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Re:The Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the MacBook by crasm on Thursday June 29, 2023 @02:05PM (#36524324)
LLM inference is GPU bound and VRAM bound. Given quantization however, 2x3090 or 4090 (48GB) is enough VRAM to load 65B quantized llama derivatives (30-40GB). With exllama you can get maybe 20-30 tok/s with dual 4090s on ~1200W. With an M2 Ultra maybe 10 tok/s on ~178W.

(I don't have these devices but have been researching LLM inference performance in the interest of buying a machine for them.)

Advantage goes to M2 Ultra if you ever might need more than 48GB VRAM. I think it's unlikely nvidia is going to release a significantly higher VRAM consumer card anytime soon, since that's what their A100s are for.

Re:The Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the MacBook by mort96 on Thursday June 29, 2023 @05:56PM (#36527318)
If only the big ML stuff didn't all use CUDA. Guessing that world won't transition to Metal compute any time soon.