In this article, we explore whether the recent addition of the M2Pro chipset to the Apple Mac Mini family works as a replacement for your power hungry workstation.

Is it? This review is pretty thorough with some realistic benchmarks. Spoiler: it won’t replace an entire data center, but it works for model development and testing. Enjoy!

  • rufus
    2·
    vor 3 Jahren

    It is quite optimized to work on things different than a GPU. And it has a quite good Metal backend (I heard). And it uses quantization and might fit a decent sized model into memory. I don’t know of any advantage PyTorch might have on that platform.

    So it’d really show us how much you can squeeze out of the platform.

    • meyotch@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      2·
      vor 3 Jahren

      Thank you for the extra explanation.

      I’m gravitating toward this platform in part due to the fact the workstation would be in my sleeping area. The ability to run a long job while I sleep without excess fan noise is worth quite a bit to me.

      Of course, it has to be actually useful, too. My main local compute tasks will be the usual development, data pre-processing, lighter fine tuning jobs and end-user model testing.

      This unit will surely suffice but I have to balance the price premium with my need for a quiet bedroom. So thanks for the additional perspective.