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KVFinn | 3 years ago
At the moment, seems like Apple has an edge here. On PC for single GPU you need an NVIDIA A40, which used prices for is about $2500, and not at retail stores.
If you don't mind having two GPUs then two $800 3090 GPUs works, but that's a workstation build you'll have to order from Puget or something. That's probably faster than Apple.
My gut instinct is that there's some low hanging fruit here and in the next couple weeks 64B Llama will run comparably or faster on any PC with a single 4090/3090 and 64 or 128 GB of system memory. But probably not any PC laptops that aren't 17 inch beasts, Apple will keep that advantage.
brookst|3 years ago
You can get a 128GB UMA mac for less than a single 48GB a100, let alone a single 96GB a100.
I think Apple got incredibly lucky here, but I don’t see how the PC world catches them any time soon. We’ve all known that UMA is theoretically better for ages, but Apple’s timing couldn’t be better. And scale economies mean they can sell the same chip to people who need 100GB of system RAM and people who need 100GB of VRAM.
If they can get their GPU / neural performance up and sort out their terrible relationship with academic research, they could snipe ML away from nvidia. It seems very unlikely, but it’s kind of stunning that it’s even in the realm of possibility.
smoldesu|3 years ago
If Nvidia announced tomorrow that they were cancelling every datacenter deal they had, open-sourcing CUDA and publishing their entire patent library to the creative commons, I would still not believe you.
This is a fun project for people with Apple Silicon machines who want to participate in the AI happenings, but I don't think you can warp it into a call for Nvidia's head. Let's wait until Apple pulls the curtains on their rackmount Mac Pros, so we can compare it with Nvidia's ARM server offerings: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/grace-cpu/