6 Mac Studios for 100k USD. Consider it a rule of thumb now - 100k to run 1T params, scales linearly.

I don't know that "consumer hardware" is a useful distinction anymore, it's just "what's your budget and what's your speed requirement".

They do however last a much longer time now.

A 8 years old graphics card can still play modern games. Ten years ago playing a modern game on hardware that old would've been unthinkable.

And with how the market is right now, we'll be stuck on the current "reference level" of hardware for a while longer.

I’d say something like a PS4 is future proof. $350 got like 10 years of modern software.

About 20 years ago my dad bought me a $5k computer, it was future proof for about "5 years" before we had to upgrade its internal parts (more memory, new graphics card).

It was future proof but not really because it struggled a lot in its final years.

i'd say it depends (as with everything)

i'm still using an old i7 3770k @ 4.8ghz with 16gb (ddr3) ram running linux for random tasks like executing tests. obviously, power consumption is higher.

my main machine is a MBP M1 Max which i use for everything. i also have my main linux desktop workstation that has a 5950x with 128gb (ddr4) ram.

i'll probably get 2-5 years out of my MBP, and my AMD workstation will probably be good for another 5-10 years.

i'm not a gamer, but i have a 3080. i'm sure my 5950x will still be good for gaming in 10 years if paired with a modern GPU.

> Computers are never "future proof".

Upgradeable components however could go a loooong stretch towards that goal. It can't be that hard to follow a common form factor for at least the housing across two or three generations to allow a reuse of everything but the main PCB.

The relevant comparison isn't one mac studio to one RTX 6000, it's a 24 channel DDR5 system, which also has ~1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth (or more when Xeon 6 compatible 8800mt/s memory becomes widely available), vastly higher prefill due to more CPU horsepower, orders of magnitude faster networking, can hook into GPU accelerators, can be upgraded etc. A baseline 384GB system from eg Puget is ~30K vs ~12K for the 256GB Mac Studio and you do get value for the money.

How's the compute side now, I wonder? Because while the Ultras have impressive memory bandwidth for inference, processing prompts still takes a dog's age on my M3 Ultra. I heard the M5 makes some strides forward in this area, though, and the M7 in particular promises to go a lot further.

Except the RTX 6000 will run circles around the Mac studio in just about every way. Memory bandwidth is literally the only spec where Apple is competitive, and while high memory bandwidth is necessary for LLMs to perform well, many people strangely don't understand that memory bandwidth alone is not sufficient.

It's unclear to me how bandwidth scales with multiple connections. Many-to-many does not seem ideal. Daisy chaining would be fine for straight pipeline work. There doesn't seem to be an equivalent of a ethernet switch for thunderbolt 5 though.