Apple
Out of context: Reply #3736
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- NBQ001
Just insane how far we've come in about 2 decades.
I wanted to know:
How many maxed out SGI Origin 2000 racks would it need to match one maxed out Apple Mac Studio from today?
(SGI Origin 2000 were the server racks from end of 90's and early 2000's that were used as render farms at ILM and other big VFX/ Animation studios to render the projects)
With the introduction of the 2025 Mac Studio featuring the Apple M3 Ultra chip, the performance gap compared to legacy systems like the SGI Origin 2000 has grown even wider.
The M3 Ultra in its highest configuration offers a 32-core CPU (24 performance, 8 efficiency), up to an 80-core GPU, and a 32-core Neural Engine, with over 800 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth. Apple claims up to double the performance of the previous M2 Ultra, and up to 2.6 times faster than the M1 Ultra. In practical terms, the M3 Ultra delivers well over 40 teraflops of single-precision (FP32) compute performance, and its real-world application performance is even more impressive thanks to modern architecture and software optimizations.
A maxed-out SGI Origin 2000 rack, depending on configuration, could reach about 25 gigaflops peak (using 128 CPUs at roughly 0.2 gigaflops each, as per historical sources). Even in the most optimistic scenario, a full interconnected system of eight racks could approach 200 gigaflops theoretical peak.
To match just one Mac Studio with M3 Ultra at 40,000 gigaflops (or 40 teraflops), you would need at least 200 full eight-rack Origin 2000 systems, totaling about 1,600 racks, to reach the same theoretical compute performance. In practice, due to efficiency and utilization differences, the number would likely be even higher.
So, to equal the raw compute power of a single maxed-out 2025 Mac Studio with M3 Ultra, you would need roughly 1,600 maxed-out SGI Origin 2000 racks. This underscores the extraordinary advances in computing power, energy efficiency, and physical density over the past three decades.
Now onto the cost:
A typical SGI Origin 2000 128-CPU rack (the largest marketed configuration) would have cost in the range of $1 million to $3 million, depending on options and support contracts, based on historical pricing trends for high-end SGI systems of that era.
Now do the math, $ 1-3 million x 1,600 racks for which you'd probably need a football stadium to put them all in.
Versus
1x single maxed out Mac Studio M3 Ultra for about $11K
And people are still bitching when a video output or render is taking few seconds more for 4K res.