Does this also count platform costs or just chip cost? I'd imagine the threadripper motherboard and ram costs aren't insignificant
The 7995WX processor alone is $10k, the motherboard is one grand, the RAM is another $300. So you're up to $11300, and you still don't have a PSU, case, SSD, GPU....or heatsink that can handle the 300W TDP of the threadripper processor; you're probably looking at a very large AIO radiator to keep it cool enough to get its quoted performance. So you're probably up past $12k, 3x the price of the Studio...more like $14k if you want to have a GPU of similar capability to the M2 Ultra.
Just the usual "aPPle cOMpuTeRs aRE EXpeNsIVE!" nonsense.
Consumer AMD 7950X supports AVX-512, it's faster than M2 Ultra at half the cost.
Either way, I think these comparisons are moot since an M2 Ultra comes with 2x M2 Max GPUs and an NPU and up to 192GB of unified memory running at 800GB/s. In other words, you wouldn't want to run your LLM on the CPU if you have an M2 Ultra.
The point of OP is to increase LLM performance when you don't have a capable GPU.