apple4thewin

anonconformist said:

netrox said:

The fact that M3 Ultra now support up to 512 GB RAM is pretty amazing. It's great for large scale LLMs. Ultra 2 would only support 192GB at max. 

Why anyone would dislike your comment is puzzling to me.

I bought a Surface Laptop 7 with 64 GB RAM (at a little discount, as I’m a Microsoft employee: these can only be bought directly from Microsoft) purely for the point of having a Windows machine to run larger LLMs and do AI experimentation at a reasonable budget, knowing there are better performance options if you have bottomless budgets.

For the price, it’s a great deal: not many machines can run that large of LLMs. It’s not perfect, as memory bandwidth and thermals (when running pure CPU for the LLMs makes it a bit warm) appears to be the bottlenecks. Right now the NPU isn’t supported by LM Studio and others, and where you can use the NPU, most LLMs aren’t currently in the right format. It’s definitely an imperfect situation. But it runs 70 Billion parameter LLMs (sufficiently quantized) that you couldn’t do with nVidia chips at a rational price, but you do need to be patient.

I’d love to have seen an M4 Ultra with all the memory bandwidth: with 512 GB RAM, presumably being able to use all the CPU cores, GPU cores and Neural Engine cores, it’s likely still memory bandwidth constrained. I would note: my laptop is still perfectly interactive at load, with only the 12 cores. I’d expect far more with one of the Mac Studio beasts.

We finally have a viable reason mere mortals could make effective use of 512 GB RAM machines: LLMs. Resource constraints of current hardware are the biggest reasons we can’t have a very user-friendly, natural human language interaction hybrid OS using LLMs to interact with humans, and the traditional older style OS as a super powerful traditional computer architecture device driver and terminal layer. The funny thing is with powerful enough LLMs, you can describe what you need, and they can create applications that run within the context of the LLM itself to do what you need, they’re just needing a little bit more access to the traditional OS to carry it out for the GUI. I know, because I’m doing that on my laptop: it’s not fast enough to run all LLMs locally at maximum efficiency for humans yet, but it does work, better than expected.

weltistsinnlos said:

So wait, it's not BS as you yourself so passionately claimed just 12 days ago?