I enjoyed this video, and you mention the forums as the place to give feedback. This AMD chip and Asus product look great. Your enthusiasm is well-placed. You correctly explain why someone would want this system for AI, and indeed, for the price, it is an excellent machine. Groundbreaking for the Windows PC market.
That said, I feel you omit the elephant in the room. Contrary to what the video says, this is not the most powerful laptop you can get (ignoring that it is positioned as a “tablet”), nor is it unique and unparalleled as the video implies - it’s a copy of Apple’s unified memory design, and less than half the memory speed of their top laptop chip at that. Apple offers a 512-bit LPDDRX-8533 memory system in the M4 Max vs. the 256-bit LPDDR5X-8000 system in the AI Max+ 395. That is a substantial difference for AI and GPU use.
Still, great video, and I am sure at the price that many people will get great use out of this and upcoming similar products. Kudos to AMD and Asus!
Agreed. Looking at specs (and price!) The Ryzen AI Max+ series is more comparable to Apple’s M4 pro (also 256 bit bus). It’s an interesting evolution as Intel’s lunar lake also has a similar architecture but with a 128 bit bus similar to the M4.
For mobile it seems apple was ahead of the curve here. It’s sad to lose upgradable memory but all of these product lines show great advantages compared to SODIMM platforms. Hopefully CAMM2 will be a thing otherwise it’s looking bleak for upgradeable laptops.
Well, if you can pay for the hardware and Apples software allows you to do what you want go with that.
Apple’s ecosystem is reasonably closed off. IMHO that makes it really hard to compare their systems with “open” systems.
Or in other words - I am not sure if this elephant is really in the room or rather standing somewhere outside.
Apple’s ecosystem is reasonably closed off. IMHO that makes it really hard to compare their systems with “open” systems.
In desktops, this is a great argument, although it’s mitigated by a unified memory design - a big argument against Apple these days has been that you can’t upgrade the memory. Well, you can’t upgrade one of these either. The NVMe is upgradable here, unlike most Apple products today. For Apple systems with standard PCIe slots, there are third party makers and drivers, although in practice this is more limited than the PC field.
In laptops, I think it matters a lot less, especially with the unified memory. Laptops are not very upgradable or “open” to begin with - you aren’t going to be swapping out parts in most of them (Framework aside).
As far as the operating system, I don’t think Apple is fundamentally more “closed” than Windows. It’s very similar to Linux in a lot of ways and the core OS (Darwin) is in fact open source. The “Apple ecosystem” (interoperability and integration across types of devices) is a largely optional bonus in my view, not something you are forced to use.
What I am excited for is desktop hardware in the open PC parts industry that uses ARM processors, possibly with unified memory, or just really wide (8 channel or such) upgradable memory. Maybe if game developers start to port to macOS it will accelerate adoption of ARM processors in the Windows and PC spaces. ARM is fundamentally more efficient and makes better use of real estate on the die. It’s unfortunate that Nvidia wasn’t able to buy ARM, but I can see regulatory reasons that’s undesirable. The next generation Nvidia Rubin architecture will also have a Vera CPU to go along with it and that should be quite interesting.