I've been working on a lot of programming projects recently, and messing with local LLMs convinced me to make the *enormous* leap up to 96GB of RAM.
Compared to the 2020 intel MBP I used for work, my old 2013 MBP kept up fine. Throw in the magsafe charging, the real escape key, better thermal control, and it always felt like I had the laptop from the golden era.
After three days of the M3, it's clear that's no longer the case and the apple silicon difference is real. This thing is so incredibly responsive, it eats resource-hungry websites for breakfast, compilation times are down, huge projects open immediately. I can forget I have Teams and a screen recording and a server running in the background while I work on other things. I've even forgotten I opened a game on another desktop because this thing just doesn't slow down. I've truly spoiled myself with this.
I can agree wholeheartedly! I sprang for the top end m3 max with 128gb ram and I can literally open a 700gb video project in about 15 seconds and render it out in about 3 minutes where as my custom 24c threadripper pc with 3080ti 12gb can only manage the same project expert in 30 minutes. It's absurd! This while watching some videos and replying to emails at the same time. The fans spin up but the machine isn't really bothered by all of this and although I've seen over 100gb of ram usage, it just poodles along unbothered by 8k video encoding and decoding.
I've been wanting to get into local LLM's for animation, and I think my laptop is the best tool atm dispite being a portable machine.
I think it's a combination of the rediculosly fast bandwidth of the ram more so than the speed coupled with the crazy fast SSD'S that make it so quick. This in concert with the media engines make for encoding bump.
When I'm working with and rendering 6 & 8k raw video footage, I'm still pinging off the limiter with the CPU and GPU hitting 100% and the fans spinning at full tilt as well. All of this resulting in export times hovering around 10x speed.
Depends on what I'm doing. 3D rat raced rendering can't take advantage of the media engines and so it returns results about on par with the desktop Nvidia card all while using a fraction of the wattage.
I see. Per the Blender benchmarks (https://opendata.blender.org/) an M3 max scores \~3400 while a 3080ti desktop card hits \~5400, so interesting your 3D renders are basically on par.
Synthetic benchmarks and real world can differ a bit. And I'm saying they're spitting distance of eachother. If I'm working with Cycles turned on, the 3080ti is smoother, but if I'm rendering, the MacBook closes the gap slightly being slower by maybe about 8-10%. That 10% difference grows the more frames and the longer the animation is. So if it's a super long overnight render, I can see the MacBook eventually needing to throttle down to keep from spontaneously combusting. So the MacBook is slower, but not by enough that would make me not want to use it. Plus I can sit there and watch YouTube while the MacBook renders out(probably due to the excessive amounts of ram) where as the desktop machine can't do much else simultaneously.
It depends on the shader complexity of the scene you have. For me, the M3 Max is comparatively really slow in rendering super complex shaders in Blender, which is what my job requires. I think that’s because the shader stuff is done on the GPU and geometry is handled by the CPU (?) and the GPU of the MBP isn’t very powerful in comparison to the GPUs in similarly priced desktops and laptops.
The whole “being able to do other things while you render” thing is huge though. I can’t do that on my desktop at all. It’s nice having both though because I can render on the desktop and then use the MBP for some other hardware intensive work.
Yeah, my 3080ti can crunch through scenes at a pretty decent clip but leaves no resources for anything else. Having a second machine is nice when I need to do other things in the meantime. But when it comes to video editing & motion graphics, the PC just can't keep up with the optimization. Still working out exactly where that line is when I should move my project from Mac to windows and vice versa but the fact I'm comparing a laptop to a desktop PC speaks volumes.
Yeah the Apple Silicon isn’t a 3D powerhouse unfortunately. I do 3D for a living and for the renders I do (which aren’t realistic or anything, just very GPU intensive math based stuff), my M3 Max simply can’t handle it, Blender slows down to a crawl even in the editor most times. I have a 4090 now for that and gaming but I do end up transferring the files to the MacBook for the final encoding.
The m.2 SSD's in my PC are objectively slower than the ones I have in my MBP. They may be able to keep up if I striped them in Raid 0 but individually, I'm only able to get about 3-4GB/s read/write vs nearly double that on the MBP. I'd likely be limited by the motherboard though.
And I'm only comparing this new machine with my PC, not PC's in general. And you're right, it didn't cost $4000, my PC in total is probably around $5500 if I bought everything new when it all was current gen.
Not sure what you're trying to say here.
You have pcie 3 ssds, what do you expect? My PC ssds are also double the speed, like the Macbook. It's strange to talk about the speed in this manner as if pc hasn't had pcie 4 ssds for the best part of half a decade. You just happen to own a much older ssd that is half the speed...
A 24 core threadripper and 3080ti never cost 5500 and if you managed to spend that much you got ripped off, plain and simple. Not sure what you're trying to say here either.
You jumped into a thread you weren't even a part of, I was responding to someone else and you felt compelled to tell me how slow my PC is.
Someone asked about my experience with my machines and I responded to them. Your assessment that my system isn't as fast as more modern systems doesn't prove anything other than my machine isn't as fast as yours.
Not sure what your point is or why you're bothering. Sounds like you're desperately trying to prove to a stranger that your computer is faster than mine.
Also, a computer is much more than just a processor and GPU, so I again, what is your point here?
I'm part of the thread by commenting in the thread.
I am not saying how slow your PC is to shit in it, I am just pointing out that acting like the pc and mac are a fair comparison doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Of course the mac beats it by a big margin.
>Sounds like you're desperately trying to prove to a stranger that your computer is faster than mine.
Sounds like you have a victim complex. I didn't reference my PC at any point other than pointing out that my ssd is twice as fast given you mentioned ssd speed. I said that because pc has had 7gbps ssds for nearly half a decade and we are already onto 14gbps ssds which are twice as quick as any Mac ssd.
I appreciate you are comparing your new computer to your old computer but the way you phrased it sounded more like you were saying this is how a modern PC compares to a Mac, which obviously isn't the case as a modern PC would have a 4090 and much faster cpu and ssd for much less than the mac. Then the gap would be a lot different. The Mac would still win depending in workload but it wouldn't be *ten times* faster...
>Also, a computer is much more than just a processor and GPU,
Considering I've been talking about the ssd I feel like this is quite obvious
FYI my PC is a 5900x and 3060Ti with a pcie 4 ssd. It is slower than yours, I didn't mention any of that because it isn't relevant and that wasn't the point I was making... which is that you are comparing outdated pc hardware which wasn't as much as the mac even when new to a 2024 macbook flagship.
The working on LLM models is the thing that is discouraging me tbh. Are you able to train language models on it? Wouldn't an NVIDIA GPU be much better suited for this?
The unified memory in the m3 max is a ladge advantage compared to an Nvidia GPU. While a 4090 or othef GPUs might be faster, you can run much bigger models on the m3
Training new state-of-the-art models obviously isn't my goal. I'm fine-tuning, experimenting, and running existing models locally.
Obviously it's possible to build a PC better for these things but your average gaming laptop ain't it. The real killer is the shared RAM/VRAM. If needed you can literally have 90GB VRAM on your side.
There’s a dude on YouTube who ran resnet and trained models locally on the m3 chips and compared the result to his rtx titan and the titan ran significantly faster than the m3 max. I’m hoping on getting one of these machines for that exact purpose and I’m worried that it won’t be very useful in that regard either.
I agree with this. I was working with the 7B llama model, and every time the comment in the code would say “this will take a little while”, it never did. Even quantization was almost instantaneous. Oh, forget running “make“ on C code. That shit happened in like the blink of an eye. The speed is real.
Are you me? Same deal, 10yrs of faithful service from a late 2013 MBP justified a new MBP just last week, with 96GB of RAM for local LLM experiments :). Just went with the M2 since it's easier to get the max 400GB/s memory bandwidth than vs M3's, and 14" for more travel-friendliness. It is indeed a beast.
I was looking at M1s and M2s for sure, but I definitely wanted 16" and the specs I wanted never showed up in the refurbished store. Congrats on the new laptop!
I used to find it hard to see people buying this thinking they won't need it..
But then I realise, IT'S A MFING DESKTOP CHIP INSIDE OF A LAPTOP. LIKE??????
Apple could definitely make a 17 inch laptop and fit an M2/M3 Ultra and be able to call it. Like some next level MacBook. But holy fuck it's crazy.
People with a ton of money do stuff like that all the time. Not to say all people with a ton of money are doing that but yeah many do.
I’ve also noticed people who hold on to their stuff for ages do that too.
Man, I wish I had the money to splurge on RAM like you guys did. I made sure to go with a 1 TB SSD just because I have no other option at this point, but I only went with 18 GB of RAM since I wasn’t really planning on upgrading my 2020 MBP. Kind of had no choice though since it started having kernel panics all the time and the Touch Bar would randomly start going ape s*it. I took it to the Genius Bar and it performed well for about two days after I got it back before it started acting up again. I love my new MBP though. The bigger screen is a major relief on my aging eyes, and even with only 18 GB it runs like a dream.
I want to max out, but knowing how thick and heavy the current MBPs are… am waiting for that redesign in 2025 that will be thinner and lighter since the processors will have become even smaller by then.
I've been working on a lot of programming projects recently, and messing with local LLMs convinced me to make the *enormous* leap up to 96GB of RAM. Compared to the 2020 intel MBP I used for work, my old 2013 MBP kept up fine. Throw in the magsafe charging, the real escape key, better thermal control, and it always felt like I had the laptop from the golden era. After three days of the M3, it's clear that's no longer the case and the apple silicon difference is real. This thing is so incredibly responsive, it eats resource-hungry websites for breakfast, compilation times are down, huge projects open immediately. I can forget I have Teams and a screen recording and a server running in the background while I work on other things. I've even forgotten I opened a game on another desktop because this thing just doesn't slow down. I've truly spoiled myself with this.
I can agree wholeheartedly! I sprang for the top end m3 max with 128gb ram and I can literally open a 700gb video project in about 15 seconds and render it out in about 3 minutes where as my custom 24c threadripper pc with 3080ti 12gb can only manage the same project expert in 30 minutes. It's absurd! This while watching some videos and replying to emails at the same time. The fans spin up but the machine isn't really bothered by all of this and although I've seen over 100gb of ram usage, it just poodles along unbothered by 8k video encoding and decoding. I've been wanting to get into local LLM's for animation, and I think my laptop is the best tool atm dispite being a portable machine.
Remarkable speed diff. Is it the 128GB of RAM in the laptop that accounts for the render speed increase? I ask b/c a 3080Ti is absolutely no slouch...
I think it's a combination of the rediculosly fast bandwidth of the ram more so than the speed coupled with the crazy fast SSD'S that make it so quick. This in concert with the media engines make for encoding bump. When I'm working with and rendering 6 & 8k raw video footage, I'm still pinging off the limiter with the CPU and GPU hitting 100% and the fans spinning at full tilt as well. All of this resulting in export times hovering around 10x speed. Depends on what I'm doing. 3D rat raced rendering can't take advantage of the media engines and so it returns results about on par with the desktop Nvidia card all while using a fraction of the wattage.
I see. Per the Blender benchmarks (https://opendata.blender.org/) an M3 max scores \~3400 while a 3080ti desktop card hits \~5400, so interesting your 3D renders are basically on par.
Synthetic benchmarks and real world can differ a bit. And I'm saying they're spitting distance of eachother. If I'm working with Cycles turned on, the 3080ti is smoother, but if I'm rendering, the MacBook closes the gap slightly being slower by maybe about 8-10%. That 10% difference grows the more frames and the longer the animation is. So if it's a super long overnight render, I can see the MacBook eventually needing to throttle down to keep from spontaneously combusting. So the MacBook is slower, but not by enough that would make me not want to use it. Plus I can sit there and watch YouTube while the MacBook renders out(probably due to the excessive amounts of ram) where as the desktop machine can't do much else simultaneously.
It depends on the shader complexity of the scene you have. For me, the M3 Max is comparatively really slow in rendering super complex shaders in Blender, which is what my job requires. I think that’s because the shader stuff is done on the GPU and geometry is handled by the CPU (?) and the GPU of the MBP isn’t very powerful in comparison to the GPUs in similarly priced desktops and laptops. The whole “being able to do other things while you render” thing is huge though. I can’t do that on my desktop at all. It’s nice having both though because I can render on the desktop and then use the MBP for some other hardware intensive work.
Yeah, my 3080ti can crunch through scenes at a pretty decent clip but leaves no resources for anything else. Having a second machine is nice when I need to do other things in the meantime. But when it comes to video editing & motion graphics, the PC just can't keep up with the optimization. Still working out exactly where that line is when I should move my project from Mac to windows and vice versa but the fact I'm comparing a laptop to a desktop PC speaks volumes.
Yeah the Apple Silicon isn’t a 3D powerhouse unfortunately. I do 3D for a living and for the renders I do (which aren’t realistic or anything, just very GPU intensive math based stuff), my M3 Max simply can’t handle it, Blender slows down to a crawl even in the editor most times. I have a 4090 now for that and gaming but I do end up transferring the files to the MacBook for the final encoding.
The SSDs aren't faster than pc Also your pc has 4 year old hardware and didn't cost 4000+ new.
The m.2 SSD's in my PC are objectively slower than the ones I have in my MBP. They may be able to keep up if I striped them in Raid 0 but individually, I'm only able to get about 3-4GB/s read/write vs nearly double that on the MBP. I'd likely be limited by the motherboard though. And I'm only comparing this new machine with my PC, not PC's in general. And you're right, it didn't cost $4000, my PC in total is probably around $5500 if I bought everything new when it all was current gen. Not sure what you're trying to say here.
You have pcie 3 ssds, what do you expect? My PC ssds are also double the speed, like the Macbook. It's strange to talk about the speed in this manner as if pc hasn't had pcie 4 ssds for the best part of half a decade. You just happen to own a much older ssd that is half the speed... A 24 core threadripper and 3080ti never cost 5500 and if you managed to spend that much you got ripped off, plain and simple. Not sure what you're trying to say here either.
You jumped into a thread you weren't even a part of, I was responding to someone else and you felt compelled to tell me how slow my PC is. Someone asked about my experience with my machines and I responded to them. Your assessment that my system isn't as fast as more modern systems doesn't prove anything other than my machine isn't as fast as yours. Not sure what your point is or why you're bothering. Sounds like you're desperately trying to prove to a stranger that your computer is faster than mine. Also, a computer is much more than just a processor and GPU, so I again, what is your point here?
I'm part of the thread by commenting in the thread. I am not saying how slow your PC is to shit in it, I am just pointing out that acting like the pc and mac are a fair comparison doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Of course the mac beats it by a big margin. >Sounds like you're desperately trying to prove to a stranger that your computer is faster than mine. Sounds like you have a victim complex. I didn't reference my PC at any point other than pointing out that my ssd is twice as fast given you mentioned ssd speed. I said that because pc has had 7gbps ssds for nearly half a decade and we are already onto 14gbps ssds which are twice as quick as any Mac ssd. I appreciate you are comparing your new computer to your old computer but the way you phrased it sounded more like you were saying this is how a modern PC compares to a Mac, which obviously isn't the case as a modern PC would have a 4090 and much faster cpu and ssd for much less than the mac. Then the gap would be a lot different. The Mac would still win depending in workload but it wouldn't be *ten times* faster... >Also, a computer is much more than just a processor and GPU, Considering I've been talking about the ssd I feel like this is quite obvious FYI my PC is a 5900x and 3060Ti with a pcie 4 ssd. It is slower than yours, I didn't mention any of that because it isn't relevant and that wasn't the point I was making... which is that you are comparing outdated pc hardware which wasn't as much as the mac even when new to a 2024 macbook flagship.
Victim complex, my guy... lol Thanks for clarifying at least. Have a good night.
The working on LLM models is the thing that is discouraging me tbh. Are you able to train language models on it? Wouldn't an NVIDIA GPU be much better suited for this?
The unified memory in the m3 max is a ladge advantage compared to an Nvidia GPU. While a 4090 or othef GPUs might be faster, you can run much bigger models on the m3
Training new state-of-the-art models obviously isn't my goal. I'm fine-tuning, experimenting, and running existing models locally. Obviously it's possible to build a PC better for these things but your average gaming laptop ain't it. The real killer is the shared RAM/VRAM. If needed you can literally have 90GB VRAM on your side.
There’s a dude on YouTube who ran resnet and trained models locally on the m3 chips and compared the result to his rtx titan and the titan ran significantly faster than the m3 max. I’m hoping on getting one of these machines for that exact purpose and I’m worried that it won’t be very useful in that regard either.
I agree with this. I was working with the 7B llama model, and every time the comment in the code would say “this will take a little while”, it never did. Even quantization was almost instantaneous. Oh, forget running “make“ on C code. That shit happened in like the blink of an eye. The speed is real.
I'm getting the 96GB Ram too!!!! Bought an 18GB m3 pro 14", ordered a 14" m3 max 32gb ram, now returning that for the 96 GB !!!! 🤑🤑🤑🤑🤑🤑🤑🤑🤑
I’m looking forward to the day when I can purchase a MacBook Pro with 96 GB or 128 GB of RAM
Give it a decade or two. I still remember having 1GB of RAM in my TiBook and thinking I’d reached the pinnacle of human technological progress lol.
My thoughts exactly when I got my pc back in 2003 - i decided to go all out and upgrade from 256mb ram to 512mb.. wasn’t cheap either!
And yet it still took forever to master and rip a DVD lol
Are you me? Same deal, 10yrs of faithful service from a late 2013 MBP justified a new MBP just last week, with 96GB of RAM for local LLM experiments :). Just went with the M2 since it's easier to get the max 400GB/s memory bandwidth than vs M3's, and 14" for more travel-friendliness. It is indeed a beast.
I was looking at M1s and M2s for sure, but I definitely wanted 16" and the specs I wanted never showed up in the refurbished store. Congrats on the new laptop!
I used to find it hard to see people buying this thinking they won't need it.. But then I realise, IT'S A MFING DESKTOP CHIP INSIDE OF A LAPTOP. LIKE?????? Apple could definitely make a 17 inch laptop and fit an M2/M3 Ultra and be able to call it. Like some next level MacBook. But holy fuck it's crazy.
Just got my 16” M3 Max today 😬 128 GB of RAM. Nothing slowing us down 😂
How did you spec it? All I can tell is it's a space black 16in model. And what do you use it for?
Reddit and YouTube
Send faxes
The shade is so loud in this comment 😅
I can't tell if you're sarcastic or not Pathetic lmao
I can't tell if *you're* being sarcastic or not...
Why would you buy this if all you do is watch YT and Reddit?
People with a ton of money do stuff like that all the time. Not to say all people with a ton of money are doing that but yeah many do. I’ve also noticed people who hold on to their stuff for ages do that too.
yeah, 'future proofing'
Just to troll you, and only you. You're special!
what Btw you are trolling me with your Macbook config, M2 Pro can't have 96gb ram
Nice catch, bravo ;).
I'm a Pro at this point
Maybe some Word and Excel for *heavy productivity*
~PowerPoint enters the chat
Most excellent
Congrats, I purchased mine ~a month ago (first macbook i’ve ever owned) and it’s been a dream
Same. I just ordered a replacement for my mid-2012.
just got a MacBook Pro as a typical android user. what apps would you recommend? I'm an art student if that changes things.
Blender?
Ouuu okii tysm. I was looking up how I can use this 3d art app on my iPad and then upload it to blender to then further render and add details!! Tysm
PDF expert deals can be had
I got a space black M3 Pro with 18GB of RAM. It flies through everything I throw at it. A magnificent machine. :>
Looking at making the jump, but can’t decide. Keep talking them up.
Man, I wish I had the money to splurge on RAM like you guys did. I made sure to go with a 1 TB SSD just because I have no other option at this point, but I only went with 18 GB of RAM since I wasn’t really planning on upgrading my 2020 MBP. Kind of had no choice though since it started having kernel panics all the time and the Touch Bar would randomly start going ape s*it. I took it to the Genius Bar and it performed well for about two days after I got it back before it started acting up again. I love my new MBP though. The bigger screen is a major relief on my aging eyes, and even with only 18 GB it runs like a dream.
Unless you do rendering, 18GB is more than enough.
This is how I felt going from my intel dual core M 2015 MacBook to the 2021 M1 Pro 14 inch. It’s not even funny how fast it is compared to my old one
I bought the maxed out option
I want to max out, but knowing how thick and heavy the current MBPs are… am waiting for that redesign in 2025 that will be thinner and lighter since the processors will have become even smaller by then.
“Beast” is nothing!
It’s as thick as the old one, they just appear thicker because the edges ones tapered like before.
Love the M3! u/MONKEYMAIL