Memory bandwidth is nearly doubled and inference speed tracks closely to that... so no, absolutely addressed here by M4. Storage speed has nothing to do with that.
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M4 Pro Chip Announced: Up to 14-Core CPU and 20-Core GPU, Up to 64GB of RAM, Thunderbolt 5 Support, and More
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Memory bandwidth is nearly doubled and inference speed tracks closely to that... so no, absolutely addressed here by M4. Storage speed has nothing to do with that.
Wonder how the performance of a M4 Pro MINI with 64GB Ram, 8TB SSD and 10GB ethernet ($4,688.00) would stock up against my M1 Ultra Mac Studio with 128GB Ram, 8TB SSD and 10GB Ethernet ($7,300.00)?
Similar in compute, your Ultra would be about 3x faster in both graphics and LLM inference.
Guys, on mini m4 pro to play native mac games like baldur gate 3 etc..at a reasonable frame rate, how noticeable or important is going from 24gb to 48gb to 64 gb ram? The $200 upgrade for 4 extra gpu core / 2 extra performance cpu core is a no brainer, but i cant decide whether upgrading from 24 gb ram for $400/$600is worth the money. Gaming is the main thing I do that is intensive everything else is standard stuff that doesn’t need the extra ram
Yeah M3 was definitely a huge step down. Very unfortunate. We got the core nerfing and then memory bandwidth nerfing.
Typing this on my M3 Pro 14" and while M1 to M2 felt very minimal, this M3 to M4 transition feels so much bigger.
No impact. You'd have to step up to the Max to see any benefit from more memory.
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Man, it's amazing how fast the Mac Mini has eclipsed the M1 Studios. The rate of improvement in the Apple Silicon line is a wonder to behold.
You are right. My M3 Pro 36 GB is still very fast and efficient. For VMs however, I found out it is limited to the 6 performance cores and I can't use efficiency cores. With the M4 they are going back to the superior 4e+8p and 4e+10p options. What really rubs me the wrong way is how they nerfed the bandwidth from 200 GB/s on the M2 Pro to 150 GB/s on the M3 Pro, and now they advertise a 75% increase from M3 to M4 Pro. Not to mention the weird RAM configurations (18 and 36 GBs).
M1 to M2/M3 was very minimal. M3 to M4 is a gigantic upgrade, especially with the improved I/O. The point I'm trying to make is that it really feels like the M3 Pro was artificially held back, just so the M4 can be a really big YoY upgrade. At least I have the Space Black color too haha
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That’ll be one hell of an upgrade, enjoy! I’ve found apple silicon to be truly impressive. Snappy as can be
I wouldn’t hold your breath for an Ultra tomorrow. They’re not announcing Mac Studios or a new Mac Pro.
Especially with the heat dissipation issues M3 Max had, there’s no chance they’re going to try to cram an Ultra into a MBP
It’ll be exciting to finally see the M4 Max get announced, though!
Inference speed absolutely is lagging, which was my point.
Let me rephrase, there are 2 main areas that Apple Silicon Macs fall short compared to PCs: inference speed (and some associated ML/AI tasks – as long as they can fit within the memory space on a PC which all models can’t), and storage speed. They are distinct things.
M3 Max with far more memory bandwidth is still miles behind now 2 year old nvidia architecture as far as inference throughput. Apple needs to address this, and will probably do so with next year’s offerings. Look up the benchmarks for yourself and you’ll see, it’s not a small difference it is enormous. The fastest Apple Silicon inference speed can’t even match a 4 year old 3090, they are way behind, which leads to my next point directly.
Tthe decision to limit the neural cores to whatever the base M chip has is short-sighted and looks like it will continue for this generation.
I expect both things to be addressed within the next year or two, along with a MBP redesign, that will spur some upgrades. Maybe graphics performance too since that is barely improved YoY this time.
M3 was truly a stopgap and the M4 makes that very apparent, but it doesn’t make those machines bad, they do have significantly improved graphics cores vs. M1/M2.
My point mentioning any of this is that these drawbacks make it difficult to justify spending a ton of money, if you care about any of these aspects or need them for your workflows which not all people do. It actually points to favoring the Mini because it can get you (or me, perhaps) to the next real advancement that holistically addresses these things.
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Apple is not intending to get great performance from 70B+ param models. What is used locally by Apple Intelligence, and esp. what is processed by the Neural Engine cores, are very small by comparison. We'll see probably another 4-5 generations of the normal Pro series before we hit a 4090 type of bandwidth. Possibly the M6 Max or M5 Ultra. Apple is not in competition with Nvidia, not in that way.
But for those who care about that use case, there is no need to even considering offloading to disk. These are not PCs w/ high bandwidth memory constrained outbound GPUs. It's the exact opposite situation and the available memory goes beyond the bandwidth needed to make larger models an even decent experience. Even if the disk throughput increased by an order of magnitude putting one in a situation to offload to disk would take a bad experience and make it worse.
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I'm tempted by the new mini. But I have an M2 Max Studio and suspect I probably wouldn't see a lot of benefit in upgrading.
Yeah, I have an M1 Ultra Studio and the M1 Ultra still tops the GPU scores of this guy, but I kind of want one of these Minis just to have on my desk to look at... 😄
It'll be another year or two before the Mini beats that Studio on every spec.
Fortunately we'll need to wait 6mos for the M4 Studios. Hopefully by then I'll be able to tamp down my excitement and convince myself to wait for M5 or M6.
The one thing that surprised me is that the Thunderbolt 5 ports do not support USB4 V2.0 at 120 Gbps. The specs only mention USB4 at 40 Gbps like the previous generation. I realize USB4 V2.0 is only an optional part of the Thunderbolt 5 specification, but I find it surprising that Apple chose not to support it.
Does anyone know why?
Does anyone know why?
If the M3 Pro was artificially held back, I would have expected them to artificially hold the M4 Pro back, too. I doubt Apple have the goal of having some single generation "big YoY upgrade", as that doesn't help their next upgrade. It is far more likely that they either had issues with the M3 Pro silicon process and provided what they could, or were trying to balance the efficiency/performance and re-adjusted to feature more performance cores based on the negative feedback they received.
I have the base MacBook Pro M3 Pro 5p/6e model and it is a great computer, but I cannot deny that I now have some M4 Pro envy!
Right, I understand the disk – for your purposes just consider them separate things because that’s how I meant it, there isn’t no relation but it isn’t the bottleneck we agree. I only meant it in the way that it’s something Apple could improve on given extant technology.
I also think M5 Ultra may be the first real competitor, we’ll see. For my purposes buying a “5 year“ powerhouse computer this entire chip generation still falls short, but my needs don’t follow the use case of most consumers. I think Apple needing the performance themselves will deliver us some very cool things at the top end, I’m just sad that it might not be in M4 because like everyone I don’t like waiting.
I also desperately need a DAW upgrade so the Mini might fit that bill, I really like that 10 performance cores are an option but I‘m a little bit wary we didn’t get decibel figures under load.
I don't wish I had waited or feel scammed whatsoever. I got the base 16" M3 at work and it runs laps around my old intel machine. The battery lasts absolutely forever and I never hear the fans at all. I've been enjoying it for a whole year now, and it's easily my favorite Mac ever (and I've had many over the years).
6+6 was fine for people getting base configs. I do agree this 8/10+4 is a better config for a desktop since power consumption isn't as big of a concern, but for the M3 Pro which was only ever sold in the MBP, I think it was a fine model. Sure the binned model in the 14" wasn't that much of an upgrade over the M2, but the sale prices dropped pretty quickly to where it was still a better deal to get the M3 model on 3rd party deals versus something like Apple refurb.
Same here. I do think the M3 was a let down in terms of performance cores, but it’s still plenty fast and I get amazing battery life.
It was obvious they nerfed it on release, so I don’t see how it could be considered a scam. They made no attempt to hide what they did, if I needed more performance I would have waited or asked my boss for permission to get a max.
I still don’t understand why they did it though. This is likely too short time for them to change CPU designs based on lack of M3 sales so maybe the yields were just bad.
Yeah, I was waiting for a substantial upgrade. The MBP was getting things done, but starting to show its age with newer things I am throwing at it.
There is nothing optional in Thunderbolt specifications.
Thunderbolt 5 support implies USB4 v2 (which TB5 is based upon), DisplayPort 2.1 and PCIe v4.
It is backwards compatible with USB4 (40GB/s) obviously.
I was thinking of eventually getting some kind of Studio with M Max chip (for both programming of quite CPU intensive things/intensive compilation tasks and photography), but based on these specs, a M4 Pro Mini with additional RAM should work pretty well, at a much cheaper price and with a smaller footprint. I am quite impressed.