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M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review

269 points · 262 comments · piotrgrabowski

  1. simonw · · 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/sec generation speed
    
      Prompt size    8K    64K   128K   256K
      RTX 5090 PC    59    51    44     n/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:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macstories.net&#x2F;stories&#x2F;m5-ultra-mac-studio-review-the-dream-mac-for-local-ai-agents&#x2F;#mx-pc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macstories.net&#x2F;stories&#x2F;m5-ultra-mac-studio-revie...
    1. jmyeet · · focus · HN ↗
      The selling point of the M5 Ultra Mac Studio is that you can run much larger models that the 5090 can&#x27;t without swapping. NVidia aggressively segments the market on VRAM for this reason. That&#x27;s why a 5090 has an MSRP of ~$2k (but good luck getting one for less than $4k) while a 6000 Pro, which is basically a 5090 with 96GB of RAM has now soared beyond $15k where 3-6 months ago it was more like $10-11k. A 6000 Pro has the same memory bandwidth but slightly more CUDA units (IIRC ~24k vs ~21k).

      This advantage won&#x27;t be apparent with a 27B model. The 256GB MS can probably run the newer Flash models locally, something you can&#x27;t do on a 5090.

      I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;ll get a successor to the 5090 until late 2028, maybe even 2029. I&#x27;m basing this on the launch date of the 5000 series and that we haven&#x27;t got a midcycle refresh yet. Rumor has it the chips are ready but the 3GB RAM modules are 3-4x the price of the 2GB modules used on the current cards.

      Apple should see a Mac Studio major update in 2028. That might even force NVidia&#x27;s hand. But it&#x27;s really impossible to say what the state of the market will be 2-3 years from now. It may have completely crashed. I suspect not however.

      The interesting thing will be when the bandwidth demands start forcing HBM memory onto these home&#x2F;enthusiast solutions.

      1. [deleted] · · focus · HN ↗

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