That is the proof what is left is a workaround, just like pilling minis on racks because Apple left the server space.

Also why Swift nowadays has to have good Linux support, if app developers want to share code with the server.

But those Thunderbolt links are slower than modern PCIe. If there's actually a M5-based Mac Studio with the same Thunderbolt support, you'll be better off e.g. for LLM inference, streaming read-only model weights from storage as we've seen with recent experiments than pushing the same amount of data via Thunderbolt. It's only if you want to go beyond local memory constraints (e.g. larger contexts) that the Thunderbolt link becomes useful.

The proposition of a Mac Pro in the Apple Silicon world wasn't necessarily about performance, it was about the existence of the PCIe slots. I don't think AI becoming a workload for pro Macs means the Mac Pro doesn't have a place, people who were using Mac Pros for audio or video capture didn't stop doing that media work and switched to AI as a profession. That market just wasn't big enough to sustain the Mac Pro in the first place and Apple has finally acknowledged that fact

Wow spend 40k to get the same tokens/second in QWEN as you would on a 3090

I have a feeling that Mac fans obsess more about being able to run large models at unusably slow speeds instead of actually using said models for anything.