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Comment by alecco | Hacker News Reader

Apple got it right with unified memory with wide bus. That's why Mac Minis are flying for local models. But they are 10x less powerful in AI TOPS. And you can't upgrade the memory.

I really wish AMD and Intel boards get replaced by competent people. They could do it in very short time. Both have integrated GPUs with main memory. AMD and Intel have (or at least used to have) serious know-how in data buses and interconnects, respectively. But I don't see any of that happening.

ROCm? It can't even support decent Attention. It lacks a lot of features and NVIDIA is adding more each year. Soon they will reach escape velocity and nobody will catch them for a decade. smh

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Aren't mac minis flying for "local models" because people have no clue what they are doing?

All those people who bought them for openclaw just bought them because it was the trendy thing to do. No one of those people is running local models on there.

> I really wish AMD and Intel boards get replaced by competent people.

Intel? Agreed. But AMD is making money hand over fist with enterprise AI stuff.

Right now, any effort that AMD or NVIDIA expend on the consumer sector is a waste of money that they could be spending making 10x more at the enterprise level on AI.

They aren't flying outside US, or countries with similar salary levels.

Granted, I feel like NVIDIA GPU pricing is such that Mac minis will be way less than 10x cheaper if not already, so one might still get ahead purchasing a bulk order of Mac minis....

A 5090 will cost you about the same amount of money as a Mac Studio M3 Ultra with eight times the RAM.

It's pretty insane how overpriced NVIDIA hardware is.

But the 5090 can run Crysis

Yes but the 5090 can run games.

Running games on my loaded M4 Max is worse than on my 3090 despite the over-four-year generational gap.

Like, Pacific Drive will reach maybe 30fps at less than 1080p whereas the 3090 will run it better even in 4K.

That could just be CrossOver's issue with Unreal Engine games, but "just play different games" is not a solution I like.

The 256GB Mac Studio (the one with "eight times the RAM") is listed for ~$2000 more than the current 5090 prices, and another additional $1500 for the 80-core GPU variant. Only the "base" model with 96gb is a remotely similar price, $3600-$4000.

And a 5090 has a little over 2x the memory bandwidth - ~820GB/s vs ~1790GB/s. And significantly higher peak FLOPS on the 5090 too.

Sure, if the goal is to get the "Cheapest single-device system with 256GB ram" it looks pretty good, but there's lots of other axes it falls down on. Great if you know you don't care about them, but not "Better In Every Way". Arguably, better in only a single way - but that single way may well be the one you need.

And the current 5090 price might be a transient peak - only three months ago they were closer to $2500 - significantly less than half the $6000 base-spec 256GB Mac Studio. While the Mac Studio has been constant.

It seems like general improvements in ram efficiency, such as that used in Gemma 4, means it’s back to memory bandwidth as the bottleneck and less about total available memory size. I’m also curious to see how much more agent autonomy will reduce less need for low latency and shift the focus to more throughput. Meaning it’s easier to spread the model out over multiple smaller GPUs and use pipeline parallelism to keep them busy. This would also mean using ram for market discrimination becomes less effective.

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