[reckless]

Does this also count platform costs or just chip cost? I'd imagine the threadripper motherboard and ram costs aren't insignificant

[KennyBlanken]

A complete desktop computer with the M2 Ultra w/64GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD is $4k.

The 7995WX processor alone is $10k, the motherboard is one grand, the RAM is another $300. So you're up to $11300, and you still don't have a PSU, case, SSD, GPU....or heatsink that can handle the 300W TDP of the threadripper processor; you're probably looking at a very large AIO radiator to keep it cool enough to get its quoted performance. So you're probably up past $12k, 3x the price of the Studio...more like $14k if you want to have a GPU of similar capability to the M2 Ultra.

Just the usual "aPPle cOMpuTeRs aRE EXpeNsIVE!" nonsense.

[incrudible]

So from a CPU perspective you get 7x the CPU throughput for 3x to 4x the price, plus upgradable RAM that is massively cheaper. The M2 uses the GPU for LLMs though, and there it sits in a weird spot where 64GB of (slower) RAM plus midrange GPU performance is not something that exists in the PC space. The closest thing would probably be a (faster) 48GB Quadro RTX which is in the $5000 ballpark. For other use cases where VRAM is not such a limiting factor, the comparably priced PC will blow the Mac out of the water, especially when it comes to GPU performance. The only reason we do not have cheap 96GB GDDR GPUs is that it would cannibalize NVIDIA/AMDs high margin segment. If this was something that affected Apple, they would act the same.

[juitpykyk]

You're using the wrong CPU.

Consumer AMD 7950X supports AVX-512, it's faster than M2 Ultra at half the cost.