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Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

Once the updated Mac Studio with M4/M5 Ultra comes out, pretty much going to make the DGX irrelevant right?

I run 4 Mac Studio ultras at work (they’re pricy when maxed out), for local-first AI dev services. But there’s a few things that make me want to switch to the Spark. Networking is the biggest one, the Macs have Thunderbolt and Ethernet, but if I run distributed inference with EXO over Thunderbolt; the drop in tokens/second is massive. These Sparks get RDMA and can stack nicely. The other big one is access to CUDA, MLX has come a long way but being able to have CUDA and GPU access in containers would simplify the stack so nicely. If I had a USB-C/Thunderbolt backplane it might compare, but scaling with the Spark is likely a lot more straightforward.

I call the stack with Mac Studios “MacAIver” because it feels like a duct tape solution, but the Spark equivalent would likely be more elegant.

You'd have to stack 16 of these to get 2TB of VRAM, equivalent to 4 Mac Studios 512GBs chained together.

16 compared to 4. Surely even much faster networking in the Spark would degrade with that many devices?

Biggest problem with Macs is that they don't have dedicated tensor cores in the GPU which makes prompt processing very slow compared to Nvidia and AMD.

n.b. there's been a little speculation that Apple adding TensorOps to Metal 4 suggests M5/M6 may get tensor cores.

https://x.com/liuliu/status/1932158994698932505

https://developer.apple.com/metal/Metal-Shading-Language-Spe...

Nice. I hope so. That would make Macs the best local LLM machines for the masses by far.

It’s $12k for each Mac Studio, and the networking makes them only effective individually (it’s like less that 15 tokens/s with EXO) while NVLINK is very effective. The Spark is definitely more scalable, but the MLX and metal teams are cooking, so honestly either way is still winning.

Ultras are pretty expensive.

I mean the spark is $3,999 and current M3 Max 28-Core CPU 60-Core GPU is the same price. I would expect the refreshed studio will stay around the same price.

In Germany the 96gb version is 5000 EUR and the 256gb version is 7000 EUR (no 128gb available as far as I can see).

At that point it's far superior to fly to the US, buy it, and fly back. Hell, have a nice week in a hotel and bring two.

Fly to a state with no sales tax. Portland, Oregon serves this purpose for high end shoppers that come from out of state and out of the country. Folks fly in to buy their Rolex, Gucci, etc, with no tax.

Doesn't work with Germany, you'll have to pay VAT at the airport.

What are they examining your bags for purchased items? That’s gestapoish.

not nessesarily, but you'll have an issue if they do a controll, or it comes up.

1. Yes they will if they suspect you (age group, clothes, newest phone, certain flights like LAX, LGA) as all custom officers all over the world do. As my bags have been searched every time I've entered the US.

2. You should read up on the Gestapo

US customs won't care if they find new electronics, so they're no problem (they are annoying, with the suitcase thing at port-of-entry, but no problem). As for German customs, I don't know, but: do the initial leave out of Germany over the road where there's checks only in theory and leave from an airport not too far over the border. You can probably get a cheaper flight in the process (e.g. Fly from Basel)

The Germans look for electronics, the Americans look in the electronics and what’s on them.

Fly back through Geneva, and take some basic precautions, such as not taking the box. Done/done.

Are you comparing prices with or without taxes? US usually prices without and EU with.

If that would be true why aren't Mac sales banned in China instead of Nvidia GPUs?

Because Tim bribed Trump with a golden calf, or more seriously it's easier to ban a component and its manufacturer vs broader systems.

Not unprecedented though, Playstation 2 had export restrictions.

But it was a different time. Most policies had some connection to the subject at hand.

Policies today are all about brand Trump and brand MAGA.

Those are high end GPUs that aren’t comparable

Because it's only a superior solution if you just want one box, and that mostly for inference. Once you start scaling to larger loads, it's much trickier to get a clusters of Macs to efficiently process them in parallel, whereas datacenter GPUs are designed for clusters.

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