alt Hacker NewsI'm curious on why you think that, say, an M2 running linux will ever be a better choice for AI workloads than an M5 Pro running MacOS? What is it that you think is in the hardware that you'd be able to unlock with linux but isn't exposed by MacOS?
I'm curious on why you think that, say, an M2 running linux will ever be a better choice for AI workloads than an M5 Pro running MacOS? What is it that you think is in the hardware that you'd be able to unlock with linux but isn't exposed by MacOS?
I'm sure a lot has changed since cough 2004, but that was the state with the PowerPC G4 and G5. Machine learning Linux applications used the IBM Power architecture because of their vectorization features, and that hardware was ridiculously expensive. When Apple started using Motorola and IBM's cheaper PowerPC chips with Altivec this small market was pumped, but none of their groovy scientific applications worked on OSX.
This created a large enough market for Linux distros installed on Apple hardware to make it a sustainable business model the makers of Yellow Dog Linux to buy the hardware through a reseller channel, ship it to the building, install Linux on it, then ship the device to customers. I worked there and it was fun.
Lots has changed since then of course, one of which being that Apple controls the chip from top to bottom, and their near-indifference in 2004 now seems to have transformed into something more adversarial.