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Posted by beex 18 hours ago

New 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6(www.apple.com)
362 points | 495 commentspage 5
yawnxyz 9 hours ago|
too bad only the iMac gets all the color!!!
Quitschquat 16 hours ago||
The "notch" seems to be gone based on the product pictures. Time to upgrade from my ~2014 model MBP.
arghwhat 16 hours ago||
Looks just as notchy as they've always been.
bonestamp2 16 hours ago|||
I do see it in one photo on their site. I just hide mine with software ("topnotch") and it's fine.
adolph 18 hours ago||
One of the interesting slights of hand Apple marketing must do is simultaneously say the new processor is awesome while selling the higher spec versions of the previous processor as upgrades:

  The M6 chip joins M5 Pro and M5 Max to create our most advanced line-up of chips ever built for a pro laptop. With a 12-core CPU, 12-core GPU and our first ever Dual 16‑core Neural Engine, M6 brings next-generation speed and advanced on device AI. All three chips deliver phenomenal single- and multithreaded CPU performance and faster unified memory. . . .
cbeach 17 hours ago||
My 5090 has a bandwidth of 1,792 GB/s, and that is just about good enough for basic (i.e. 27B models) local LLM inference.

The fastest M6 MacBook Pro (24/32GB configs) has a memory bandwidth of 170 GB/s. And the M5 Max is 614 GB/s.

Am I missing some nuance of the M6 MBP here, or am I right to assume it won't set the local LLM world on fire?

quantumink 17 hours ago|||
The case of your 5090 having become a coveted artifact of great rarity in these times - may be a nuance of some measure.

Also, the following two have very different 'needs' to feel good enough:

1. heavy agentic workloads via harness vs 2. a simple private chat interface with a local instance

Even if an MBP's bandwidth were higher, it's tough to see a reason to run it as a constantly loaded 24/7 inference machine due to heat degradation.

P.S. still extremely awesome to be able to host and chat with a decently quantized 27B model on your laptop. ...and to be fair even a 32GB Air would do that! It is a thing of beauty: the amount of folks this may add to the hacker/tinker community.

tedd4u 16 hours ago||||
Isn't the laptop version of the 5090 is a more apples-to-apples comparison? It has 896 GB/s memory bandwidth (compared to the 614 on the M5 Max MBP).
adolph 15 hours ago||||
The 5090 does have a bandwidth advantage, but also must pass more data from main to GPU memory for any particular task. Comparisons of a 5090 to a DGX Spark at 273 GB/s are illustrative since the Spark uses unified memory similar to Apple's M-series. [0] The 5090 certainly wins most benchmarks but that doesn't mean the DGX Spark is not useful.

0. https://float16.cloud/en-en/ai-benchmark/dgx-spark-vs-rtx-50...

skohan 13 hours ago||
Loading data to the GPU will generally never be the bottleneck. Yes that's a bit better for unified memory, but prefill and decode will still be bound by compute and memory bandwidth respectively.

There's some value in having a huge amount of memory addressable by the GPU for loading larger models, but even that doesn't make sense for current gen models. For MOE models, newer inference engines with smarter GPU expert caching and pinned memory allow a GPU with lots of bandwidth to significantly outperform a Spark, so that leaves you with larger dense models that fit on a spark but not on a GPU where you might have a use-case.

But even then it's hard. For instance a full-fat BF16 of a ~30B parameter model will fit on a 128GB spark and not a 32GB 5090, but at that size it's going to be frustratingly slow on the spark given the compute and bandwidth constraints.

Imo these devices are mostly good for experimentation, or if you only want to do overnight jobs or training which wouldn't be possible on a GPU, and you don't want to pay $100k for a DGX station.

lowbloodsugar 17 hours ago|||
Is your 5090 in a laptop? o_0
cbeach 17 hours ago||
No. But does high memory bandwidth necessarily require desktop/server style power and cooling?
lowbloodsugar 15 hours ago||
Laptop 5090 (24gb) is 800gb/s.

M5 Max (128gb) is 600gb/s

Rtx spark laptop (128gb) is 200gb/s.

Desktop 5090 (32gb) is 1700gb/s.

Desktop 6000 (96gb) is 1700gb/s and 600W.

So, yes?

tines 17 hours ago||
sleight*
locusofself 17 hours ago||
Dare I even ask how much the 32gb/1tb variant will be? $3,000?
lostNFound 17 hours ago|
You could have dared to check. But no, it's $2399 for those specs.
monster_truck 12 hours ago||
M6 Pro wen
varispeed 15 hours ago||
It's not justifying an upgrade. Shame there are no finance options for M5 Max 128GB.
Kalanos 17 hours ago||
i wonder if it has 2 fans
ThouYS 15 hours ago||
Apple can release as much fantastic hardware as they want - as long as the software keeps getting worse, what's the point?
villgax 18 hours ago||
About time they put a battery in the lid, which is what an iPad already manages to do with thinness. Boom another half a decade of updates all the way to 48hrs
skohan 13 hours ago||
I think the 16" pro is already at the max battery size you can take on a plane.
wren6991 17 hours ago|||
Also a great way to make money from screen replacements when the battery expands!
xena 17 hours ago||
Citation?
wren6991 17 hours ago|||
It's confusingly worded but I think it's a suggestion for something Apple could do in the future. I don't see any mention of this in the linked Apple article.
yuhao2dai 17 hours ago|
eh no thanks. not jumping to m5 max now we know apple is cooking with m7 pro and m7 max. don't drop the ball.
asdff 15 hours ago||
Yes but have you considered the M8?
swyx 17 hours ago||
you know they jut bump this every year right
tonyedgecombe 16 hours ago||
The rumour is they aren't going to bump the pro and pro max.
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