Posted by beex 18 hours ago
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. . . .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?
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.
0. https://float16.cloud/en-en/ai-benchmark/dgx-spark-vs-rtx-50...
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.
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?