Qwen3.8 27B tokens/sec generation speed

  Prompt size    8K    64K   128K   256K
  RTX 5090 PC    59    51    44     n/a
  M5 Ultra       48    39    32     24
  M3 Ultra       31    23.5  20     15

That’s like 12 years worth of OpenAI Pro subscriptions

I didn't expect this to make the 5090 to look like a good deal.

Yes Apple has some of the best hardware out there, albeit overpriced. But the software is such a hindrance and I can't take anyone that states otherwise seriously. If only it had proper Linux support (and the Asahi people do an amazing job but you can reverse-engineer only so many stuff with limited funding, and then you have to do it again for new models). MacOS is good if you just want to have a standard experience, which to be fair is most people. It's good for just setting up an LLM server I guess since the hardware is a perfect fit. I wouldn't touch it otherwise.

I'm also curious about any new low hanging optimization opportunities in the kernels for this new hardware.

It's already clear to me that M5 Mac Studio is more cost-effective than anything you can run on open router, assuming decent utilization.

The M5 Mac Studio will be the most cost effective way to run uncensored cyber capable open agents.

An exciting tipping point will be if programmers can get an Astra-Ultra like experience all week with this hardware. That would be a real sense where this hardware exceeds the value of even 20x cloud subscriptions.

Ehh, the actual elephant in the room is:

"why bother with local AI at all when you can lease a GPU for $5/hr?"

To which the answer is you shouldn't bother, unless you have a bunch of money to throw at hobby projects.

This is a great article and bodes well for the M5, but we should expect more like this comparing to other platforms before we truly understand where it fits.