Which one is the fastest and how fast is it? Even the "fast" ones doesn't seem to even reach close to consumer NVIDIA GPUs released years ago when it comes to prompt processing.
indeed. make up your mind, and also "slow/fast" mean very little given plethora of models to choose from. fast for what, slow for what. fast with which harness, etc...
Hopper is ~4 years old at this point though, compared to Blackwell which is ~2 years old, the difference isn't nil.
Depending on your use case, you might prefer native FP4 and FP6 low-precision support and 5th-generation Tensor Cores rather than what Hopper offers.
I think for training Hopper makes sense as it's generally a bit cheaper and the difference isn't that big, but for inference the difference widens a bunch makes a lot more sense to go with Blackwell.
You're correct, the difference isn't nil - H100 is data-center grade GPU with loads of bandwidth and compute while RTX PRO is a consumer grade GPU. The difference between the microarchitectures would make sense to point out if we had been comparing apples to apples and not apples to pits.
Hopefully... If it doesn't, mere mortals like us consumers are going to be priced out of computers altogether. It'll be the end of the personal computing era and a return to big iron mainframes.
Kind of feels like if you spend $40K on your GPU setup, you don't want to cheap out on the PSU.
Still, you're right, I have a 1200W PSU for a single RTX Pro 6000, cost ~500 something, so still the PSU shouldn't be that large part of the total budget.
$42k and a toy CPU at that. Threadripper or EPIC if it must be AMD camp, although I'd rather it weren't (_always_ some random issues on linux). TBH, if I were buying workstation at such prices, I'd probably first take a look at what HP has (since their cooling and immunity to dust is unprecedented), and then probably BOXX and Puget. For DIY there's always supermicro at such levels.
I've noticed that some companies have flat out dropped the high memory configurations from their lineup that were offered just months ago at inflated prices. OnePlayerX had a 128GB Strix Halo tablet, RedMagic had a 24GB Android phone - both have been removed from their sites. It's a similar situation for the new Thinkpad lineup.
That memory speed drop going from single DIMM per channel DDR5 to dual DIMM per channel is very much notable - 3600MT/s is barely any faster than what DDR4 could do in it's final days.
The CPU market seems to be missing the "HEDT" platform we used to enjoy.
Thelio Mira AI
$3,299.00
Description
Specs
Warranty
Accelerate your AI development with Thelio Mira AI, System76's affordable, GPU-focused workstations, built for local AI development — so you can train, fine-tune, and iterate challenging AI workloads entirely on your own hardware.
Configure Thelio Mira with up to:
16-core AMD Ryzen 9000 Series CPU
192 GB DDR5 RAM
Dual NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 GPU
192 GB GPU memory
this is miss leading. actually it is 4gb ram a400 price.
Seems they might be selling a combo of dual RTX Pro 6000 workstation cards (non-refundable), but the setup they have, unless they change how the GPUs cooling work, isn't gonna work out thermally if you stack two of those workstation cards on top of each other. But it doesn't say WS or "Workstation", so I suppose could be the server variant too? But also doesn't say...
Hope they have good overall cooling the case, cooling doesn't seem to be mentioned, it'll be a noisy little machine no doubt :)
When I saw the 192GB I first thought they might have beat Framework to market with a Gorgon Halo machine with unified RAM that Framework has teased. This is just a GPU workstation.
I'd really like to just buy some collective shares of a GB300 NVL72 in a datacenter somewhere and have a daily token quota on a shared DeepSeek model or whatever was hot that week. I would just need to find ~100 like-minded folks at this $40k per share price to get started haha.
I've thought a little bit about this, really I suspect you'd actually want maybe 20 folks for about a 20k buy-in and a dedicated 8×B300. You could get some pretty sweet token/s. Probably a community/coop share structure. It'd be better than the GB300 which is fairly throughput optimized (not needed for 20ish folk)
Are you sure about that? For the price of the top configuration here you can buy a 5-stack of 256GB Mac Studio M5 Ultras.
This dual NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 setup has 192GB of VRAM at 1.8 TB/s, versus the 5-stack of Macs that collectively have 1.25 TB at 1.2 TB/second... I'm not convinced that equation comes out in Nvidia's favour.
Right, performance is more than just the aggregated memory speed of the hardware you have. I'm fairly sure, at least last time I looked, maybe Apple launched something new in the last 2-3 months that has completely changed the picture?
> performance is more than just the aggregated memory speed of the hardware you have
In other fields, sure, but for big LLMs it's a very significant part of the performance picture. That stack of Macs also is going to be able to natively run models 4-5x larger than the dual Blackwells can hold in memory - any model over about 128GB of weights isn't going to fit on the GPUs, and is going to be heavily performance constrained by moving data across the PCIE bus.
> maybe Apple launched something new in the last 2-3 months that has completely changed the picture
Indeed. The M5 Ultra (currently up for pre-order) has 50% higher memory bandwidth than its predecessor, and a claimed 4x improvement in prompt prefill.
> any model over about 128GB of weights isn't going to fit on the GPUs
Not sure if you misunderstand what GPUs we're talking about, one RTX Pro 6000 has 96GB of VRAM.
> Indeed. The M5 Ultra (currently up for pre-order) has 50% higher memory bandwidth than its predecessor, and a claimed 4x improvement in prompt prefill.
Exciting! Eagerly awaiting the benchmarks and comparisons then. Lets hope "4x improvement" had a good enough baseline so 4x actually ends up useful in practice compared to the current hardware they offer.
> 50% higher memory bandwidth
Seems this lands on ~1.2 TB/s if what Apple claims is correct. For reference, RTX Pro 6000 does 1.8 TB/s, so seems Apple is indeed getting closer incrementally.
Yeah, that's why the "any model over about 128GB of weights isn't going to fit on the GPUs" part doesn't make sense, you'll easily be able to run weights in that weight class on two of them. Or did I misunderstand what "on the GPUs" you meant?
Right, easily run 128-160 GB models, yes. Not easily run models much larger than that. Anything that doesn't fit in the 192 GB (including context, cache, etc) is going to have to be sparse/MoE, and the rather anaemic PCIE bandwidth is going to hurt.
By comparison, the 5x Mac cluster should be able to run a dense ~800GB-1TB model without a drastic slowdown.
People routinely buy cars that cost double that. This is a machine that people that typically earn six figure salaries use to do their work on. Exactly the target demographic that would buy/lease expensive cars as well. And then those get used mainly to commute to work.
I don't really need one. But I do have a 4.5K mac book pro for work. Yes it's a bit overpowered. But it's the main vehicle with which I earn a living and it routinely saves me time by blazing through builds and generally doing things quickly for me. I have slightly more GPU on that thing than I need. But it's nice to have the option to experiment with some of the open weight AI models.
> People routinely buy cars that cost double that.
Maybe it's the "routinely" or the "people" part, but "people" generally don't ever buy a 80K car, it's a small fraction of the population who can afford such luxury cars. And I'm sure the ones who buy cars for 80K, unless they're car enthusiasts or just plain billionaires, don't do so "routinely" either.
I absolutely love system76. Never owned one of their desktop machines, but I have a couple of their older laptops and they work fantastically for me. As in I can easily get a decade out of them and replace the batteries every few years. One of them is almost a decade old ironically enough.
Sold my computer + DLSR camera back in the day to afford moving countries. Can't imagine what life would have been if I didn't, very happy I did. Lived with a netbook for 2-3 years, but was before I was a professional programmer.
Anyone know why they chose a consumer grade CPU on this? I’m a little surprised to see a 9950X as the top option. There’s not enough PCIe lanes available to run everything without bifurcation. I imagine the GPUs probably aren’t too bothered generally… but the NVMe drives are likely to slow down as a result.
A Threadripper ain’t cheap, but if you’re spending $45k on a workstation it seems like a weird place to skimp. Not to mention you’d then have the option of shoveling a few more 6000 pros in it when you want to run something larger (assuming your home/office electrical box can support it).
Aye but at $45k you’re so deep already is that really worth the savings? It’s so much easier to manage a single system, and the performance will be in absolute terms better.
Truly, I get your point, but $45k is obscene for a workstation (because of the RAM shortage). I can’t fathom it being a reasonable decision[1] unless you’re able to churn an immense profit from it. And… if you can, it’s an expense that saves time, energy, and effort. If it is only profitable when $8k in price difference makes it viable, is that really worth the effort? An $8k increase making a difference, when you’re wholly dependent on the frontier (or near frontier) lab not releasing a model that makes your work(station) irrelevant— seems reckless. Couple that with the doubling of DeepSeek’s parameters for their flash model… and well the math just don’t math for my naive brain.
[1] I’m absolutely incapable of spending that much on a workstation so my opinions may be irrelevant… but I cannot understand the “stepping over quarters to save a penny” mentality[2].
[2] I could be missing the forest for the trees. As a result, I’d love to know how I am being shortsighted. I just can’t fathom a situation where an $8k surcharge in system RAM doesn’t make sense. It’s not about system RAM, it’s about GPU RAM, margins, and useful lifetime of the system.
This is a link to their configurable workstation on consumer boards. They offer TR or Xeon based boards too; it's just a different link/SKU: https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-major
> An $8k increase making a difference, when you’re wholly dependent on the frontier (or near frontier) lab not releasing a model that makes your work(station) irrelevant
Hmm, why? I don't understand why better models being available remotely would change the usefulness of what you already have working locally? If it works for you, it works, regardless of what the frontier labs have, and if it doesn't, it doesn't, again regardless.
I remember losing sleep when I bought my RTX Pro 6000, but somehow they keep going up in price, and waddya know I’ve even done real work that appreciates the VRAM size.
Same. Had to convince the wife, initially aimed to get two of them, ended up with one. Now my wife is berating me for not convincing her that I should have bought four and then sell two later... Can't win :)
Haha, bloody hell, mate. $17k a pop? I bought these for $8k-ish. That's bonkers to buy this when newer flash models won't fit on this any more. DeepSeek V4 Flash seems the last in its line, and then you have to count on Qwen Next. Seems like a waste honestly.
I find it hard to believe any enterprise willing to drop over $40k on a workstation PC would choose `Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS with the COSMIC Desktop Environment` over Ubuntu.
The prefill rates are way faster on these cards compared to apple silicon, which affects TTFT and therefore usability for a lot of coding tasks, unless you fire and forget most of the time.
Mac GPUs supposedly being fastest thing on Earth obsoleting everything NVIDIA is just pure marketing. It was just faster once than some midrange laptop NVIDIA, which conveniently wasn't explicitly marked as different chip sharing the branding with the desktop variant(oof).
The real benefits to going Mac is its quiet and discreet, high wife/CEO acceptance design, and their huge GPU-assignable shared RAM.
If you're okay with your desk being the wing top of a flying airplane, and 3M Peltor or David-Clark is your favorite working time headphone brand anyway, then your build will be faster and cheaper than a maxed out Mac Studio.
For me the operating system (and ecosystem in general) is one of the biggest reasons I use a Mac, but the unified memory pool is a benefit too. I am still distraught about the gaming situation though.
I wonder why Apple has not really pushed their memory bandwidth numbers. They're starting to catch up to 2020 at this point -- cool, but still struggling to run years-old models. (FLOPS is even further behind by a year or two)
Maybe they're waiting on HBM? Given that they're skipping M6 Max to go straight for M7, I'd assume they're doing a redesign for it.
GDDR has higher latency and much lower capacity. HBM requires an interposer and also has lower capacity. It's not an easy choice. The M7 family will probably double memory bandwidth using LPDDR6.
Is this just a marketing stunt? From a completely ignorant user, doesn't AI reeuqires high bandwidth ram (like the GPU)? Is really DDR5’s bandwidth enough?
There’s roughly 50% more memory bandwidth on an RTX 6000 pro versus the M5 Ultra. I imagine it really comes down to what you’re doing, I know my 5090 runs laps around the M5 Pro I have when it comes to local LLM performance (until it runs out of memory).
If it wasn’t for the fact the 6000 Pro is selling for like 100% ($9,000) over MSRP it would probably look a lot more reasonable.
If your goal is pure GPU compute, you should have got a 5090. It can bench comparable to the RTX 6000 Pro cards and is near guaranteed to outperform M5 Ultra.
That sounds like a contradiction.
/J
> 96 GB Dual NVIDIA RTX PRO 5000 w/ 1000W PSU (non-refundable) +$19,169
Though I don't think there's anything stopping you from trying to stuff an H100 into this machine if you want to BYO.
Depending on your use case, you might prefer native FP4 and FP6 low-precision support and 5th-generation Tensor Cores rather than what Hopper offers.
I think for training Hopper makes sense as it's generally a bit cheaper and the difference isn't that big, but for inference the difference widens a bunch makes a lot more sense to go with Blackwell.
Wish I built this a few years ago!
That's a bitter pill to swallow. Most of this is the cost of the Nvidia card, and the RAM.
Still, you're right, I have a 1200W PSU for a single RTX Pro 6000, cost ~500 something, so still the PSU shouldn't be that large part of the total budget.
It would be great if China had more lithography machine....
The CPU market seems to be missing the "HEDT" platform we used to enjoy.
From $3,299 (with just 64 GB RAM and a 4 GB GPU) to over $50,000. Very affordable indeed.
Configure Thelio Mira with up to:
this is miss leading. actually it is 4gb ram a400 price.dual RTX6000 price is : $40,538.00
Hope they have good overall cooling the case, cooling doesn't seem to be mentioned, it'll be a noisy little machine no doubt :)
Edit: The Max-Q is one of the options, what's the other option then?
Are they possibly selling setups they haven't actually tested practically in the real world?
Then I will do a video of me playing Crysis on it
This dual NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 setup has 192GB of VRAM at 1.8 TB/s, versus the 5-stack of Macs that collectively have 1.25 TB at 1.2 TB/second... I'm not convinced that equation comes out in Nvidia's favour.
In other fields, sure, but for big LLMs it's a very significant part of the performance picture. That stack of Macs also is going to be able to natively run models 4-5x larger than the dual Blackwells can hold in memory - any model over about 128GB of weights isn't going to fit on the GPUs, and is going to be heavily performance constrained by moving data across the PCIE bus.
> maybe Apple launched something new in the last 2-3 months that has completely changed the picture
Indeed. The M5 Ultra (currently up for pre-order) has 50% higher memory bandwidth than its predecessor, and a claimed 4x improvement in prompt prefill.
Not sure if you misunderstand what GPUs we're talking about, one RTX Pro 6000 has 96GB of VRAM.
> Indeed. The M5 Ultra (currently up for pre-order) has 50% higher memory bandwidth than its predecessor, and a claimed 4x improvement in prompt prefill.
Exciting! Eagerly awaiting the benchmarks and comparisons then. Lets hope "4x improvement" had a good enough baseline so 4x actually ends up useful in practice compared to the current hardware they offer.
> 50% higher memory bandwidth
Seems this lands on ~1.2 TB/s if what Apple claims is correct. For reference, RTX Pro 6000 does 1.8 TB/s, so seems Apple is indeed getting closer incrementally.
Right, but the top option here is a pair of RTX Pro 6000s, hence 192 GB of VRAM in total. Should be enough for a 128GB model plus context, cache, etc.
By comparison, the 5x Mac cluster should be able to run a dense ~800GB-1TB model without a drastic slowdown.
I don't really need one. But I do have a 4.5K mac book pro for work. Yes it's a bit overpowered. But it's the main vehicle with which I earn a living and it routinely saves me time by blazing through builds and generally doing things quickly for me. I have slightly more GPU on that thing than I need. But it's nice to have the option to experiment with some of the open weight AI models.
Maybe it's the "routinely" or the "people" part, but "people" generally don't ever buy a 80K car, it's a small fraction of the population who can afford such luxury cars. And I'm sure the ones who buy cars for 80K, unless they're car enthusiasts or just plain billionaires, don't do so "routinely" either.
-_-
Some of us worked hard in life and have spare money, sue me!
Can honestly say that was one of the best trades I’ve ever done. I didn’t buy another computer for 3 more years.
As that’s unified memory à la Apple and I think up to 128gb
A Threadripper ain’t cheap, but if you’re spending $45k on a workstation it seems like a weird place to skimp. Not to mention you’d then have the option of shoveling a few more 6000 pros in it when you want to run something larger (assuming your home/office electrical box can support it).
Truly, I get your point, but $45k is obscene for a workstation (because of the RAM shortage). I can’t fathom it being a reasonable decision[1] unless you’re able to churn an immense profit from it. And… if you can, it’s an expense that saves time, energy, and effort. If it is only profitable when $8k in price difference makes it viable, is that really worth the effort? An $8k increase making a difference, when you’re wholly dependent on the frontier (or near frontier) lab not releasing a model that makes your work(station) irrelevant— seems reckless. Couple that with the doubling of DeepSeek’s parameters for their flash model… and well the math just don’t math for my naive brain.
[1] I’m absolutely incapable of spending that much on a workstation so my opinions may be irrelevant… but I cannot understand the “stepping over quarters to save a penny” mentality[2].
[2] I could be missing the forest for the trees. As a result, I’d love to know how I am being shortsighted. I just can’t fathom a situation where an $8k surcharge in system RAM doesn’t make sense. It’s not about system RAM, it’s about GPU RAM, margins, and useful lifetime of the system.
So they offer both options.
Hmm, why? I don't understand why better models being available remotely would change the usefulness of what you already have working locally? If it works for you, it works, regardless of what the frontier labs have, and if it doesn't, it doesn't, again regardless.
EG As I gazed at Janice, joy with equal part contentment washed through my soul.
Oh, it's System76, that's why. Open hardware. Makes sense.
Edit: Also Nvidia
The real benefits to going Mac is its quiet and discreet, high wife/CEO acceptance design, and their huge GPU-assignable shared RAM.
If you're okay with your desk being the wing top of a flying airplane, and 3M Peltor or David-Clark is your favorite working time headphone brand anyway, then your build will be faster and cheaper than a maxed out Mac Studio.
Maybe they're waiting on HBM? Given that they're skipping M6 Max to go straight for M7, I'd assume they're doing a redesign for it.
Can I afford it? Absolutely not.
If running models then Apple is fine, if training or tuning or large number of users then Nvidia is king
If it wasn’t for the fact the 6000 Pro is selling for like 100% ($9,000) over MSRP it would probably look a lot more reasonable.