I wonder if that’s something new, or just the same virtual network interface that’s been around since the TB1 days (a new network interface appears when you connect two Macs with a TB cable)
I'm super interested in the clustering capability. At launch people said they were only getting like 11Gbps from their TB4 drive arrays, which was really way less than expected.
Apple does kind of advertise that each TB port has its own controllers. Which gives me hope that whatever 1x port can do 6x can do 6x better.
AMD's Strix Halo victory feels much more shallow today. Eventually 48GB or 64GB sticks will probably expand Strix Halo to 192 then 256GB. But Strix Halo is super super io starved, is basically a desktop of IO, with no way to easily host-to-host, and Apple absolutely understands that the use of a chip is bounded by what it can connect to. 6x TB5, if even half true, will be utterly outstanding.
It's been so so so so cool to see Non-Transparent Bridging atop thunderbolt, so one host can act like a device. Since it's PCIe, that hypothetically would allow amazing RDMA over TB. USB4 mandates host to host networking, but I have no idea how it is implemented and I suspect it's no where near as close to the metal.
In 2017 I was working for a company that was trying to develop foundation models and I was developing a framework for training what were then large neural network [1] and other models.
It was "yet another mac-oriented startup" but I had them get me an Alienware laptop because I could get one with a 1070 mobile card that meant I could train on my laptop whereas the data sci's had to do everything on our DGX-1. [2]
Today it is the other way around, the Mac Studio looks like the best AI development workstation you can get.
[1] I was really partial to a character-level CNN model we had
[2] CEO presented next to Jensen Huang at a NVIDIA conference, his favorite word was "incredible". I thought it was "incredible" when I heard they got bought by Nike, but it was true.
