Comment by devy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devy | Hacker News Reader

re: "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?

> 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 :)

Specifically, Meta is behind Pytorch. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple also sent a few M5 Ultras to Google to stimulate Tensorflow support.

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!

> 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.

> Future is for everyone

So long as you can choose between running AI locally or a new Corolla

how are the Macs connected to each other?

RDMA over thunderbolt

Jeff Geerling blogged about his demo setup - https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/15-tb-vram-on-mac-stu...

Uses Exo - https://exolabs.net

You can do it with other software, that's just one of the quick-and-easy setups if you've got a spare 40-60k for studios sitting around

https://x.com/johnternus/status/2110789142326165518

I like how he just casually posts a photo of over $30k worth of equipment on his disk like "this is accessible to everyone!"

I love this. He's used up all the Thunderbolts on the back to make use of the new hack where you can connect all of them, so he has to plug his monitor in on the front :D

Here's what it probably looks like from the back:

https://x.com/digitalix/status/2110782016446960086

(sorry I don't have a working Twitter mirror)

They're serial cables—but, multiple of them, in parallel!

Apple's getting close to re-inventing the ribbon connector.

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