Yes I know but it is getting there and they have Apple developers working on it.
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Mac Studio M1 Ultra GPU will be beaten by AMD and Nvidia in just 6-7 months.
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And as an added bonus, those PC desktops will heat your house for free during the winter as well!
It'll be years to never before NVIDIA or AMD can make something with equivalent performance which will sit quietly on a desk in an 8"x8" square.
This isn't the case for many of the Intel-era MacBooks with soldered RAM, but for the M1 Pro/Max models (especially in laptop form) there's a massive advantage in bandwidth to soldered vs DIMMs.
The M1 Max uses 8 channels of RAM at once to achieve its 400 GB/s bandwidth, meaning that you'd need 8 sticks of RAM (!) to achieve the same performance in a user-upgradable system. For the M1 Ultra, you'd need a whopping 16 (more RAM slots than in the 2019 Mac Pro) to achieve the same 800 GB/s. Couple that with the advantages of unified graphics memory and the general plateau in RAM increases over the past decade (see this thread), I'd say the trade-offs are reasonable.
It would be great if desktop machines like this offered an extra RAM slot or two for later expansion, though (not sure how well that'd play with the unified memory architecture).
No, not really.
Any desktop of any decency whatsoever will cost $400. The cheapest M1 Mini can be had for $629.
There is zero justification, no matter what your income bracket, to talk of new desktop computers and claim $629 is correspondingly "very expensive", especially when even semi decent Windows desktops cost significantly more than the cheapest Minis.
Fine, but your statement defending $700 on the basis that $10k expensive Windows systems exist doesn't make any sense.
YMMV and I'm done here.
I'm not the one who made the blanket statement "Apple desktops are very expensive".
They're not. They start off at a premium price. Sure they can get "very expensive" but they're not all "very expensive".
You continuing to ignore this is your Issue, not mine.
True, but that additional cost comes with more longevity, from both hardware and a software point.
Cheap and expensive are relative terms and we shouldn't use them. Mac Studio is neither cheap nor expensive. We should talk about value. Windows machines of that power cost just as much if not more, so a Mac offers good, even great value relative to that. Especially when you think what it's for and who it's for.
Historically, this has almost never been true. It's true now since Apple has released their own very impressive silicon and compounded with the fact that nvidia/amd GPUs go for crazy inflated prices due to crypto/pandemic/scalpers etc.
Before this was the case though, it was almost always possible to build significantly more powerful PCs compared to their intel based mac counterparts, especially at the very high end.
There's no way the Apple system will give 128GB to any GPU task. That's the ENTIRE memory capacity. You need memory for the OS, the software...
I'm talking about the current situation, yes. Also, even before, you could build more powerful PCs for less money but you still had to build them, probably cheap out on some components and they came with Windows instead of macOS. For those that prefer macOS, the value was always there. But now, yeah, it's a different situation altogether. My MBP is expensive compared to most Windows laptops, but also, I can't find a laptop alternative to Mac that runs at that performance, at those thermals and with that battery life - at any price point.
Software has to be written to use specific Apple APIs to make use of that neural engine, though, right?
Yeah, I know. I am not disputing the value of macos for those that need it. I have 2 macbook airs I use for xcode. Just pointing out that windows pcs are really expensive now due to some very specific market conditions.
Also, you can actually find very competitive laptops to MBP. A lot of high end alder lake based laptops coming out perform equal to or better than macbook pros in quite a few benchmakrs/scenarios and also in build quality, albeit at higher power usage. Apple is in a unique position at this stage if you want all 3 i.e. performance, portability and battery life, pretty impressive. You can find equal or better non apple laptops though if you are ok to sacrifice a bit on the battery life part. Just saying. Not everyone might place the same value on each of those 3 aspects, depends on what weight you assign to each of those 3 aspects for your use case and I guess the 4th aspect is cost although these days high end windows laptops also cost a pretty penny.
This is the GPU tech for which Apple did a new deal with Imagination. I think it looks pretty good.
IMG CXT GPU - Imagination
Ray tracing for mobile. Bringing high-performance, desktop-quality ray traced visuals to the palm of your hand.
www.imaginationtech.com