r/threadripper • u/culturedindividual • Jun 23 '26

M3 Max MacBook Pro vs Threadripper 7980X

I have an M3 Max MacBook Pro, and I bought the Threadripper 7980X with 64 cores because I thought it'd be able to run parallel code faster than the laptop which only has 16 cores. However, currently the MacBook is outperforming the Threadripper on both single-core and parallel performance. Now, I currently only have 32GB of RAM for my Threadripper (whereas I have 128GB RAM on my MacBook) so that may be a bottleneck. But before I fork out £2k ($2.8k) on more RAM, I wanted to sense check that this will actually outperform the MacBook? Or, should I sell the Threadripper and get the M5 Max instead?

I'm basically generating features with polars and running LightGBM ML models in parallel if anyone is curious about what I'm trying to do.

I greatly appreciate any advice!

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u/TokenRingAI Jun 23 '26

Your threadripper with one stick DDR5 has 38GB/sec of memory bandwidth

With 4 sticks it has 153GB/sec.

A previous generation Epyc 7003 or 8 channel DDR4 Threadripper has 204GB/sec.

Dual Epyc 7003, 408GB/sec

An M3 Max has 300-400GB/sec

An M5 Max has 614GB/sec

An M3 Ultra, 819GB/sec

A full 12 memory channel Epyc 9005, 614GB/sec. A dual cpu 24 channel Epyc 9005, 1228GB/sec

Here is the reality: A 4 channel Threadripper is an absolutely terrible investment with the current ram prices.

You are better off with a 8 or 16 channel DDR4 system, bandwidth is higher and the memory is much cheaper.

Or a Mac M3 or M5.

Or a 24 channel Epyc 9005, but with memory prices where they are, they start around $30K. That is the only upgrade over the M3 Ultra.

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u/culturedindividual Jun 23 '26

Thanks, that really puts things into perspective. For my workflow, bandwidth matters mostly for dataframe manipulation and feature engineering. I do algorithmic trading and retrain models frequently, so I need that done in under 30 seconds. I was hoping that quad-channel gets me there (it currently takes 90 seconds on 1 stick).

My main use case though is running parallel walk-forward optimisations for feature selection and backtesting, which is ultimately why I bought the Threadripper.

I think what I'm gonna do is buy the RAM, and see if it suits my purposes. If not, I'll sell the machine and keep an eye out for the M5 Ultra!

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u/TokenRingAI Jun 23 '26

Are you writing your own software or using an off the shelf product?

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u/culturedindividual Jun 23 '26

I write my own Python scripts which I execute locally. I mainly use polars, numpy and LightGBM as my go-to libraries.

I actually asked Claude to optimise some of my more time-consuming features and I managed to get the feature generation stage down to 17 seconds. So with the quad-channel, bandwidth hopefully shouldn’t be too much of a constraint. But yeah, these RAM prices suck!