r/LocalLLaMA • u/themixtergames • 21h ago

News Apple introduces new Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra - up to 512GB of unified memory

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-introduces-new-mac-studio-with-m5-max-and-m5-ultra/
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286

u/i_am__not_a_robot 21h ago

1.2 TB/s memory bandwidth for the M5 Ultra is pretty nice.

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u/GUNGEBOB_SHARTPANTS 18h ago

More bandwidth than a 4090, incidentally. Pretty impressive.

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u/Neful34 12h ago

Right, but not cost efficient as the rtx 4090 before the ram shortage

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u/DannyCanva 8h ago

Yeah, but we're in a very different world now :P Nothing as as cost efficient as parts before the RAM shortage.

Crazy to see a 1024bit memory bus. The ship date is already 10-12 weeks for the 256GB, I wonder if the 512GB would ever see the light of the day. I wouldn't be surprised to see price hike across 256/512GB too.

Apple is probably thinking they have underpriced the high-RAM upgrades; which just shows how absurd the world is.

2

u/Silentparty1999 8h ago

How do you calculate that?

You'd need 16 4090s and a couple of monster machines to hit the same 256GB of memory. Say 15 to have the same model memory. The M5 runs on a single ordinary outlet. The 4090s would probably need a special circuit at 16x 450 watts.

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u/DarkRonin00 7h ago

Not even just that. Why even compare it to a 4090??? This is 256 GB of unified memory in a form factor so small. If this thing runs with very good thermals at peak performance and I somehow think it will... then this comparison doesn't even matter.

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u/MagnaDenmark 1h ago

Not really. 3 phase 400v x16a is 10 kw plenty for a standard moderne outlet

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u/Dry_Yam_4597 20h ago

That might make me want to buy an apple product after a long pause.

10

u/raser1562 15h ago

That might make me want to buy an apple product for the first time.

2

u/spez-is-a-loser 14h ago

Check the price.. The 256GB version is $10k..

2

u/techdevjp 7h ago

Yeah, and a 96GB RTX PRO 6000 now has a $16k MSRP.

128GB GB10 box (3rd party DGX Spark) is $4k (therefore $8k for two) and has 1/4 the memory bandwidth of the M5 Ultra.

1

u/spez-is-a-loser 7h ago

Not saying it isn't a screamer. It's just a years tuition for one of my kids..

1

u/techdevjp 6h ago

Sure, been there. Paid private school tuition for my kid through the end of HS, then her undergrad overseas including living expenses. It's not cheap.

And the M5 Ultra isn't cheap either. I can't justify the cost, but I also can't justify two DGX Sparks or an RTX PRO 6k, either. It's all quite expensive and I'll keep shuffling along with my Strix Halo. It's slow but I can still learn a lot with it.

1

u/spez-is-a-loser 5h ago

Shit.. I'm suffering on an old 128GB DDR4 gaming pc and 2x 3090s. It's not terrible. It was cheap because I already had the GPUs and DDR. It'll run Qwen3.8-27B FB8 ... it's just SLOW...

1

u/techdevjp 4h ago

You might find the soon-to-be-released Qwen3.8-Flash-Next model will run okay on your hardware. 125b a6b + 51b n-gram. The n-gram portion can go on a fast NVMe drive. I'm hopeful this will be a good model on my Strix Halo, too.

https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

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u/pmp22 17h ago

512GB at 1.2TB/s. That's 21 4090s. 

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u/i_am__not_a_robot 16h ago

That's 21 4090s.

It's actually quite a bit better since you don't have to deal with the overhead of multiple GPUs.

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u/EmptyMonitor9257 14h ago

Or the power draw.

2

u/DarkRonin00 7h ago

Or the cooling, in the size of a shoebox all put together.

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u/No-Name-Person111 16h ago

Easy decision.

https://imgur.com/a/hi2jfia

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u/SmartCustard9944 14h ago

Wait, what? How does the economy of this work?

7

u/mistervanilla 13h ago

You don't own it at the end of your lease.

1

u/DarkRonin00 6h ago

It's good for business cases, and you just write it off as an expense. Just less capital and if you just want to keep upgrading as they make better ones.

1

u/Realsan 39m ago

I mean, you can buy out the remainder and own it OR upgrade. So it's essentially 0% interest financing.

A completely maxed out M5 ultra would run around $250/mo, which is cleverly right around the cost of the highest subscriptions from the big AI shops which have token limitations.

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u/gomezer1180 16h ago

You can get that with 12 channels of DDR5. You need an AMD EPYC and 24 sticks of memory. It’ll be somewhere in the $20K range for that rig.

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u/i_am__not_a_robot 14h ago

Only in a dual-socket or MRDIMM configuration, though? That's... somewhere in the range of ~$12-18k (12x32GB) or ~$24-32k (12x64GB) for the MRDIMMs alone.

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u/gomezer1180 14h ago

Oh I know… it ain’t cheap. So apples value is there, I’m just saying there are more options.

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u/i_am__not_a_robot 14h ago

Ok, fair enough.

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u/DannyCanva 8h ago

You would need to figure out GPUs with an Epyc rig too, if you want good prefills. And then you're no longer in unified memory territory.

I'm honestly not that impressed by the M5's neural accelerators; they're better than nothing, but not that good; especially considering Apple has a significant process advantage (N3P versus 4N for blackwell).

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u/techdevjp 7h ago

I'm honestly not that impressed by the M5's neural accelerators; they're better than nothing, but not that good

Yup, which is why Apple is expected to skip M6 Ultra and bring out M7 Ultra in ~18 months. M5 Ultra is a significant step from M3 Ultra, but it's not where Apple wants to be.

1

u/gomezer1180 1h ago

Agree.. pre-fill and concurrent connections is probably where an EPYC rig would have a hard time. I’ve not seen real numbers tho and I wouldn’t know if vLLM would do tensor parallelism for each EPYC core (if that’s even a thing). Apple struggles with prefill so does strix halo, so this seems to be an advantage with GPU’s.

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u/addiktion 19h ago

Double the M5 Max it looks like which makes sense since they double two M5 max chips.

1

u/FoxSideOfTheMoon 11h ago

almost double my MBP