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aurareturntoday at 12:04 AM1 replyview on HN

Mac studio wins in memory capacity, price, perf/watt and value.

RTX 6000 wins in performance, if your model can fit into the VRAM.

There are very obvious and clear advantages to a Mac Studio. It's an entire system for one and you're getting a world class CPU as well.


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angoragoatstoday at 12:43 AM

> Mac studio wins in memory capacity, price, perf/watt and value.

[citation needed]. I have personally specced out and built an nvidia GPU-based machine which after some optimization, handily beat the Mac Studio in terms of tokens/watt for LLM inference with most models. This was in the M2 Ultra era, and I haven't run the numbers for the later generations, but nvidia's cards have gotten faster just as Apple's CPUs/GPUs have, so I would guess that it's still possible to do.

> RTX 6000 wins in performance, if your model can fit into the VRAM.

"if your model can fit into the VRAM" can be true for the Mac as well.

> There are very obvious and clear advantages to a Mac Studio.

There are certain advantages for sure, depending on your use case. They may _seem_ to be obvious, but as evidenced above, I believe that many people overestimate the Mac's superiority on the metrics you cite when comparing a Mac vs. a dedicated GPU for LLM inference.

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