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Re:Apple discontinues the Mac Pro with no plans for future h... by eigenspace on Friday March 27, 2026 @05:32AM (#47540590)
The framework desktop is quite cool, but those Ryzen Max CPUs are still a pretty poor competitor to Apple's chips if what you care about it running an LLM. Ryzen Max tops out at 256 GB/s of memory bandwidth, whereas an M4 Max can hit 560 GB/s of bandwidth.

So even if the model fits in the memory buffer on the Ryzen Max, you're still going to hit something like half the tokens/second just because the GPU will be sitting around waiting for data.

Personally, I'd rather have the Framework machine, but if running local LLMs is your main goal, the offerings from Apple are very compelling, even when you adjust for the higher price on the Apple machine.

Re:Apple discontinues the Mac Pro with no plans for future h... by rl3 on Friday March 27, 2026 @07:03AM (#47541194)
There's also the DGX Spark. Granted, its price has been going up recently alongside everything else that has memory in it.
Re:Apple discontinues the Mac Pro with no plans for future h... by eigenspace on Friday March 27, 2026 @07:16AM (#47541299)
I haven't heard a single good think about DGX Spark from anyone using it, so I'd be pretty wary about that.
Re:Apple discontinues the Mac Pro with no plans for future h... by xienze on Friday March 27, 2026 @07:22AM (#47541339)
That also has pretty poor memory bandwidth. 283GB/s I think.
Re:Apple discontinues the Mac Pro with no plans for future h... by rl3 on Friday March 27, 2026 @07:46AM (#47541527)
Yeah. The main selling point I'd say is the onboard ConnectX-7 hardware.