4mo ago

Apple unveils new Mac Studio, the most powerful Mac ever

out.reddit.com

302 Found

Apple today announced the new Mac Studio, the most powerful Mac ever made, featuring M4 Max and the new M3 Ultra chip.

17 comments

It would be bad if it was the least powerful Mac ever, It makes mW laugh they need to tell people it is the most powerful everytime
Holy shit.
M3 Ultra chip with 32-core CPU, 80‑core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine, 512 RAM
Still a ton of money, but I'm salivating. M4 is only Max at this point, but now I'm dreaming about what that might become.
I wonder if this will be the game plan going forward, with the Ultra chip lagging by a year. Seems a likely cadence.
- M3 Ultra chip with 32-core CPU, 80‑core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine, 512 RAM
  That RAM is nice, but core count doesn't say much at this point: there are different cores with different architectures, multithreading, pipelining, caches, speeds, etc.
  I'd rather see a TOPS comparison:
  M3: claims 18 TOPS
  M4: up to 38 TOPS
  nVidia H100: up to 3900 TOPS/TFLOPS (INT8/FP8)
  Meta is claiming to have 350,000 H100s, to put things into perspective.
  
  I mean, sure, but largely GPU-based TOPS isn't that good a comparison with a CPU+GPU mixture. Most tasks can't be parallelized that well, so comparing TOPS between an APU and a TPU/GPU is not apples to apples (heh).
- I think the next ultras won’t use the fusion thing and will be just a larger die. (the m4 max does not seem to have the connector) so it might take them a bit to sort it out.
Did they remove the stupid limit of 2 VMs per machine or is it still an expensive toy?
- Is the limit 2 VMs or two macOS VMs? I thought it was technically a "licensing" restriction.
  
  Two Mac OS VMs enforced at Kernel level, which wasn't a thing on Intel Macs.
  
  If I understand correctly, it is two MacOS VMs.
  EDIT:
  https://khronokernel.com/macos/2023/08/08/AS-VM.html
https://frame.work/gb/en/desktop
- how much it costs with 512Gb of video ram?
  
  A single 128GB mainboard is $2000, so four of them is $8000. Not the same as a machine with 512GB of unified memory.
  For the M4 Mac Studio, it costs $4800 to upgrade from 32GB to 128GB. I believe everything else "base model" is $2000, for a total of $6800, but this is also a full working computer and not just a mainboard.
Here's the link to the actual press release: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/03/apple-unveils-new-mac-studio-the-most-powerful-mac-ever/
As always, the only real advantage will be the efficiency.
"Most powerful mac ever" is a weird headline. Although at least it is reusable every year or so.

17 comments