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. gpugreg · 1790003246 · focus · HN ↗
  Those RTX 5090 numbers are bad. You can get over 200 tps with ninfer using NVFP4 and MTP.
  1. beastman82 · 1790006689 · focus · HN ↗
    can confirm.
    I dont' know why people spend huge money on these and Spark. The 5090 is running qwen 3.8 at 200+ tps!! That's 1-2 orders of magnitude faster.
    throwaway27448 · 1790008542 · focus · HN ↗
    A) the macos value add is enormous if you have any investment in the ecosystem, B) for me at least a GPU is completely useless for anything but being a token generator.
    bigyabai · 1790009466 · focus · HN ↗
    > for me at least a GPU is completely useless for anything but being a token generator.
    No thanks to the "macos value add" that forces you to use Metal while Valve customers frolick in Protonland.
    throwaway27448 · 1790012612 · focus · HN ↗
    > No thanks to the "macos value add" that forces you to use Metal while Valve customers frolick in Protonland.
    Crossover works on macos, too. So does moltenvk, so does vanilla wine, etc etc. You can run most games without a hitch these days (allegedly, according to /r/macgaming). But I don't play video games so a GPU would probably be better off in some kid's computer.
    bigyabai · 1790020552 · focus · HN ↗
    A GPU would be better-off attached to your Mac in an eGPU enclosure. There is not a single Apple Silicon GPU on the market that leads the industry in prefill, decode or power efficiency.
    But of course, Apple doesn't allow that as part of their ecosystem. It's really a privilege to have MoltenVK perform worse than the fanmade HoneyKrisp driver. It's valuable when Apple refuses to sign AArch64 CUDA drivers for macOS. It's exciting to pay Crossover to support half of the library Proton offers for free.
    Clearly, I'm some sort of ingrate that selfishly demands the best things, without considering how to accommodate the poor trillion-dollar megacorporation.

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