No way buying a bunch of minis could be as efficient as much denser GPU racks. You have to consider all the logistics and power draw, and high end nVidia stuff and probably even AMD stuff is faster than M series GPUs.
What this does offer is a good alternative to GPUs for smaller scale use and research. At small scale it’s probably competitive.
Apple wants to dominate the pro and serious amateur niches. Feels like they’re realizing that local LLMs and AI research is part of that, is the kind of thing end users would want big machines to do.
There’s been rumors of Apple working on M-chips that have the GPU and CPU as discrete chiplets. The original rumor said this would happen with the M5 Pro, so it’s potentially on the roadmap.
Theoretically they could farm out the GPU to another company but it seems like they’re set on owning all of the hardware designs.
TSMC has a new tech that allows seamless integration of mini chiplets, i.e. you can add as many CPU/GPU cores in mini chiplets as you wish and glue them seamlessly together, at least in theory. The rumor is that TSMC had some issues with it which is why M5P and M5M are delayed.
I’m not saying a Mac Pro with expansion slots, I’m saying a Mac Pro whose marketing angle is locally running AI models. A hungry market that would accept moderate performance and is already used to bloated price tags has to have them salivating.
I think the hold up here is whether TSMC can actually deliver the M5 Pro/Ultra and whether the MLX team can give them a usable platform.
Power draw? A entire Mac Pro running flat out uses less power than 1 5090.
If you have a workload that needs a huge memory footprint then the tco of the Macs, even with their markup may be lower.
What this does offer is a good alternative to GPUs for smaller scale use and research. At small scale it’s probably competitive.
Apple wants to dominate the pro and serious amateur niches. Feels like they’re realizing that local LLMs and AI research is part of that, is the kind of thing end users would want big machines to do.