Thread

M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review

269 points · 262 comments · piotrgrabowski

simonw · 1790001122 · focus · HN ↗
The numbers I was most interested in are tucked away in a chart towards the bottom - the speed comparison of the Mac Studios v.s. a RTX 5090:
```
  Qwen3.8 27B tokens&#x2F;sec generation speed

  Prompt size    8K    64K   128K   256K
  RTX 5090 PC    59    51    44     n&#x2F;a
  M5 Ultra       48    39    32     24
  M3 Ultra       31    23.5  20     15
```
A whole bunch more comparison numbers in this section: <a href="https://www.macstories.net/stories/m5-ultra-mac-studio-review-the-dream-mac-for-local-ai-agents/#mx-pc" rel="nofollow">https://www.macstories.net/stories/m5-ultra-mac-studio-revie...
1. redox99 · 1790003159 · focus · HN ↗
  A dense 27B doesn't really make sense for the Mac. A MoE makes way more sense when you have modest bandwidth but lots of memory.
  1. peri-cl · 1790003570 · focus · HN ↗
    They do MoE. They benchmarked GLM 5.3-flash (320B / 18B), and Qwen 3.8-flash-next (125B / 6B). The dense Qwen is only focused (I assume) because it's about the only thing that fits on a 5090, that they can compare the two heads on.

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