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.
    fhub · 1790023441 · focus · HN ↗
    How are you deciding which work to send to the 5090 vs a frontier model, or making the two work together nicely?
    Correct is much more important than fast for me, but if I could get correct and fast, that would obviously be amazing.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.