I don’t see a price there, so I’m not sure how “overpriced” it is. But it’s a class of product that is expensive across the board, compared to a typical desktop workstation or gaming PC.
The use cases are mostly local AI. That’s very demanding and requires compromises one way or another. You want high memory capacity and high memory bandwidth most of all. You can’t get both without paying out the nose, so you need to find the sweet spot for your specific use cases.
Discrete GPUs give you high bandwidth, but low capacity.
Standard desktop memory gives you high capacity, but low bandwidth (and also low compute speed since CPUs are no good for the workloads).
This type of product is a middle ground. Integrated memory gives you better bandwidth than DDR5, but not as good as a discrete GPU. Integrated GPU/NPU gives you much better performance than a desktop CPU, and can access the full integrated memory directly. Upgradeable memory is not really possible for this class of product.
The real competition for this is a tricked-out MacBook Pro. Those are faster, but they ain’t cheap, and I don’t think Apple even sells any 192GB Macs anymore, and when they did it was close to $10k.
They don’t even have the 128GB or 192GB options available when you click “Customize Now” the base 32GB option starts at $1,269 USD with no storage. So yeah, just a bit over priced.
I don’t see a price there, so I’m not sure how “overpriced” it is. But it’s a class of product that is expensive across the board, compared to a typical desktop workstation or gaming PC.
The use cases are mostly local AI. That’s very demanding and requires compromises one way or another. You want high memory capacity and high memory bandwidth most of all. You can’t get both without paying out the nose, so you need to find the sweet spot for your specific use cases.
Discrete GPUs give you high bandwidth, but low capacity.
Standard desktop memory gives you high capacity, but low bandwidth (and also low compute speed since CPUs are no good for the workloads).
This type of product is a middle ground. Integrated memory gives you better bandwidth than DDR5, but not as good as a discrete GPU. Integrated GPU/NPU gives you much better performance than a desktop CPU, and can access the full integrated memory directly. Upgradeable memory is not really possible for this class of product.
The real competition for this is a tricked-out MacBook Pro. Those are faster, but they ain’t cheap, and I don’t think Apple even sells any 192GB Macs anymore, and when they did it was close to $10k.
Well, MacBook Pro or also Mac Studio. Pre shortage, you could spec out the Mac Studio with 512 GB of RAM, if you had stupidly deep pockets.
They don’t even have the 128GB or 192GB options available when you click “Customize Now” the base 32GB option starts at $1,269 USD with no storage. So yeah, just a bit over priced.
Even the 128GB version starts at $3,500 despite being out of stock. Yeah… overpriced.