Does anyone know how cost effective a base M1 Mac Studio would be compared to a PC build with comparable cost?
There's also the obvious set of trade offs, such as being quiet, compact, but being unrepairable, while the PCs having nearly the opposite qualities.
Is the power efficiency of Apple Silicon still a major advantage in a desktop system?
> Does anyone know how cost effective a base M1 Mac Studio would be compared to a PC build with comparable cost?
If you normalize to performance, building a comparable PC for things like compiling code can be about half the price. Intel and AMD’s latest top-end consumer CPUs are very, very fast and significantly cheaper.
> Is the power efficiency of Apple Silicon still a major advantage in a desktop system?
If you’re going for ultimate silence and/or you need the smallest machine possible, power efficiency matters.
If you’re spending 99% of your time in the code editor and web browser, your CPU is going to be mostly idle anyway and peak power usage basically doesn’t matter. A decently configured AMD or even Intel system with reasonable fan curves can be plenty quiet for the 1% of time that you’re at 100% CPU usage (hint: embrace the high temperatures and let it throttle, it’s fine).
I watched one guy build a hackentosh for the same price as a Mac mini and compared them. The intel based one wins in multi threaded workloads but the M1 wins in single threaded, power efficiency, and things which it has hardware acceleration like video encoding.
Light gaming seems common, asahi linux streams have have minecraft, tux racer, mario kart, and related. Seems like a fair amount of ML (both inference and training) going on. PyTouch now works with CPU, GPU, and AMX (via metal), and seen some posts on using the neural to achieve a 7x improvement over the GPUs, but not upstreamed yet. One bonus is the GPU (and AMX) can access all memory, not just the 8-16GB that's common on GPUs these days.
I'm not a heavy gamer, but having some 3D is nice. I'd likely buy a 7900 (non-x) or 7800X3D if buying now, but not going to spend $800 and up for current gen GPUs, maybe get a 3060 or 3060 Ti. The Mac Studio is looking pretty promising, hopefully it's refreshed with the M2 CPUs RSN.
It really depends on how much you were planning to lard up that Mac with expensive Apple memory and storage. The more of that you want or need, the better the PC is going to look. Ballparking:
ATX case $100
650W ATX PSU apparently these are the smallest now? $100
Z690 motherboard you can spend a lot here but say $250
Reputable DDR5 DIMMs: $70 per 16GB, $120 for 32GB, $220 for 64GB
Reputable 1TB SSD $100
Excellent and quiet air cooler: $100
CPU similar in single-thread perf to M2: $400
You'll note the absence of GPU. I personally don't use them so I see no value in Apple's supposedly quite good ones. And we don't have 4x Thunderbolt ports that will set you back another $100. But we're up to $1200 which is noticeably less than any Mac Studio model.
It would be interesting to see a 24 or 32 core Threadripper vs the Mac Studio. I didn't price out the full system but those CPUs are in the $1300-2800 range
It’s about half the cost to build your own based on Ryzen thread ripper and DDR5. I’ve done this before however, it’s not ARM64. It also requires like 1000w power supply. Can you build a machine just as capable? Yes. Will it be as efficient? No. Will it be Arm? Probably not. That said, I run Apple MacBook Air as my daily so YMMV.
*edit* ok a bit more than half. Chip shortage has scalpers sitting on threadrippers.
Do you need a Threadripper to compete with M1 Ultra? Ryzen 9 7950X seems pretty comparable and doesn't require a 1000W PSU unless you must pair it with a 4090 or something.
Depends, how cache friendly is your workload? The M1 ultra has more than 4x the memory bandwidth of the threadripper. Of course the GPU makes a big difference in cost and power use. If you need a 4090, there's nothing comparable. But if the Apple iGPU is enough you save a ton of power and space.
