alt Hacker Newsre: "Apple’s unified memory architecture lets the M5 Ultra's integrated GPU use up to 512 GB per Mac Studio, so two machines can hold an entire model. And the chip’s 1.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth is fast enough to read the small slice each token needs. The result is two Mac Studios behave like one supercomputer with a terabyte of unified memory."
At the current market price of Apple Mac Studio Ultra, 30-core CPU + 64-core GPU w/ 256GB RAM is already reaching at around $10k. Keep in mind that computers are appreciating assets recently.
The 512GB RAM option is not even for sales yet (they said late October availability). Based on typical Apple pricing, it's likely to be around $14k apiece. So we are looking at least $28k - $30k for the setup Muse team is advertising. That's essentially the Nvidia H100 GPU w/ 96GB VRAM/HBM3 at up to 3.94 TB/second memory bandwidth, 3x+ than Mac Studio's Unified Memory speed.
Also, how did Meta get access to Apple's unreleased M5 Ultra w/512GB RAM Mac Studio? Or is that simply a marketing piece that they wrote purely on specs?
Replies
> Keep in mind that computers are appreciating assets recently.
You are correct but at my age my brain is never going to stop being surprised by this statement.
1024GB of ram is bigger than 96GB of ram.
Also you are comparing apples to or— dang it, I don’t mean to do that in this thread. Well, it’s a very poor comparison, as they are completely different computing devices with completely different use cases, capabilities, and customer bases. Not to mention power requirements!
> Future is for everyone
So long as you can choose between running AI locally or a new Corolla
> Also, how did Meta get access to Apple's unreleased M5 Ultra w/512GB RAM Mac Studio? Or is that simply a marketing piece that they wrote purely on specs?
It should be well known that Apple provides early access to developers under strict conditions. Otherwise, how do you think they announce new hardware not for sale, and show demos of third party apps taking advantage of such hardware?
The 512GB is obviously geared towards local LLM crowds. I'm just speculating, but I would be surprised if there's not at least a few devices with the 'ecosystem players' like LM Studio, Unsloth, etc. Of course, they'd never confirm nor deny :)