I want my next laptop to be the 128gb M series monster. That will run not quite frontier models but ones that are close in performance, and run them fast.
I don’t know about that. Could a cheaper 2nd MacBook in all cases be used as an outboard unMath/unTPU coprocessor to handle those other tasks? (I have no clue.)
are you sure? lpddr5 is somewhere in the range of ~0.25 W/GB (for some reason this stat is hard to find good values for), so 128gb of RAM will mean your laptop idles at >25 watts.
True. But I am usually near an outlet, and with the M series even the overpowered ones just bring you back to the battery life of a good Intel laptop (3-4 hours) instead of 8+ for smaller ones.
That and running local LLMs pretty much requires an outlet. The GPU goes up to 50 watts. Battery life drops from many hours to less than one.
that 25 watts was just for ram. You still need another ~5 watts for cpu and display at idle, so you're talking about a laptop that lasts ~3 hours with the screen on literally doing nothing. For comparison, my 2021 XPS-13 (with a pretty small 55wH battery) lasts at least 4 hours under actual use (video playback, browsing github, compiling code etc).
Also, when your laptop is using 25W just for the RAM, that's ~20 watts less that the CPU/GPU get when you want to power up the CPU/GPU.
