Let's say you want to have the absolute max memory(512GB) to run AI models and let's say that you are O.K. with plugging a drive to archive your model weights then you can get this for a little bit shy of $10K. What a dream machine.
Compared to Nvidia's Project DIGITS which is supposed to cost $3K and be available "soon", you can get a specs matching 128GB & 4TB version of this Mac for about $4700 and the difference would be that you can actually get it in a week and will run macOS(no idea how much performance difference to expect).
I can't wait to see someone testing the full DeepSeek model on this, maybe this would be the first little companion AI device that you can fully own and can do whatever you like with it, hassle-free.
There’s an argument that replaceable pc parts is what you want at that price point, but Apple usually provides multi year durability on their pcs. An Apple ai brick should last awhile.
You can chain multiple Mac Studios using exo for inference, you'd "only" need two of these. There's a bottleneck in the RMA speed over TB5, but this may not matter as much for a MoE model.
A back of the napkin calculation: 819GB/s / 37GB/tok = 22 tokens/sec.
Realistically, you’ll have to run quantized to fit inside of the 512GB limit, so it could be more like 22GB of data transfer per token, which would yield 37 tokens per second as the theoretical limit.
It is likely going to be very usable. As other people have pointed out, the Mac Studio is also not the only option at this price point… but it is neat that it is an option.
How many t/s would you expect? I think I feel perfectly fine when its over 50.
Also, people figured a way to run these things in parallel easily. The device is pretty small, I think for someone who wouldn't mind the price tag stacking 2-3 of those wouldn't be that bad.
Not sure why you are being downvoted, we already know the performance numbers due to memory bandwidth constraints on the M4 Max chips, it would apply here as well.
525GB/s to 1000GB/s will double the TPS at best, which is still quite low for large LLMs.
Compared to Nvidia's Project DIGITS which is supposed to cost $3K and be available "soon", you can get a specs matching 128GB & 4TB version of this Mac for about $4700 and the difference would be that you can actually get it in a week and will run macOS(no idea how much performance difference to expect).
I can't wait to see someone testing the full DeepSeek model on this, maybe this would be the first little companion AI device that you can fully own and can do whatever you like with it, hassle-free.