Hopefully... If it doesn't, mere mortals like us consumers are going to be priced out of computers altogether. It'll be the end of the personal computing era and a return to big iron mainframes.
$42k and a toy CPU at that. Threadripper or EPIC if it must be AMD camp, although I'd rather it weren't (_always_ some random issues on linux). TBH, if I were buying workstation at such prices, I'd probably first take a look at what HP has (since their cooling and immunity to dust is unprecedented), and then probably BOXX and Puget. For DIY there's always supermicro at such levels.
I've noticed that some companies have flat out dropped the high memory configurations from their lineup that were offered just months ago at inflated prices. OnePlayerX had a 128GB Strix Halo tablet, RedMagic had a 24GB Android phone - both have been removed from their sites. It's a similar situation for the new Thinkpad lineup.
That memory speed drop going from single DIMM per channel DDR5 to dual DIMM per channel is very much notable - 3600MT/s is barely any faster than what DDR4 could do in it's final days.
The CPU market seems to be missing the "HEDT" platform we used to enjoy.
Seems they might be selling a combo of dual RTX Pro 6000 workstation cards (non-refundable), but the setup they have, unless they change how the GPUs cooling work, isn't gonna work out thermally if you stack two of those workstation cards on top of each other. But it doesn't say WS or "Workstation", so I suppose could be the server variant too? But also doesn't say...
Hope they have good overall cooling the case, cooling doesn't seem to be mentioned, it'll be a noisy little machine no doubt :)
I'd really like to just buy some collective shares of a GB300 NVL72 in a datacenter somewhere and have a daily token quota on a shared DeepSeek model or whatever was hot that week. I would just need to find ~100 like-minded folks at this $40k per share price to get started haha.
I absolutely love system76. Never owned one of their desktop machines, but I have a couple of their older laptops and they work fantastically for me. As in I can easily get a decade out of them and replace the batteries every few years. One of them is almost a decade old ironically enough.
People routinely buy cars that cost double that. This is a machine that people that typically earn six figure salaries use to do their work on. Exactly the target demographic that would buy/lease expensive cars as well. And then those get used mainly to commute to work.
I don't really need one. But I do have a 4.5K mac book pro for work. Yes it's a bit overpowered. But it's the main vehicle with which I earn a living and it routinely saves me time by blazing through builds and generally doing things quickly for me. I have slightly more GPU on that thing than I need. But it's nice to have the option to experiment with some of the open weight AI models.
Anyone know why they chose a consumer grade CPU on this? I’m a little surprised to see a 9950X as the top option. There’s not enough PCIe lanes available to run everything without bifurcation. I imagine the GPUs probably aren’t too bothered generally… but the NVMe drives are likely to slow down as a result.
A Threadripper ain’t cheap, but if you’re spending $45k on a workstation it seems like a weird place to skimp. Not to mention you’d then have the option of shoveling a few more 6000 pros in it when you want to run something larger (assuming your home/office electrical box can support it).
Aye but at $45k you’re so deep already is that really worth the savings? It’s so much easier to manage a single system, and the performance will be in absolute terms better.
Truly, I get your point, but $45k is obscene for a workstation (because of the RAM shortage). I can’t fathom it being a reasonable decision[1] unless you’re able to churn an immense profit from it. And… if you can, it’s an expense that saves time, energy, and effort. If it is only profitable when $8k in price difference makes it viable, is that really worth the effort? An $8k increase making a difference, when you’re wholly dependent on the frontier (or near frontier) lab not releasing a model that makes your work(station) irrelevant— seems reckless. Couple that with the doubling of DeepSeek’s parameters for their flash model… and well the math just don’t math for my naive brain.
[1] I’m absolutely incapable of spending that much on a workstation so my opinions may be irrelevant… but I cannot understand the “stepping over quarters to save a penny” mentality[2].
[2] I could be missing the forest for the trees. As a result, I’d love to know how I am being shortsighted. I just can’t fathom a situation where an $8k surcharge in system RAM doesn’t make sense. It’s not about system RAM, it’s about GPU RAM, margins, and useful lifetime of the system.
I find it hard to believe any enterprise willing to drop over $40k on a workstation PC would choose `Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS with the COSMIC Desktop Environment` over Ubuntu.
I remember losing sleep when I bought my RTX Pro 6000, but somehow they keep going up in price, and waddya know I’ve even done real work that appreciates the VRAM size.
Haha, bloody hell, mate. $17k a pop? I bought these for $8k-ish. That's bonkers to buy this when newer flash models won't fit on this any more. DeepSeek V4 Flash seems the last in its line, and then you have to count on Qwen Next. Seems like a waste honestly.
Is this just a marketing stunt? From a completely ignorant user, doesn't AI reeuqires high bandwidth ram (like the GPU)? Is really DDR5’s bandwidth enough?
The prefill rates are way faster on these cards compared to apple silicon, which affects TTFT and therefore usability for a lot of coding tasks, unless you fire and forget most of the time.
Mac GPUs supposedly being fastest thing on Earth obsoleting everything NVIDIA is just pure marketing. It was just faster once than some midrange laptop NVIDIA, which conveniently wasn't explicitly marked as different chip sharing the branding with the desktop variant(oof).
The real benefits to going Mac is its quiet and discreet, high wife/CEO acceptance design, and their huge GPU-assignable shared RAM.
If you're okay with your desk being the wing top of a flying airplane, and 3M Peltor or David-Clark is your favorite working time headphone brand anyway, then your build will be faster and cheaper than a maxed out Mac Studio.
For me the operating system (and ecosystem in general) is one of the biggest reasons I use a Mac, but the unified memory pool is a benefit too. I am still distraught about the gaming situation though.
I wonder why Apple has not really pushed their memory bandwidth numbers. They're starting to catch up to 2020 at this point -- cool, but still struggling to run years-old models. (FLOPS is even further behind by a year or two)
Maybe they're waiting on HBM? Given that they're skipping M6 Max to go straight for M7, I'd assume they're doing a redesign for it.
GDDR has higher latency and much lower capacity. HBM requires an interposer and also has lower capacity. It's not an easy choice. The M7 family will probably double memory bandwidth using LPDDR6.
There’s roughly 50% more memory bandwidth on an RTX 6000 pro versus the M5 Ultra. I imagine it really comes down to what you’re doing, I know my 5090 runs laps around the M5 Pro I have when it comes to local LLM performance (until it runs out of memory).
If it wasn’t for the fact the 6000 Pro is selling for like 100% ($9,000) over MSRP it would probably look a lot more reasonable.
If your goal is pure GPU compute, you should have got a 5090. It can bench comparable to the RTX 6000 Pro cards and is near guaranteed to outperform M5 Ultra.
Speaking of AMD CPU’s, how is Strix Halo coming along?
As that’s unified memory à la Apple and I think up to 128gb
I thought it was a pricing mistake. But no, you just have to select the variations. $42,412.00
And people still don't believe Apple is giving a good deal on Macs.
Prompt processing on Macs is VERY slow...
> Prompt processing on Macs is VERY slow...
That sounds like a contradiction.
/J
which engine? cause there are dozens already, and some are quite fast.
They missed an opportunity by not adding $8
I wonder what the target audience for this price range is? At that price point I would rather go for a single H100.
I would rather take this option than a single H100:
> 96 GB Dual NVIDIA RTX PRO 5000 w/ 1000W PSU (non-refundable) +$19,169
Though I don't think there's anything stopping you from trying to stuff an H100 into this machine if you want to BYO.
For that price you get the H100. The machine is overpriced, and I'd personally rather go for a second-hand workstation with server-grade components.
I had to do a double take myself, scrolled down and arrived at a similar number.
Wish I built this a few years ago!
Yeah, I bought a Thelio Major three years ago. I'm kicking myself for not going dual-4090s for a mere $10K back then.
Hopefully it will come down to that price point or cheaper again in the next 3-4 years?
Hopefully... If it doesn't, mere mortals like us consumers are going to be priced out of computers altogether. It'll be the end of the personal computing era and a return to big iron mainframes.
Me three
So a new car, or an AI rig.
That's a bitter pill to swallow. Most of this is the cost of the Nvidia card, and the RAM.
$42k and a toy CPU at that. Threadripper or EPIC if it must be AMD camp, although I'd rather it weren't (_always_ some random issues on linux). TBH, if I were buying workstation at such prices, I'd probably first take a look at what HP has (since their cooling and immunity to dust is unprecedented), and then probably BOXX and Puget. For DIY there's always supermicro at such levels.
That's what I don't understand, they're shipping RTX 6000s that are PCI lane-starved. Buying a Maserati and driving it around in 3rd gear.
Really just the GPUs. PSUs aren’t that expensive maybe 100-200 for a good 750W-1000W one
I've noticed that some companies have flat out dropped the high memory configurations from their lineup that were offered just months ago at inflated prices. OnePlayerX had a 128GB Strix Halo tablet, RedMagic had a 24GB Android phone - both have been removed from their sites. It's a similar situation for the new Thinkpad lineup.
The honor 400 used to be sold for 300 dollars with 12 gb of ram. Now the replacement the honor 600 comes with 8 GB at twice the price.
SSD too. The priced have tripled...
It would be great if China had more lithography machine....
All memory. SSDs are expensive, microSD is expensive, even spinning rust has inflated.
hoist by our own strategic export controls, rip
Taiwan would disagree
That memory speed drop going from single DIMM per channel DDR5 to dual DIMM per channel is very much notable - 3600MT/s is barely any faster than what DDR4 could do in it's final days.
The CPU market seems to be missing the "HEDT" platform we used to enjoy.
Threadripper (4 or 8 memory channels)
> Accelerate your AI development with Thelio Mira AI, System76's affordable, GPU-focused workstations
From $3,299 (with just 64 GB RAM and a 4 GB GPU) to over $50,000. Very affordable indeed.
50K without a proper CPU, mind.
Seems they might be selling a combo of dual RTX Pro 6000 workstation cards (non-refundable), but the setup they have, unless they change how the GPUs cooling work, isn't gonna work out thermally if you stack two of those workstation cards on top of each other. But it doesn't say WS or "Workstation", so I suppose could be the server variant too? But also doesn't say...
Hope they have good overall cooling the case, cooling doesn't seem to be mentioned, it'll be a noisy little machine no doubt :)
They're [Max-Q] blower cards and there's a big gap between them so the cooling looks fine.
So the two variants they offer is the Max-Q and the Server edition one, but only explicitly mentioned for one?
Edit: The Max-Q is one of the options, what's the other option then?
Seeing as it adds a second PSU, I'm guessing the workstation one.
That's bananas, unless they also water cool them, would easily overheat if it's just two bog standard workstation cards on top of each other.
Are they possibly selling setups they haven't actually tested practically in the real world?
Page mentions liquid cooling, for what it's worth.
I'd really like to just buy some collective shares of a GB300 NVL72 in a datacenter somewhere and have a daily token quota on a shared DeepSeek model or whatever was hot that week. I would just need to find ~100 like-minded folks at this $40k per share price to get started haha.
Nobody seems to have noticed that they dropped their ampere-based thelio.
$37,000 in GPUs. Man, I never expected another PC manufacturer to make Apple's top configuration look cheap by comparison.
I absolutely love system76. Never owned one of their desktop machines, but I have a couple of their older laptops and they work fantastically for me. As in I can easily get a decade out of them and replace the batteries every few years. One of them is almost a decade old ironically enough.
It only costs $40,000.
People routinely buy cars that cost double that. This is a machine that people that typically earn six figure salaries use to do their work on. Exactly the target demographic that would buy/lease expensive cars as well. And then those get used mainly to commute to work.
I don't really need one. But I do have a 4.5K mac book pro for work. Yes it's a bit overpowered. But it's the main vehicle with which I earn a living and it routinely saves me time by blazing through builds and generally doing things quickly for me. I have slightly more GPU on that thing than I need. But it's nice to have the option to experiment with some of the open weight AI models.
And you would buy it through your company so it won’t be quite as much net. Surely no one is buying these just for fun
the landing page showed "$3,299.00" and I had my candy store moment for a few secs.
5 years ago I could not afford top shelf coders. Now I cannot afford top shelf machines.
New car or a Thelio. Tough decision.
Second-hand car is more rational than new car.
I bought a spark instead of a motorcycle so it’s somewhat relative and it’s also somewhat relative.
There was a time when I sold my computer and bought a motorcycle.
Can honestly say that was one of the best trades I’ve ever done. I didn’t buy another computer for 3 more years.
What motherboard do they use? (Or do they design their own now?)
The ASUS logo is visible in the photo of the innards.
I'm guessing it'll depend on the GPU (and CPU) choice, putting the cheapest that is sufficient for the choice.
Anyone know why they chose a consumer grade CPU on this? I’m a little surprised to see a 9950X as the top option. There’s not enough PCIe lanes available to run everything without bifurcation. I imagine the GPUs probably aren’t too bothered generally… but the NVMe drives are likely to slow down as a result.
A Threadripper ain’t cheap, but if you’re spending $45k on a workstation it seems like a weird place to skimp. Not to mention you’d then have the option of shoveling a few more 6000 pros in it when you want to run something larger (assuming your home/office electrical box can support it).
You need far more absurdly expensive RAM (RDIMM/ECC?) for a threadripper. Like 4x more expensive.
Aye but at $45k you’re so deep already is that really worth the savings? It’s so much easier to manage a single system, and the performance will be in absolute terms better.
Truly, I get your point, but $45k is obscene for a workstation (because of the RAM shortage). I can’t fathom it being a reasonable decision[1] unless you’re able to churn an immense profit from it. And… if you can, it’s an expense that saves time, energy, and effort. If it is only profitable when $8k in price difference makes it viable, is that really worth the effort? An $8k increase making a difference, when you’re wholly dependent on the frontier (or near frontier) lab not releasing a model that makes your work(station) irrelevant— seems reckless. Couple that with the doubling of DeepSeek’s parameters for their flash model… and well the math just don’t math for my naive brain.
[1] I’m absolutely incapable of spending that much on a workstation so my opinions may be irrelevant… but I cannot understand the “stepping over quarters to save a penny” mentality[2].
[2] I could be missing the forest for the trees. As a result, I’d love to know how I am being shortsighted. I just can’t fathom a situation where an $8k surcharge in system RAM doesn’t make sense. It’s not about system RAM, it’s about GPU RAM, margins, and useful lifetime of the system.
This makes Mac Studio with 256GB memory look cheap in comparison. More memory to store weight at a quarter of the price!
It's gonna have WAY faster token rates than that Mac Studio though, enough to be a qualitative rather than quantitative difference.
At that price, it's competing against a cluster of M5 Mac Studios, which we don't have test data for yet.
Can't it be both?
EG As I gazed at Janice, joy with equal part contentment washed through my soul.
I find it hard to believe any enterprise willing to drop over $40k on a workstation PC would choose `Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS with the COSMIC Desktop Environment` over Ubuntu.
I remember losing sleep when I bought my RTX Pro 6000, but somehow they keep going up in price, and waddya know I’ve even done real work that appreciates the VRAM size.
Haha, bloody hell, mate. $17k a pop? I bought these for $8k-ish. That's bonkers to buy this when newer flash models won't fit on this any more. DeepSeek V4 Flash seems the last in its line, and then you have to count on Qwen Next. Seems like a waste honestly.
Is this just a marketing stunt? From a completely ignorant user, doesn't AI reeuqires high bandwidth ram (like the GPU)? Is really DDR5’s bandwidth enough?
> 192 GB GPU memory
How did I miss that? I was still sleeping I guess
Is it more powerful than Apple silicon, or why would anyone buy this? Just for Linux?
Oh, it's System76, that's why. Open hardware. Makes sense.
Edit: Also Nvidia
The prefill rates are way faster on these cards compared to apple silicon, which affects TTFT and therefore usability for a lot of coding tasks, unless you fire and forget most of the time.
Mac GPUs supposedly being fastest thing on Earth obsoleting everything NVIDIA is just pure marketing. It was just faster once than some midrange laptop NVIDIA, which conveniently wasn't explicitly marked as different chip sharing the branding with the desktop variant(oof).
The real benefits to going Mac is its quiet and discreet, high wife/CEO acceptance design, and their huge GPU-assignable shared RAM.
If you're okay with your desk being the wing top of a flying airplane, and 3M Peltor or David-Clark is your favorite working time headphone brand anyway, then your build will be faster and cheaper than a maxed out Mac Studio.
For me the operating system (and ecosystem in general) is one of the biggest reasons I use a Mac, but the unified memory pool is a benefit too. I am still distraught about the gaming situation though.
It is more powerful than Apple.
I wonder why Apple has not really pushed their memory bandwidth numbers. They're starting to catch up to 2020 at this point -- cool, but still struggling to run years-old models. (FLOPS is even further behind by a year or two)
Maybe they're waiting on HBM? Given that they're skipping M6 Max to go straight for M7, I'd assume they're doing a redesign for it.
GDDR has higher latency and much lower capacity. HBM requires an interposer and also has lower capacity. It's not an easy choice. The M7 family will probably double memory bandwidth using LPDDR6.
So the MacBooks might get roughly the M5 Ultra's bandwidth in a couple years. Not bad -- my M4 Max is currently stuck in 2016
Do I want one? Yes.
Can I afford it? Absolutely not.
How is this interesting compared to either a Mac Studio or Nvidia Spark? Did I miss something?
This is a tier above the best Mac Studio and two tiers above the Spark.
Big GPUs
wouldnt you be better off maxing out the new Mac hardware? the memory bandwidth is insane on those jobbies
Two RTX 6000 have more FLOPS and more memory bandwidth than a M5 Ultra (but they also cost more).
There’s roughly 50% more memory bandwidth on an RTX 6000 pro versus the M5 Ultra. I imagine it really comes down to what you’re doing, I know my 5090 runs laps around the M5 Pro I have when it comes to local LLM performance (until it runs out of memory).
If it wasn’t for the fact the 6000 Pro is selling for like 100% ($9,000) over MSRP it would probably look a lot more reasonable.
If your goal is pure GPU compute, you should have got a 5090. It can bench comparable to the RTX 6000 Pro cards and is near guaranteed to outperform M5 Ultra.