alt Hacker NewsMy expectations from M5 Max/Ultra devices:
- Something like DGX QSFP link (200Gb/s, 400Gb/s) instead of TB5. Otherwise, the economies of this RDMA setup, while impressive, don't make sense.
- Neural accelerators to get prompt prefill time down. I don't expect RTX 6000 Pro speeds, but something like 3090/4090 would be nice.
- 1TB of unified memory in the maxed out version of Mac Studio. I'd rather invest in more RAM than more devices (centralized will always be faster than distributed).
- +1TB/s bandwidth. For the past 3 generations, the speed has been 800GB/s...
- The ability to overclock the system? I know it probably will never happen, but my expectation of Mac Studio is not the same as a laptop, and I'm TOTALLY okay with it consuming +600W energy. Currently it's capped at ~250W.
Also, as the OP noted, this setup can support up to 4 Mac devices because each Mac must be connected to every other Mac!! All the more reason for Apple to invest in something like QSFP.
Replies
> +1TB/s bandwidth. For the past 3 generations, the speed has been 800GB/s...
M4 already hit the necessary speed per channel, and M5 is well above it. If they actually release an Ultra that much bandwidth is guaranteed on the full version. Even the smaller version with 25% fewer memory channels will be pretty close.
We already know Max won't get anywhere near 1TB/s since Max is half of an Ultra.
> - The ability to overclock the system? I know it probably will never happen, but my expectation of Mac Studio is not the same as a laptop, and I'm TOTALLY okay with it consuming +600W energy. Currently it's capped at ~250W.
I don't think the Mac Studio has a thermal design capable of dissipating 650W of heat for anything other than bursty workloads. Need to look at the Mac Pro design for that.
> Also, as the OP noted, this setup can support up to 4 Mac devices because each Mac must be connected to every other Mac
I do wonder where this limitation comes from, since on the M3 Ultra Mac Studios the front USB-C ports are also Thunderbolt 5, for a total of six Thunderbolt ports: https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/specs/
> Neural accelerators to get prompt prefill time down.
Apple Neural Engine is a thing already, with support for multiply-accumulate on INT8 and FP16. AI inference frameworks need to add support for it.
> this setup can support up to 4 Mac devices because each Mac must be connected to every other Mac!!
Do you really need a fully connected mesh? Doesn't Thunderbolt just show up as a network connection that RDMA is ran on top of?
For a company that has repeatedly ignored macOS, your wishlist seems anything but a pipe dream. QSFP on a mac. Yeah right. If anything, they’ll double down on TB or some nonstandard interconnect.
What is a computer?
(Although, I do hope with the new work on supporting RDMA, the MLX5 driver shipped with macOS will finally support RDMA for ConnectX NICs)
https://kittenlabs.de/blog/2024/05/17/25gbit/s-on-macos-ios/
Apple has always sucked at properly embracing properly robust tech for high-end gear for markets outside of individual prosumer or creatives. When Xserves existed, they used commodity IDE drives without HA or replaceable PSUs that couldn't compete with contemporary enterprise servers (HP-Compaq/Dell/IBM/Fujitsu). Xserve RAID interconnection half-heartedly used fiber channel but couldn't touch a NetApp or EMC SAN/filer. I'm disappointed Apple has a persistent blindspot preventing them from succeeding in data center-quality gear category when they could've had virtualized servers, networking, and storage, things that would eventually find their way into my home lab after 5-7 years.
> 3090 would be nice
They would need 3x speedup over the current generation to approach 3090. A100 that has +- the 3090 compute but 80GB VRAM (so fits LLaMA 70B) does prefill at 550tok/s on a single GPU: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1ivc6vv/llamacp...
> Also, as the OP noted, this setup can support up to 4 Mac devices because each Mac must be connected to every other Mac!! All the more reason for Apple to invest in something like QSFP.
This isn’t any different with QSFP unless you’re suggesting that one adds a 200GbE switch to the mix, which:
* Adds thousands of dollars of cost,
* Adds 150W or more of power usage and the accompanying loud fan noise that comes with that,
* And perhaps most importantly adds measurable latency to a networking stack that is already higher latency than the RDMA approach used by the TB5 setup in the OP.
> TOTALLY okay with it consuming +600W energy
The 2019 i9 Macbook Pro has entered the chat.
Mine is to remove the extreme Macos bloat.
Would you please mind leaving some RAM to remain available for purchase at an affordable price for us mere mortals ? 1Tb for what, like, "Come on AI, make the humankind happy now"?
/"s"