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Cake day: June 3rd, 2023

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  • Not the person you responded to, but my m1 max macbook pro is used to dry run changes to my kubernetes cluster by running 4 virtual machines and networking them. My previous pc could pull it off fine, but my macbook can run a virtual cluster for hours on battery.

    Because of the unified memory, you can use all of your ram as video ram for the purposes of running a massive LLM if you want local AI. there’s a plugin I run for VScode that emulates github copilot but runs entirely on device and offline.

    Apple’s ARM implementation is really nice for getting a lot of specific work done. Mine spends most workdays docked and being used as my primary workstation.





  • Didn’t like the tone of my last attempt to reply, so here’s a rundown from a hardware enthusiast perspective.

    Single board computers with no thunderbolt cannot have an external GPU, and have soldered permanent processors

    The U sku on that cpu denotes low voltage. That cpu will have much worse performance than you expect. Ghz numbers usually advertise boost clocks, not stable performance.

    Even when an external GPU is an option, the memory bandwidth of thunderbolt is not sufficient to run most cards and will result in micro stuttering and overall reduced performance. Usually you lose ~30%-50% of your performance depending on the card.

    To top all of this off, you cannot use the steam deck as a reasonable expectation for this class of hardware. The deck runs a custom APU with a beefier than normal GPU. You will not get that performance from the linked micro pc.