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M5 Ultra

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Headlines · 7

  1. M5 Ultra Mac Studio beats a single GB10 in agentic test but trails a Spark pair

    Tom's Hardware benchmarked an M5 Ultra Mac Studio with a 36-core CPU, 80-core GPU and up to 512GB of unified memory against a single Dell Pro Precision GB10 system, which it described as nearly identical to an Nvidia DGX Spark. Using llama.cpp with Qwen 3.8 27B and its native multi-token prediction, the Mac completed the Artificial Analysis AgentPerf-Local test in just under half the time of the GB10 system. The report also cited 1.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth for the Mac versus 273 GB/s for the GB10. For DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017, however, the Mac's llama.cpp setup took 10–25 minutes for the longest tested contexts, while a two-Spark cluster using DSpark speculative decoding and TensorFold took under five minutes. The report said Mac Studio lead times stretched into February 2027.

    Tom’s Hardware · 🔥 7
  2. Apple Opens Orders for 512GB M5 Ultra Mac Studio at $22,299

    Apple made the previously announced 512GB unified-memory option for the M5 Ultra Mac Studio available to order on Oct. 28, with the configuration starting at $22,299 and rising to $29,799 with 16TB of storage. The 512GB option requires the top M5 Ultra chip with a 36-core CPU, 80-core GPU and 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth, and is limited to that tier since the M5 Max tops out at 128GB. TechRepublic notes 9to5Mac's Oct. 28 report that initial orders showed estimated delivery windows from late November to early December, and that Apple's own July 2026 testing showed a four-system Mac Studio cluster delivering up to three times the AI inference performance of a single system, though that result comes from Apple's own testing.

    TechRepublic · 🔥 0
  3. Apple opens orders for 512GB M5 Ultra Mac Studio at $22,299

    Apple's online store began offering the 512GB unified-memory configuration of the M5 Ultra Mac Studio on Oct. 28, as TechRepublic and TechRadar reported. The option requires the top-tier M5 Ultra with a 36-core CPU and 80-core GPU, and the 512GB upgrade adds $15,500, bringing the minimum price to $22,299 and $29,799 with a 16TB SSD. Apple says the M5 Ultra supports up to 512GB of unified memory at 1.2TB/s of bandwidth, and new orders are quoted for delivery between late November and early December 2026.

    TechRadar · 🔥 0
  4. Apple Opens Orders for 512GB M5 Ultra Mac Studio at $22,299

    Apple made its previously announced 512GB unified-memory option for the M5 Ultra Mac Studio available to order on Oct. 28, according to TechRepublic. The configuration pairs a 36-core CPU and 80-core GPU with 512GB of unified memory, 1.2TB/s memory bandwidth, and 1TB SSD, and starts at $22,299, rising to $29,799 with 16TB of storage. The 512GB option requires the top-end M5 Ultra processor; the M5 Max is limited to 128GB.

    TechRepublic · 🔥 0
  5. Apple MLX runs 816B Muse Spark Open locally on Mac Studio cluster

    Apple Machine Learning Research published a post on October 15, 2026, detailing how the latest MLX release runs the nearly trillion-parameter Muse Spark Open (816B total, 42B active) locally on Mac Studio. It says a single Mac Studio offers up to 512GB of unified memory and can scale across multiple Macs using an RDMA over Thunderbolt driver; on a cluster of four M5 Ultra Mac Studios, the model generated over 36 tokens per second at an 8,192-token context. Apple also compared M5 Ultra with M3 Ultra and benchmarked Mistral Medium 3.5, Qwen 3.8, and pipeline and tensor parallelization schemes, claiming up to 4.6x the start-up time-to-first-token speed of the previous Mac Studio generation.

    Apple Machine Learning Research · 🔥 0
  6. Four Tesla V100 GPUs on an NVLink board beat two DGX Sparks in a Qwen3.8-Flash-Next test

    YouTuber Jun Yamog published a test in which four NVIDIA Tesla V100 data-center GPUs (2017 Volta architecture, 32GB HBM2, 900GB/s memory bandwidth) were mounted on an NVLink carrier board offering 300GB/s over six NVLink 2.0 links, with a modified A100 heatsink cooling each roughly 300W chip. Running 4-bit quantized Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, the quad-V100 setup was reported 40% faster than two DGX Spark units (128GB LPDDR5X unified memory) and 230% faster than an M5 Ultra Mac Studio on long-prompt processing; for short prompts it kept a 40% lead over DGX Spark and was 163% faster than M5 Ultra. In short-prompt token generation the V100 cluster reached 100.6 tok/s, 121% faster than the two DGX Sparks, versus 44.5 tok/s for M5 Ultra. The tester said the large gap against Apple Silicon may partly stem from insufficient software optimization (reported by Wccftech and IT之家; discussed on r/LocalLLaMA).

    Wccftech · 🔥 0
  7. M5 Max Mac Studio drops $200 as Apple readies 512GB M5 Ultra for local AI

    TechRadar reports that the Mac Studio with M5 Max (18-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine), 36GB of memory and 512GB of storage is down to $2,299 from $2,499 at B&H Photo, an 8% discount; the 1TB configuration is $2,579, down from $2,799. The article says Apple's 512GB M5 Ultra Mac Studio, aimed at running large AI models locally, is due to ship in late October and may appear at Apple's event next week, with the author speculating it could start well above $10,000. Citing a roundup of M5 Ultra reviews, it says the Ultra's real strength is local AI, while its multi-core lead over the M5 Max is only about 26% and single-core performance is roughly the same.

    TechRadar · 🔥 0

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