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·
    10 months ago

    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·
      10 months ago

      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.