No way buying a bunch of minis could be as efficient as much denser GPU racks. You have to consider all the logistics and power draw, and high end nVidia stuff and probably even AMD stuff is faster than M series GPUs.

What this does offer is a good alternative to GPUs for smaller scale use and research. At small scale it’s probably competitive.

Apple wants to dominate the pro and serious amateur niches. Feels like they’re realizing that local LLMs and AI research is part of that, is the kind of thing end users would want big machines to do.

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gumboshoes 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Exactly: The AI appliance market. A new kind of home or small-business server.

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jabbywocker 2 days ago | parent [-]

I’m expecting Apple to release a new Mac Pro in the next couple years who’s main marketing angle is exactly this

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firecall 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Seems like it could be a thing.

Also, I’m curious and in case anyone that knows reads this comment:

Apple say they can’t get the performance they want out of discreet GPUs.

Fair enough. But yet nVidia becomes the most valuable company in the world selling GPUs.

So…

Now I get that Apples use case is essentially sealed consumer devices built with power consumption and performance tradeoffs in mind.

But could Apple use its Apple Silicon tech to build a Mac Pro with its own expandable GPU options?

Or even other brand GPUs knowing they would be used for AI research etc…. If Apple ever make friends with nVidia again of course :-/

What we know of Tim Cooks Apple is that it doesn’t like to leave money on the table, and clearly they are right now!

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jabbywocker 2 days ago | parent [-]

There’s been rumors of Apple working on M-chips that have the GPU and CPU as discrete chiplets. The original rumor said this would happen with the M5 Pro, so it’s potentially on the roadmap.

Theoretically they could farm out the GPU to another company but it seems like they’re set on owning all of the hardware designs.

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nntwozz 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Apple always strives for complete vertical integration.

SJ loved to quote Alan Kay:

"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."

Qualcomm are the latest on the chopping block, history repeating itself.

If I were a betting man I'd say Apple's never going back.

	▲	jabbywocker a day ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah outside of TSMC, I don’t see them ever going back to having a hardware partner.

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storus a day ago | parent | prev [-]

TSMC has a new tech that allows seamless integration of mini chiplets, i.e. you can add as many CPU/GPU cores in mini chiplets as you wish and glue them seamlessly together, at least in theory. The rumor is that TSMC had some issues with it which is why M5P and M5M are delayed.

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alwillis a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I’m expecting Apple to release a new Mac Pro in the next couple years

I think Apple is done with expansion slots, etc.

You'll likely see M5 Mac Studios fairly soon.

	▲	jabbywocker a day ago \| parent [-]
		I’m not saying a Mac Pro with expansion slots, I’m saying a Mac Pro whose marketing angle is locally running AI models. A hungry market that would accept moderate performance and is already used to bloated price tags has to have them salivating. I think the hold up here is whether TSMC can actually deliver the M5 Pro/Ultra and whether the MLX team can give them a usable platform.

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pjmlp a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I fear they no longer care about the workstation market, even the folks at ATP Podcast are at the verge of accepting it.

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api 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s really the only common reason to buy a machine that big these days. I could see a Mac Pro with a huge GPU and up to a terabyte of RAM.

I guess there are other kinds of scientific simulation, very large dev work, and etc., but those things are quite a bit more niche.

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FuckButtons 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Power draw? A entire Mac Pro running flat out uses less power than 1 5090. If you have a workload that needs a huge memory footprint then the tco of the Macs, even with their markup may be lower.