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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. gpugreg · · focus · HN ↗
      Those RTX 5090 numbers are bad. You can get over 200 tps with ninfer using NVFP4 and MTP.
      1. beastman82 · · focus · HN ↗
        can confirm.

        I dont&#x27; know why people spend huge money on these and Spark. The 5090 is running qwen 3.8 at 200+ tps!! That&#x27;s 1-2 orders of magnitude faster.

        1. mathisfun123 · · focus · HN ↗
          same reason they spend huge amounts of money on rolexes when seikos work better (the tech crowd isn&#x27;t immune from vanity).
          1. throwaway27448 · · focus · HN ↗
            If you seriously think apple products are nothing but a status item, you&#x27;re deluding yourself and probably have been for decades.
            1. mathisfun123 · · focus · HN ↗
              If you seriously think apple cares about anything other than cell phones, you&#x27;re deluding yourself and probably have been for decades.
              1. tom_ · · focus · HN ↗
                They&#x27;ve been selling phones for less than 20 years at this point? Though I suppose 1.9 is not equal to 1, so it gets the plural.
              2. throwaway27448 · · focus · HN ↗
                ...did you mean profit? I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re manufacturing iphones just on the hope they delight you. This is also true of Google et al.

                I don&#x27;t get these weird parasocial emotional attachments&#x2F;beefs people have with brands. Talk to a therapist.

                1. mathisfun123 · · focus · HN ↗
                  brother my point is they don&#x27;t care about their product offerings outside of their phones. this post&#x2F;thread is about one of their product offerings which is not a phone which is inferior to their competitors&#x27;. simple.
                  1. selectodude · · focus · HN ↗
                    My M1 Pro MBP is 6 years old and continues to be the best computer I own, so if that’s Apple not trying, god help everybody else once they do.
                    1. mathisfun123 · · focus · HN ↗

                      [dead]

                      1. brookst · · focus · HN ↗
                        <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.macrumors.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;we-need-to-discuss-the-m6-gpu.2489966&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.macrumors.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;we-need-to-discuss-the-...
                        1. bigyabai · · focus · HN ↗
                          What in that thread is particularly impressive or noteworthy? According to the benchmarks I&#x27;ve seen, M6 raster performance is actually less efficient than M5 in many scenarios.
              3. [deleted] · · focus · HN ↗

                [deleted]

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