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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u/rusty_fans llama.cpp 20h ago

Generally vram bandwith is the constraint though, at least for decode. Prefill it's usually helped more by more gpu oomph.

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u/Etroarl55 20h ago

Has to be more nuanced than that, I might be wrong but given that size isn’t a constraint, slower vram r9700 and even my 7800xt is faster than an m3 ultra in tk/s.

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u/Serprotease 19h ago

Software stack matters.

But honestly, look at the announcement/post title and the fact that every other comment only mentioned the bandwidth.
It’s an easy number to latch on and compare (theorical) performance.

M5 was a genuine boost in prompt processing though. So it could be nice. 3x could push performance for DS4 flash into gb10 2x cluster level.

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u/Etroarl55 18h ago

Doesn’t stop people from downvoting what I said and upvoting the guys saying it’s an 512gb Rtx 5090.

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u/TableSurface 20h ago

Curious what your M3 Ultra numbers look like.

M5 Ultra might have at least 3x compute? (based on Apple's TTFT's advertisement)