Almost nobody pays for AI out of pocket yet Only ~3% of US consumers do, up from under 1% in 2023 The youngest buyers are adopting at 4x the rate of the oldest Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-we…

We compared the M5 Ultra Mac Studio 512GB with 4x DGX Spark and 4x AMD Ryzen AI Halo The prices are relatively the same ($15-20k), but the trade-offs are noticeable Compute (prompt processing speed) - Mac: one chip, all the compute is always usable. Quick on normal prompts, will feel slower on long ones - Sparks: boxes link over 200GbE, which is fast enough to combine their compute. Fastest of the three, and native FP4 speeds up quantized models even more - Halos: boxes link over 10GbE, too slow to share work properly. Ends up close to the Mac but somewhat worse Bandwidth (token generation speed) - Mac: 512GB on a single bus, faster than a 4090, ~4x the tokens/sec of Spark or Halos - Sparks: the model splits across boxes and tokens pass through them in sequence, so 4 boxes still generate at 1 box's speed - Halos: same ceiling as Spark, same reason Power - Mac: less than a gaming PC, silent - Sparks: nearly maxes out a wall circuit, will be hot - Halos: about half the Sparks, but somewhat hot The real gap is bandwidth. The Studio will feel noticeably faster. Spark 2 is rumored soon, but it won't matter unless the bandwidth goes way up. Same for AMD, plus better interconnect speeds