Quote from: Sasquach on Yesterday at 16:28:17Quote from: umbrella on Yesterday at 08:50:30everyone keeps mentioning core count but that's somewhat irrelevant here, AMD still uses hyper threading meaning 32 threads. Intel ditched hyper threading and has 24 cores. Either way though there's no cheap way to obtain an m3 ultra, it's apple, so maybe it is fair to compare it to server parts.
At 14k price point I can have dell workstation sporting 2TB ram and thread ripper 7995wx with 96 cores.
That thing will run circles around M3 ultra. Especially with an option for 4 GPUs....
I don't know what kind of deals you get, but a Dell Precision 7875 with 7995wx & 2TB would be more than seven times the price of the top end Mac Ultra in my country, not including GPUs. And its RAM speed is still around half the M3 Ultra's.
Whether it runs circles depends on the task, for many tasks a $600 entry M4 would be faster. To run an LLM larger than 70b, you're going to need multiple professional GPU$$$ (about $60k worth), and you don't want that sitting on your desk. Though, M3 Ultra's startup time is pretty slow for larger LLMs, and is ultimately limited, but we're talking about something that sits on the corner of a desk in a quiet office.
As for software, a lot of Windows & Linux software looks like crap. When I have to use a Mac, I just turn all the colours and widgets off, and I'm left with a terminal (though I'd still 100% prefer to be using Linux). It's whether it runs the right software quickly.
As I said in the AMD thread, I'd like to see nbc run head to head tests of the m3 ultra against the top end x86 chips, not because I prefer Apple, but because moments of humiliation is the only way x86 is going to pull ahead.
Obviously, each system will have its own advantages, unless you're coming from a bizarre ungrounded "twice the cores but 25% improvement" perspective, Apple's lines of chip are an incredible advancement.