The top Mac Studio has six thunderbolt 5 ports, each of which is a PCIe 4.0 x4 link. Each is a 8GB/sec link in each direction, which is a lot. Going from x16 down to x4 has less than a 10% hit on games: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/sbegpb/gpu_in_pci...
“In the more common situations of reducing PCI-e bandwidth to PCI-e 4.0 x8 from 4.0 x16, there was little change in content creation performance: There was only an average decrease in scores of 3% for Video Editing and motion graphics. In more extreme situations (such as running at 4.0 x4 / 3.0 x8), this changed to an average performance reduction of 10%.”
Oculink is generally faster than TB5 despite them both using PCIe 4.0, because Oculink provides direct PCIe access whereas Thunderbolt has to route all PCIe traffic through its controller. The benchmarks show that the overhead introduced by the TB5 controller slows down GPU performance.
It's not just the controllers; the Thunderbolt protocol itself imposes different speed limits. The bit rates used by Thunderbolt aren't the same as PCIe, and PCIe traffic gets encapsulated in Thunderbolt packets.
Maybe; I'm unable to find any benchmarks that specifically compare PCs with TB to Macs to test this. But there is certainly still overhead with TB no matter what, and therefore it'll never be as fast as Oculink.
Sure, but how big of a difference is there? Even inside a desktop PC, you typically have PCIe ports directly off the CPU and ones off the chipset, and the latency for the latter is double. But the difference is immaterial in practice.
That's just blatantly wrong, the performance loss of GPUs is very well documented and gets worse as you go towards higher end models. We're talking 30%+ loss of performance here.
Sure. And lots of people need all that I/O. But my point is that it’s not like the Mac Studio has no I/O. The outgoing Mac Pro only has 24 total lanes of PCIe 4.0 going to the switch chip that’s connected to all the PCI slots. The advent of externally route PCIe is a development in the last few years that may have factored into the change in form factor.
When people talk about 100gigabit networks for Macs, im really curious what kind of network you run at home and how much money you spent on it. Even at work I’m generally seeing 10gigabit network ports with 100gigabit+ only in data centers where macs don’t have a presence
Local AI is probably the most common application these days.
Apple recently added support for InfiniBand over Thunderbolt. And now almost all decent Mac Studio configurations have sold out. Those two may be connected.
100 Gb/s Ethernet is likely to be expensive, but dual-port 25 Gb/s Ethernet NICs are not much more expensive than dual-port 10 Gb/s NICs, so whenever you are not using the Ethernet ports already included by a motherboard it may be worthwhile to go to a higher speed than 10 Gb/s.
If you use dual-port NICs, you do not need a high-speed switch, which may be expensive, but you can connect directly the computers into a network, and configure them as either Ethernet bridges or IP routers.
I work in media production and I have the same thought constantly. Hell I curse in church as far as my industry is concerned because I find 2.5 to be fine for most of us. 10 absolutely.
100gbps is going to be for mesh networks supporting clusters (4 Mac Studios let's just say) - not for LAN type networks (unless it's in an actual datacenter).
I suppose the throughput is not the key, latency is. When you split ann operation that normally ran within one machine between two machines, anything that crosses the boundary becomes orders of magnitude slower. Even with careful structuring, there are limits of how little and how rarely you can send data between nodes.
I suppose that splitting an LLM workload is pretty sensitive to that.
Things that aren’t graphics cards, such very high bandwidth video capture cards and any other equipment that needs a lot of lanes of PCI data at low latency.
Multiple GPUs was tried, by the whole industry including Apple (most notably with the trash can Mac Pro). Despite significant investment, it was ultimately a failure for consumer workloads like gaming, and was relegated to the datacenter and some very high-end workstations depending on the workload.
Multi-GPU has recently experienced a resurgence due to the discovery of new workloads with broader appeal (LLMs), but that's too new to have significantly influenced hardware architectures, and LLM inference isn't the most natural thing to scale across many GPUs. Everybody's still competing with more or less the architectures they had on hand when LLMs arrived, with new low-precision matrix math units squeezed in wherever room can be made. It's not at all clear yet what the long-term outcome will be in terms of the balance between local vs cloud compute for inference, whether there will be any local training/fine-tuning at all, and which use cases are ultimately profitable in the long run. All of that influences whether it would be worthwhile for Apple to abandon their current client-first architecture that standardizes on a single integrated GPU and omits/rejects the complexity of multi-GPU setups.
I see AI as a new, unreliable resource that I can try and tame with good software practices. It's an incredibly fun challenge and there's a lot to learn.
As long as there's internal documentation, which virtually every serious shop has, it can be processed and combined with AI. There are startups selling this product already. I've seen first hand some very narrowly focused domain knowledge becoming more accessible when you can ask the chatbot and the thing is right. It works.
Come to think of it, domain knowledge should be an LLMs strong suit as long as you can provide the right documentation, which is working pretty well already.
Right now the main issue I see with AI is that it doesn't do well with scaling. It's great for building demos and examples but you have to fix its code for real production work. But for how long?
In ERP software there are MLOCs without any technical documentation. And nobody would spend a dime to create one. So, the deep expert knowledge on how business processes are supposed to work (in full detail) and how they are implemented is mostly in the heads of a couple of people.
AI is most excellent at reading and understanding large codebases and, with some guidance docs, can easily reproduce accurate technical documentation. Divide and conquer.
Reading a large codebase...perhaps if it is not too large. Understanding... why a tool exists, what is the motivation for its design, what the external human systems requirements for successful utilization of the internal facing tools... especially when that knowledge exists only in the memories of a few developers and PMs... not so much.
Deep domain expertise is a long way from AI capability for effective replacement.
Again, nobody would spend a dime to create the technical documentation, even if it could be done somewhat faster with AI support. Also, in my experience AI is not so great explaining the consequences to business processes when documenting code.
Accuracy/faithfulness to the code as written isn't necessarily what you care about though, it's an understanding of the underlying problem. Just translating code doesn't actually help you do that.
No, current LLMs are already good enough to read the subtexts from documents, email, call transcripts where available. They're extremely good at identifying unwritten business practices, relationships, data flows, etc.
> human suffering, unfortunately, does not motivate Americans like gas prices do.
Absolutely right. It also makes sense most people will care about something tangible like gas prices than the lives of other people half way across the world.
But this doesn't mean that half way across the world there isn't something truly urgent that needs dealing with.
I honestly don't know what will come of this war but I do know with a fair bit or certainty that a nuclear Iran would have caused the US far more damage than a few weeks of higher gas prices, and they wouldn't even need to use it.
But to truly and fully understand this people need to put a real effort and research the region.
> But to truly and fully understand this[,] people need to put a real effort and research the region.
The US defense apparatus has been doing just this for quite some time. And netunyahoo has been saying Iran is 'weeks away' from having nukes for 30 years, now.
Opinion? israel has some real juicy stuff on trump, and he's doing his best to not get the information released by doing netun's bidding.
I am thoroughly appalled at trump's General Officers allowing him to get into such a mess.
I think it’s less blackmail and more the Israeli government has learned it can simply act and expect the US to back them up to save face. Rubio admitted as much with his initial statements after we attacked Iran. Netanyahu can currently reliably expect the US military to back up its foreign policy with or without buy in ahead of time.
This might be true but the current conflict was a long planned joint operation. Centcom was not just prompted to join in, but was the lead plan maker and execution of the attack was entirely in sync with Israel.
I do not think it was as coordinated with US leadership as that statement implies even if they had discussed it prior. Rubio’s initial statement was very telling. Now Trump says it was all Hegseth’s idea, so the story isn’t even consistent now.
Iran literally hit a preschool in Israel today, with an MRV which is solely designed to terrorize the population (and is a war crime btw). Plus a 12 year old is in critical condition alongside 40 civilians from a single Iranian missile hitting a residential building later today. And in June Iran hit a hospital in Israel with a ballistic missile.
> Its a mystery...
Not a mystery, though, is it? Israel has excellent air defense which is why the damage isn't x10 worse. But Iran is definitely making a huge effort to hit the civilian population for maximum damage.
Unlike Iran which is literally aiming statistical weapons at population centers, the US has high accuracy weapons - the school was hit because intelligence wasn't up to date (it used be an IRGC building).
Your comment is absolutely misinformed, or worse, spreading disinformation on purpose.
No, everything I said was true. The entire world knows who deliberately targets and murders children, by the tens of thousands. "Disinformation" is one of the Zionist colony's biggest exports, but its effect (like all drugs) has waned over time.
People who have unyoked from Zionist mental-control have dozens, if not 100s of independent journalistic outlets, mostly online, where they can (and ARE) following to get some sense of what's really happening. Hence your frustration.
Its not for nothing that "every accusation is a confession" is now a phrase which has spread across the globe, in relation to the Zionist entity and its hasbara. So, your "spreading disinformation on purpose" accusation is really your confession.
What's tinfoil hat about it? The antisemitism card has been overused, it's a common tactic by the Israeli government and its agents. People who have been able to pull themselves out of being affected by these false claims can think more clearly on the matter.
Anyone thinking they can talk their way into controlling Iran, a fundamentalist fanatic country with a very loud and visible doctrine literally calling to destroy the west, is delusional. The western "avoid conflict at all cost" approach is extremely detrimental.
Of course Israel and the current US government are violent religious fanatics who are using made up crap like the Bible and Torah to motivate the war.
The nuclear armed violently psychopathic state in the Middle East that still lies about nukes is the one that must be attacked not the country that allowed all audits of their nuclear program. We should conduct an operation to decommission or transfer in safe keeping to a neutral power all of Israel's illegal nukes and impose crippling sanctions on them for their lying on this extremely serious matter.
Lying about nukes until Mordechai Vanunu outed the program. Iran has been cooperative in letting its nuclear program being audited, your country like the countless "execptions" it claims for itself does not permit any audits.
You tell me, if Iran, Hamas, and (insert other groups you hate) played games about nukes and told you they "don't" have nukes despite having hundreds how would you feel?
Israeli nukes must be brought under audit and transferred or decommissionied urgently by neutral third parties, it is a very grave matter.
Again do you have some sort of example or evidence?
> your country
I'm not Israeli
> the countless "execptions" it claims for itself
What exceptions? They don't need an exception to an agreement that they never consented to.
> played games about nukes
It's not much of a game, they just don't divulge sensitive information about their capabilities.
> transferred or decommissionied
Why would Israel give up a means of defending itself, while several of its neighbors continue trying to wipe it off the map? The only way this becomes plausible is if Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis stop trying to destroy Israel.
Who said anything about the NPT? The exceptions are to such things as audits of nukes which the other party here, Iran has had no problems with. Israel also claims exception and offense to the ICCPR which was one of the examples I had in mind of how Israel always seems to want "exceptions" for perfectly normal things.
>It's not much of a game, they just don't divulge sensitive information about their capabilities.
Nobody is expecting them to divulge any intelligence about its nuclear weapon systems. Why do Israel supporters always exaggerate and invent things not said by anyone? We ask Israel to simply be subject to similar audits of its nukes as Iran was, being like Iran and several other countries in that region a volatile and violent country. Illegal nukes in such a country should be a subject of concern.
And suppose Iran walks out of NPT, I have a feeling you'd still want to interfere and bomb their attempts at making nukes. So please do not lie that it is anything about the NPT.
>Why would Israel give up a means of defending itself, while several of its neighbors continue trying to wipe it off the map? The only way this becomes plausible is if Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis stop trying to destroy Israel.
Who said I want Israel to give up its means of defence? I only wish for them to be subject to standard audits and inspections.
>Why would Israel give up a means of defending itself, while several of its neighbors continue trying to wipe it off the map? The only way this becomes plausible is if Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis stop trying to destroy Israel.
Israel's origin is a long and complex story. No entity in that region is blameless, Israel included.
Again, you tell me, if Iran, Hamas, and (insert other groups you hate) played games about nukes and told you they "don't" have nukes despite having hundreds how would you feel? Obviously they would not wish to divulge sensitive information about their capabilities.
What would be illegal about them? Israel never agreed to the NPT.
> Nobody is expecting them to divulge any intelligence about its nuclear weapon systems.
Even if Israel could trust a group of foreign auditors not to leak any military secrets, what information would you hope to gain from the exercise? Confirmation that Israel does have nuclear weapons, which we already know in practice anyway?
> you'd still want to interfere and bomb their attempts at making nukes
Only as long as a regime with an official stance of "Death to America and Israel" is in charge.
Why not. If we take words as violence, how about the dreams of violent annexation to achieve the so called Greater Israel. Or statements by Israeli's of threatening to nuke Rome and the entirety of Europe. I have very little trust in Israel or Iran, both are crappy countries high on fumes of religion and nationalism and constantly belligerents. Though funnily this war was started by Israel and America unprovoked while pretending to negotiate with Iran, after of course a series of murders of negotiators. Actions are louder than words. It shows far more who is more unpredictable, violent and backstabbing liars. I trust Israel today even less than I trust Iran, thus we should treat them just like any other untrustworthy and volatile entity such as by conducting thorough and 24x7 audits of their nuclear programs.
I am neither Israeli nor Iranian. They can bomb and kill each other all they want as long as they don't involve anyone else. And they will continue bombing and killing each other as they are both driven by the classic cause of endless wars: religion and nationalism. I do not think one side better than other. I considered Israel mildly better but I had to change my stance. Being that I am not a fan of either country, I would prefer either Israel's nuclear capabilities be incapacitated or Iran develop nuclear capabilities as a balancing factor.
> statements by Israeli's of threatening to nuke Rome and the entirety of Europe
I take it you’re quoting some random individual? Certainly no Israeli leaders said anything of the sort. The Iranian regime’s leaders on the other hand are quite explicit about their ambitions of destroying the US and Israel.
> this war was started by Israel and America unprovoked
Israel has been attacked with over a hundred thousand Iranian rockets and drones in recent times. If that isn’t a provocation, what is? How many Iranian rockets do you expect Israel to tolerate before finally responding?
It may be random, but I didn't hear any Iranian saying they want to nuke the entire Europe if they feel threatened. I can already tell who I feel more threatened by. Even if we assume the Iranian govt truly means that, its still countries that have bonbed, hurt and destroyed Iran, and this begins far before the Islamic republic itself such as toppling Irans just and honorably elected government to install a dictatorial puppet monarch. Whereas that Israeli is threatening the entirety of Europe who never hurt Israel and even against all common sense and justice and fairness have been giving billions of euros to the Israeli entity, and this is how the ingrates respond.
Being neither Israeli nor Iranian and not having my brain clouded by the stupidities of religion, nationalism or racialism there is a certain clarity of mind that arises in these matters.
Greater Israel expansionism is something Israeli leaders including Bibi constantly say. Israel wants Lebensraum. If that's not a statement by thr government, what is?
Are you sure about the timing, who started shooting who first?
Have you talked to an actual Israeli before? They just want to not suffer constant rocket attacks. If Hezbollah stopped attacking, there would be ~zero interest in any sort of military action in Lebanon.
Israeli's are people like anyone else. However they are a peoples who are heavily propagandized to be fearful and hateful of everything since birth by their government, a peoples who have in my view become somewhat pathological as a reaction to the Holocaust. It is not wholly their fault. There are good people and bad people like in any country or group. But what I have seen of them has been more than enough for me, I have seen them laugh about throwing rocks and launching rockets at a peaceful Palestinian settlement for example. What do you say of that? Is that an example of they will stop violence if they are left alone?
I am not a big fan of basically any country in that region, Israel while better in some respects eg lgbtq is also more paranoid and psychotic in other aspects.
There's no need for anyone to "propagandize" Israelis into fearing attacks; they personally experience enemy attacks all the time. So much so that a lot of Israelis are just sleeping in bomb shelters at this point, so they don't have to jump out of bed and run whenever there's yet another nighttime attack.
You don't want to go into "who fired the first shot". The terrorist group who did the King David Hotel bombing yielded one of Israel's prime ministers. The formation of the country itself was a series of violent terroristic attacks by self proclaimed zionists. I do not say the arab countries around them are innocent, but that who fired the first shot does not leave Israel innocent either. Israeli's are just experiencing for the first time the fun of bomb shelters that all their neighbors felt due to them for years.
I didn't say anything about who fired the first shot. I was just responding to
> Greater Israel expansionism is something Israeli leaders including Bibi constantly say. Israel wants Lebensraum.
The reality is that Israelis don't care about ancient maps, they care about the terrorists operating in Lebanon that have been bombarding them for years.
> Israeli's are just experiencing for the first time
Not at all. Israel was attacked by five armies the day after it declared independence, and has been attacked many times since, including regular rocket attacks over the past ~25 years.
What's not to care about who fired the first shot? I am not talking about 3000 year old maps, though Bibi is. I am talking about events in the late 1940s where jewish terrorists constant bloodsoaked violence and terror led to rhe states foundation, including prime ministers being extracted from one of these terror outfits. It's all a direct continuation of that.
>Again do you have some sort of example or evidence?
There is discrepancy between what Vanunu said and what the government of Israel said. Evidence points to Vanunu being truthful, thus naturally, the Israeli government are liars.
You claimed something about "lies about nukes". There's really no way to construe "we neither confirm nor deny" as a lie, whether or not someone else leaks the information.
> Anyone thinking they can talk their way into controlling Iran, a fundamentalist fanatic country with a very loud and visible doctrine literally calling to destroy the west, is delusional
If US takes down their democracy and downs their domestic passenger jets, fight a proxy war with chemical weapons through Saddam Hussein that alone kills 20~30 thousand, no country is going to respond to that with flowers in their hair.
Loved your link, but I doubt it is going to change anyone who thinks Israel and US are doing the god's work here.
I don't think they had any reason to destroy us until trump decided to kick the hornet's nest. In fact they were quite reasonable and agreed to inspections of their nuclear programme which is also something Trump broke before, and now with his petty war.
I mean they hate Israel way more than us and they never attacked them either (until this war obviously). And regime change was already happening there slowly. They would have become more moderate, the public opinion inside Iran was more and more against them especially since what they did to the protesters.
This war was unnecessary and only cemented the regime's hold on their people by giving them an external enemy.
Iran has sponsored, built and trained organizations all over the middle east so they could destroy Israel: Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and groups in Iraq are all proxies propped up by Iran.
Iran was the first to attack Israel, this happened in 2024 when Israel killed Nasrallah (Hezbollah) and Iran fired hundreds of ballistic missiles directly at Israel.
Iran hates the US way more than Israel, but Israel is closer so obviously they are directing their efforts according to what's plausible. Iran calls the US and Israel "the big satan" and "little satan" in almost all internal communication. Just a couple of weeks ago the entire Iranian parliament chanted "death to America" and "death to Israel" (you can see the videos online). Iran had US flags laid out on the floor of their facilities so that anyone going by will walk over the US flag.
Despite being very uncomfortable, the war is probably necessary because as seen by Iran's attack on Diego Garcia, they have way longer range than previously thought, they have a deposit or military grade uranium enough for 10-12 bombs, they were completely dishonest about their nuclear programs, and waiting until Iran had nukes meant you couldn't ever stop them. You'd have another North Korea but ten times worse, as the Iranian regime is truly a fundamentalist insane leadership. Trump may be unhinged but he's right about Iran using nukes if they had them.
Not really? The current conflict with Iran is entirely a joint venture where Israel is taking on a significant portion. In previous conflicts the US was marginally involved and even pushed Israel to stop fighting entirely. I don't think you have a good grasp on these events.
Tell that to the 1200+ civilians murdered, raped, mutilated and burned alive on October 7th. Israel is not a weak country but it has definitely been tested in the amount of pain it suffered.
Search all the sources - there were only 14 confirm out of the 828 civilians + 367 soldiers.
There were many people being shot in their homes in the first hour, a long time before IDF managed to reach those areas by foot. As of air, there were not enough attack helicopters to cover all that area, and there were no clear commands of where and how much to attack, that pilots mostly did not attack at all.
> substantial number of them were killed by the Israeli military
Let me stop you right there, the Palestinian (hamas) raid on Israel was livestreamed for the psychological terror effect, and there is absolutely a mountain of videos showing how everything happened. There's an overwhelming number of witness accounts telling the horrors committed by Palestinians towards families in their homes, the music festival, etc. You can still visit the places they torched ny hand. Please don't spread disinformation on October 7th.
> Let me stop you right there, the Palestinian (hamas) raid on Israel was livestreamed for the psychological terror effect, and there is absolutely a mountain of videos showing how everything happened.
No, there aren't videos showing how "everything" happened. There are videos showing a part of what happened, and you are extrapolating how everything happened from the subset of those that you have seen, even though you acknowledge that they were created as a propaganda effort to create exactly the impression you have derived from them.
The videos, the security cameras footage, alongside numerous first hand accounts paint a very clear, minute by minute picture, which I'm not sure you bothered to look into.
Hamas raided numerous towns near Gaza where they murdered people and children in their homes. This is where most people died. This and the music festival where people literally came to dance peacefully.
Under no circumstances did IDF kill 1200 Israeli civilians on October 7th, or "a substantial" part. This is disinformation and Hamas propaganda, and any source even implying this is lying to your face.
Meta (Facebook) always had a problem in execution even when their vision was solid which is sadly a rare occasion. This is why meta just buys products instead of developing its own (Instagram, Whatsapp, etc). It had a moment with the ray bans but that didn't last, the second iteration was meta'd all over.
My GPU, NVMe drives and motherboard might disagree.
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