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Comment by phren0logy | Hacker News Reader

I am gonna have an aneurysm. It relies on CUDA, yet you can't get a recent Apple machine with a proper desktop Nvidia GPU. No, I don't want an external GPU box. What the heck are they running this on internally?

Actually, don't tell me. Just sell me one.

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I'm going to be a bit facetious here, please forgive me – are most machine learning frameworks run on desktop hardware at scale? If not, then, I kind of get why Apple creates a framework that doesn't work on their consumer devices.

I mean, do people complain that DeepMind doesn't run on a Chromebook?

I'm sorry but your argument seems totally misplaced. I'd love to hear a case for it though – Apple hardware is very powerful and does a lot, and I wish it did more – I'm sure we all do, but why are we letting that distract from them contributing to open source and releasing great tools?

It doesn't require CUDA. You can run it on a MBP with no discrete GPU. It had been previously available under the name of Graphlab create, then went closed source briefly after the Apple acquisition, and is now back to open source it looks like.

I assume they just use a Linux box, as I expect most do in AI engineering/science nowadays. But it gets gives some hope that Apple finally sees thr light again towards reasonable hardware configs geared at professionals.

It looks like the same group that is behind MXNet recently released TVM [1], which lets you use Cuda, OpenCL, Metal, etc as the target for tensor operations. I wonder if that means support for AMD cards will happen in the near future?

1. http://www.tvmlang.org/2017/08/17/tvm-release-announcement.h...

If they ever add support for AMD GPU in this ML lib, I will seriously consider buying the next-gen Mac Pro.

Coremltools works with existing pretrained models. It converts existing ml models. You don’t have to train one to use one. I assume that this project packages it easier .

I feel your pain. AMD-only GPU config finally got me to ditch the MBP for work. I tried to use my 2014 model as long as I could.

I’m curious why you couldn’t use the 2014 model anymore? I still use mine with the 750m and it works fine for testing the CUDA programming I do. Really hope there’s one with an Nvidia card by the time I decide to upgrade.

Crazy story.

There is an electrical issue which cannot be fixed easily because it is now out of warranty. I get continuously mildly shocked most times i touch the keyboard. I still use it at home with a docked setup (external keyboard, mouse), but it is a total no-no when on-the-go. Docked, it is great -- can even connect three monitors (2 via DP and 1 via HDMI).

The electrical issue started as a mild annoyance manifesting as a slight tickle in the fingers and some vibration, but when using for many hours, my pinky started getting paralyzed and would stay that way until the weekends when I didnt use the laptop. At first I though it was my pillow, sleep posture, or something. Only later did I realize it was long term mild electrocution adding up...

I tried all the electrical re-baselines at the apple store but the next set of fixes were so expensive might as well buy a Razer, which I did...

I have that on mine too. My experience is that it only happens if you use the two prong cord. If you are on a grounded outlet, the effect won't happen.

That sounds like a grounding issue. I’ve had that with various MBPs over the years; bad on some outlets, not on others.

Funny you say that. I (literally) just first-boot started my Late 2012 mac mini running my new eGPU box running a RX580 after a few years of dealing with Apple dual display limitations, and I see this post. This will should certainly give more life to this maxed out quad-core i7 config. I'll have to check this out.

Turi (Graphlab) is an acquisition from last year. Can't remember if they had GPU support back then.

I can’t imagine an AI startup without a GPU support.

It works without CUDA, but it will be slow. That being said, many workloads wouldn't run on a normal desktop machine anyway and will need to be run on a cluster somewhere.

> What the heck are they running this on internally?

based on the documentation, most definitely running it using WSL on Windows 10.

The pain is real.

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