit speeds.
- vlovich123 6mo agoWhen people talk about 100gigabit networks for Macs, im really curious what kind of network you run at home and how much money you spent on it. Even at work I’m generally seeing 10gigabit network ports with 100gigabit+ only in data centers where macs don’t have a presence
- Forgeties79 6mo agoI work in media production and I have the same thought constantly. Hell I curse in church as far as my industry is concerned because I find 2.5 to be fine for most of us. 10 absolutely.
- nine_k 6mo agoI suppose the throughput is not the key, latency is. When you split ann operation that normally ran within one machine between two machines, anything that crosses the boundary becomes orders of magnitude slower. Even with careful structuring, there are limits of how little and how rarely you can send data between nodes. I suppose that splitting an LLM workload is pretty sensitive to that.
- AdamN 6mo ago100gbps is going to be for mesh networks supporting clusters (4 Mac Studios let's just say) - not for LAN type networks (unless it's in an actual datacenter).
- jltsiren 6mo agoLocal AI is probably the most common application these days. Apple recently added support for InfiniBand over Thunderbolt. And now almost all decent Mac Studio configurations have sold out. Those two may be connected.
- throw0101c 6mo ago> Apple recently added support for InfiniBand over Thunderbolt. TIL: * https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technotes/tn3205-low-latency-communication-with-rdma-over-thunderbolt https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technotes/tn3205-l... Or maybe I forgot: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46248644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46248644
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- wpm 6mo agoVideo capture I/O expansion Networking
- pjmlp 6mo agoTo have lots of them plugged together, high end audio cards, electronics integrations, disks with having cables all over the place.