3 ms·

Would be foolish of them not to take advantage of Microsoft having self-sabotage as its favorite pastime.

by vovavili 5mo ago

PaulHoule 5mo ago
... and a huge amount of help from Dell, Lenovo and the like.
- forsalebypwner 5mo ago
  yeah, that's a good point... man, my opinion of Lenovo has tanked in the last decade and I'm only just realizing it now. I always thought of Dell as kinda shitty, but Lenovo had a great thing going that just kinda atrophied in some cases, and actively got worse in others
bigyabai 5mo ago
Apple has taken advantage of that for the past 2 decades, to the tune of a minority share in the PC market. Meanwhile Nvidia is happily cresting what, 5 trillion in valuation? It's a weird time to be an Apple shareholder.
- seanmcdirmid 5mo ago
  Apple M series are competitive in inference at least. I wish Apple would just aim their chip people at NVIDIA in everything else. They are probably the only ones that have the talent, resources, and capital to do that.
  - bigyabai 5mo ago
    They're honestly not competitive for inference, it's why datacenters largely ignore Apple Silicon. Even the M5 Max is still bottlenecked for dense models due to the relatively weak GPU and paltry ~500-600gb/s of GPU memory bandwidth. For reference, the RTX 5080 (a consumer GPU) has 1tb of VRAM bandwidth and runs circles around the M5 Max in GPU compute benchmarks: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks Even for home inference, it's hard to recommend a dedicated Mac over a cheap Nvidia server box. > They are probably the only ones that have the talent, resources, and capital to do that. Apple invented OpenCL. The problem was their reluctance to work with the rest of the industry, and once CUDA took over it was too late for them to even try.
    - seanmcdirmid 5mo ago
      > For reference, the RTX 5080 (a consumer GPU) has 1tb of VRAM bandwidth and runs circles around the M5 Max in GPU compute benchmarks: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks NVIDIA hampers their GPUs with un-unified graphics memory, while the M series can use everything the computer has (well, you need to save 4GB or so). It also works on airplanes and in hotel rooms, a cheap NVIDIA server box with 64GB of RAM (what my M3 Max laptop has)....how cheap is that?
      - andriy_koval 5mo ago
        I think un-unified memory issue is solved by software layer in datacenter setting: model is distributed across multiple GPUs in the same server, or across multiple servers if model is extra large.
  - robertjpayne 5mo ago
    I'm quite happy Apple stays focused on their products. They enter a market when they can own it end-to-end -- it makes no sense for them to all of a sudden become an AI chip house or AI server house.
    - seanmcdirmid 5mo ago
      There is a lot of money in AI chips, and Apple could definitely get a fairly large slice of that business if they put the work in (well, if they are putting the work in now, depending on what Baltra is really about).

Would be foolish of them not to take advantage of Microsoft having self-sabotage as its favorite pastime.

PaulHoule 5mo ago

... and a huge amount of help from Dell, Lenovo and the like.

forsalebypwner 5mo ago
yeah, that's a good point... man, my opinion of Lenovo has tanked in the last decade and I'm only just realizing it now. I always thought of Dell as kinda shitty, but Lenovo had a great thing going that just kinda atrophied in some cases, and actively got worse in others

bigyabai 5mo ago

Apple has taken advantage of that for the past 2 decades, to the tune of a minority share in the PC market. Meanwhile Nvidia is happily cresting what, 5 trillion in valuation? It's a weird time to be an Apple shareholder.

seanmcdirmid 5mo ago
Apple M series are competitive in inference at least. I wish Apple would just aim their chip people at NVIDIA in everything else. They are probably the only ones that have the talent, resources, and capital to do that.
- bigyabai 5mo ago
  They're honestly not competitive for inference, it's why datacenters largely ignore Apple Silicon. Even the M5 Max is still bottlenecked for dense models due to the relatively weak GPU and paltry ~500-600gb/s of GPU memory bandwidth. For reference, the RTX 5080 (a consumer GPU) has 1tb of VRAM bandwidth and runs circles around the M5 Max in GPU compute benchmarks: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks Even for home inference, it's hard to recommend a dedicated Mac over a cheap Nvidia server box. > They are probably the only ones that have the talent, resources, and capital to do that. Apple invented OpenCL. The problem was their reluctance to work with the rest of the industry, and once CUDA took over it was too late for them to even try.
  - seanmcdirmid 5mo ago
    > For reference, the RTX 5080 (a consumer GPU) has 1tb of VRAM bandwidth and runs circles around the M5 Max in GPU compute benchmarks: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks NVIDIA hampers their GPUs with un-unified graphics memory, while the M series can use everything the computer has (well, you need to save 4GB or so). It also works on airplanes and in hotel rooms, a cheap NVIDIA server box with 64GB of RAM (what my M3 Max laptop has)....how cheap is that?
    - andriy_koval 5mo ago
      I think un-unified memory issue is solved by software layer in datacenter setting: model is distributed across multiple GPUs in the same server, or across multiple servers if model is extra large.
- robertjpayne 5mo ago
  I'm quite happy Apple stays focused on their products. They enter a market when they can own it end-to-end -- it makes no sense for them to all of a sudden become an AI chip house or AI server house.
  - seanmcdirmid 5mo ago
    There is a lot of money in AI chips, and Apple could definitely get a fairly large slice of that business if they put the work in (well, if they are putting the work in now, depending on what Baltra is really about).