It's not "good". A more accurate description would be "sometimes useful and not far from being good". The author is using pretty small models. There have been a lot of improvements that scale in any case (eg MTP) but ultimately this is still hardware limited by 3 factors:
1. Memory bandwidth
2. VRAM size, which limits the size of a model you can use effectively. Yes you can swap but then you're taking a performance hit;
3. Raw FLOPS, including quantization.
Apple here is interesting because they have a shared memory model and you can buy Macs currently with up to 128GB of RAM (previously 256/612GB on Mac Studios, both discontinued). New M5 Mac Studios are expected in Q3 but that's not guaranteed. It may take until next year
Depending on the chip, Macs top out at ~900GB/s. A 5090 or 6000 Pro has 1800GB/s. A B100 is at like 3.2TB/s. A 5090 has, depending on how you count, 5-7x the FLOPS of a M5 Pro so a 5090 is still better than any current Max... except for the 32GB limit.
NVidia aggressively segment the market by limiting VRAM. The RTX 6000 Pro is basically a 5090 with slightly more CUDA cores and 96GB of VRAM instead of 32GB for $10-11k instead of $3k.
So let's project this into the future a little. The M6 Ultra/Max may well be 1TB+/s memory bandwidth with much higher FLOPS and thus actually be competitive for larger models. A 6090 in the current market will probably still have 32GB of VRAM if I had to guess. Maybe it goes up to 48GB.
But anyway I think we're only 2-3 years away from sub-$5000 hardware that does 100-300+tok/s on models larger than 31B. And that's going to be a game changer.
1. Memory bandwidth
2. VRAM size, which limits the size of a model you can use effectively. Yes you can swap but then you're taking a performance hit;
3. Raw FLOPS, including quantization.
Apple here is interesting because they have a shared memory model and you can buy Macs currently with up to 128GB of RAM (previously 256/612GB on Mac Studios, both discontinued). New M5 Mac Studios are expected in Q3 but that's not guaranteed. It may take until next year
Depending on the chip, Macs top out at ~900GB/s. A 5090 or 6000 Pro has 1800GB/s. A B100 is at like 3.2TB/s. A 5090 has, depending on how you count, 5-7x the FLOPS of a M5 Pro so a 5090 is still better than any current Max... except for the 32GB limit.
NVidia aggressively segment the market by limiting VRAM. The RTX 6000 Pro is basically a 5090 with slightly more CUDA cores and 96GB of VRAM instead of 32GB for $10-11k instead of $3k.
So let's project this into the future a little. The M6 Ultra/Max may well be 1TB+/s memory bandwidth with much higher FLOPS and thus actually be competitive for larger models. A 6090 in the current market will probably still have 32GB of VRAM if I had to guess. Maybe it goes up to 48GB.
But anyway I think we're only 2-3 years away from sub-$5000 hardware that does 100-300+tok/s on models larger than 31B. And that's going to be a game changer.