A Mac Studio is a much better buy in terms of memory bandwidth, but impossible to buy in a 128 GB configuration. Honestly there aren’t great options right now and it’s probably better to wait for the market to be less insane.
Waiting for the market to be less insane is somewhat akin to waiting for the s&p500 to drop a decent amount so you can buy in.
lol this is so wrong it's funny - equities go up in price, commodity goods go down in price. the two markets are literally diametrically opposed.
So, you should get into RAM futures if you believe this is more than a transient arbitrage sort of situation. All extant RAM will become obsolete as the demand shifts to newer, fancier versions.
xAI effectively did and lucked out to cover their losses and more with it.
Yes but on what timescale? Replacing the > 5 year old sticks in my laptop would currently cost well over half what the machine ran me when it was brand new.
I said less insane, not sane. If prices go down 20% but are still up 150% over a few years ago, that would still be an improvement from now.
Or it could work the other way: if new hardware comes out in 2027 such that the tokens/$ ratio works out better, that would also be less insane.
There was a post recently, that showed the DGX spark is twice as fast as the M3 Ultra at prompt processing, but half as fast at output tokens [2]. They used gps-oss-120 for that test with a small context.
[1] https://gpuquicklist.com/apus?models=GB10%20Grace%20Blackwel...
[2] https://aimultiple.com/dgx-spark-alternatives , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48732679
I mostly run them clustered for DS4 and am quite happy with the performance, and the cost isn’t that much more for two than the MBP while giving me double the unified memory.
I’ll probably pick up a third to run multiple smaller models. I don’t understand why people would buy a halo over a spark at comparable prices, particularly because if you want to cluster, the cx7 be beats the shit out of them when it comes to latency and throughput
There will be a basic M6.