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> M5 Ultra features a massive amount of high-bandwidth unified memory, up to 512GB, and delivers a staggering 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth that is 50 per
by rvz 2mo ago
> M5 Ultra features a massive amount of high-bandwidth unified memory, up to 512GB, and delivers a staggering 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth that is 50 percent higher than M3 Ultra.
Apple never needed to participate in the AI race to zero. Because they were already at the finish line years ago building their own chips that can run large >100B parameter AI models locally.
- nasaeclipse 2mo agoAs someone who works in AI now, I have found it pretty amazing that Apple basically didn't do much with AI software, and focused more on the hardware side. I think this is what the future of AI is going to look like, local models run on your mac for your workflow. It's possible that they're working on their own LLM that's going to work very well on their chips, and possibly outperform anything out there when they do release it.
- ngvrnd 2mo agonth mover advantage.
- Havoc 2mo agoHas yet to materialise
- compounding_it 2mo ago>local models run on your mac for your workflow. 10 years ago 32GB ram laptops sounded too much. 8 was enough. These days even I would get that much ram since it’s soldered. 64GB is higher end. In a few years we should see such high end hardware commonplace. Working with a local LLM to get work done is the ideal way to go which has mostly hardware limitation as of now that gets solved in due time.
- parineum 2mo ago> 10 years ago 32GB ram laptops sounded too much. 8 was enough. These days even I would get that much ram since it’s soldered. 64GB is higher end. Ten years ago I got 64gb of ram in my laptop, same as I have now. I bought both for business and personal use. System ram capacity hasn't changed much in 10 years. It makes me curious how old you were 10 years ago.
- swiftcoder 2mo ago> Ten years ago I got 64gb of ram in my laptop We were definitely outliers that long ago. I put 64 GB in a MacBook Pro back in 2019, and that was (a) overkill for everything I ever ran on that machine, and (b) stupidly expensive by 2019 standards (albeit almost affordable by 2026 standards)
- givinguflac 2mo ago|It's possible that they're working on their own LLM Yep, Siri AI; they’re doing it in public.
- robotresearcher 2mo ago‘Apple Foundation Model’
- raizer88 2mo agoDidn't they fire half of siri team yesterday?
- llm_nerd 2mo ago>I have found it pretty amazing that Apple basically didn't do much with AI software The iPhone 15 was almost entirely marketed based upon AI (I would say fraudulently so, advertising features they still haven't delivered), and a huge portion of the OS work was on local AI or AI integration. And for that matter Apple has been dumping enormous sums into their own AI development. Their failure to have a lot to show for it doesn't void the fact that they tried really, really hard. It's bizarre how often this "Apple sat on the sidelines and let the AI people fight...so smart!" narrative appears on HN. Apple hasn't gone down the path of spending hundreds of billions on nvidia GPU data centres, but they absolutely tried really hard to matter in AI.
- teekert 2mo agoIs there anything comparable that runs Linux, doesn't necessarily look as good, but is perhaps (a lot) cheaper/fixable? Or is this really pretty optimal? I mean this is not nvidia based right? It's all custom? So we can use it under Asahi perhaps? I want to get something for my company to run local models, wondering what would be a good option.
- intelkishan 2mo agoAsahi was stuck at M3 last time I checked it out.
- datakan 2mo agoI love linux and would be using it if the ARM support was better. It's just not there and most distros that support ARM do it a little poorly. I just haven't seen anything even remotely comparable to Apple Silicon and unfortunately Linux is struggling very hard to support it.
- Marsymars 2mo agoIt's not quite that ARM support isn't good on Linux, it's that there aren't high-performance ARM chips with strong general-purpose software stacks. Like the Raspberry Pi is very well supported, but otherwise the only upmarket devices are things like Ampere workstations and hyperscaler server chips.
- Lunar5227 2mo agoStrix platform maybe?
- LeBit 2mo ago1.2TB/s is 2/3 the speed of an nVidia 5090. But you get a generic computer and much more RAM. And you lose a couple of organs.
- noodletheworld 2mo agoHow much memory does that come with?
- rbinv 2mo ago32 GB GDDR 7
- snapcaster 2mo agois it still effectively 2/3rds? Don't know enough to compare a discrete GPU/CPU setup to something like this where it's more integrated
- danielEM 2mo agoThere is no magic, if the data you compute as atomic chunk don't fit in cache then memory bandwidth R/W limit kicks in and architecture does not matter. On contrary - having multi gpu setup of same price and same memory size with even slower memories may give you effectively much higher bandwidth but at the cost of power consumption.
- bel8 2mo agoThe real downside for me is not having Linux support. It would take Apple one or two engineers to make Linux life much easier on macs. But Linux is outside their walled garden so it's ignored.
- LeBit 2mo agoI’m done with macOS. My Mac Mini is strictly a headless server for llama.cpp. I use a Linux workstation. If I were limited to use Mac hardware , I would install Linux in VMware Fusion and work from there.
- jjice 2mo agoI was so blown away at all the discourse surrounding "Apple fumbling on models". They should never have been in the model game to begin with. Apple crushes hardware over the last decade and that's a huge advantage today. In the end, massive models have proven to be very strong, but small models have proven to be good enough (especially with the recent Qwen 2.8 27B drop) and that's where I imagine the future will lie for consumers.
- chasd00 2mo agoI suspected Apple would let everyone else blow all their money then, when the dust settles, deliver a better experience to end users and clean up.
- jjice 2mo agoAgreed. Apple doesn't innovate anymore, but they're generally pretty good at adapting once other people have.
- maherbeg 2mo agoI think this is a bit of a crazy statement. Everyone expects Apple to somehow build a category leading product every year. I'd expect something innovative every couple of years * the iPhone * the iPad * apple watch * airpods * unified memory laptops and computers Those are all products that either created a category or changed that industry.
- jjice 2mo agoI think that each of the products you name is the top or near the top of their category, but these weren't creating a category. I don't think my original comment says anything about "changing that industry", so that's a bit of a strawman. They absolutely change the industry they're in. They're just not first to any of those categories that you mentioned (maybe unified memory, I'm not sure). They weren't the first smart phone, tablet, smart watch, or true wireless earbuds. They did a damn fine job making each of those though. I am typing this on a my work macbook wearing AirPods, and AppleWatch, listening to audio on my iPhone. Apple does a really good job with their products. Realizing how surrounding by Apple I am...
- dgellow 2mo agoThey did participate early on with Apple Intelligence and failed miserably. Really good move to not double down and let the others explore the space first