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You're right a $3600 graphics card is worse than a $2600 laptop; but from my perspectives they're very different products. Not least of all because even at $3600 for a RTX 5090 you still have the whole rest of the computer left to purchase.
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Max version with the 614GB/s is a $3599 laptop
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The RTX 5090 only has 32gb of VRAM. So the tradeoff is NVIDIA is for blazing speed in a tiny memory pool, but Apple Silicon has a larger memory pool at moderate speed.
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Or, there's the DGX Spark, which effectively neutralizes both of these trade-offs, and is the same price as the RTX 5090.
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For reference, DGX Spark is at 273 GB/s
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It's not 5090 performance though.
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Nothing stops you from plugging in a 5090. Nvidia ships ARM64 GPU drivers.
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So, what were we talking about even then in the thread?
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I imagine the upcoming M5 Ultra will be competitive in this regard. The M3 Ultra already has 819GB/s and it's two generations behind.
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> NVIDIA RTX 5090 already offers 1,792 GB/s

You can buy two m5 pro base model for the same price as a single 5090...

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That's a fun comparison, but can you run those 2 m5 pros in parallel to accomplish 2x the work? Otherwise, you just told me you can buy 2 toyota corollas for the price of 1 F-150 while trying to convince me you can haul your boat behind both corollas at the same time.
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Maybe not 2x (scaling is never linear) but you can absolutely chain them, and macOS supports RDMA over TB5 for even better performance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46248644

Maybe hold back on the attitude

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You can also buy a 64gb mini, save $1k and do more work than what you could do with a single 5090.

In Europe I can get a 128gb mac studio m4 max for 300 euros more than a 5090 (for which you still need to buy a power supply, motherboard, cpu , &c.)

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But the inference on the mac studio m4 max will be slower than on the 5090, even though you can load larger models.
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All I'm saying is that the comparison doesn't make sense. The 5090 is faster on a small subset of tasks if attached to a computer which ends up being 3x the price of a m5 machine that fit the same model or the same price as a machine that fits models 5x bigger
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So you're saying that buying 2 Corollas for the cost of 1 Ferrari engine would be better? Even though the Ferrari engine is much more powerful, it's useless without the rest of the car.
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