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Its theoretical 120GB/s (with soldered lpddr5, the fastest) is between a M2 (100GB/s) and a M2 Pro (200GB/s).

For a portable solution it can be a nice compromise (only considering LLMs here). The only way to get 64GB of Ram (or more) with apple is with a M1/M2 Max. It's way faster (400 GB/s) but the retail price is at least ~4000€. The M2 Pro doesn't get above 32 GB of RAM.

For a while I considered a macbook pro, but the price tag, mixed with the fact that the SSD is soldered (just with LLMs, I plan a lot of mileage on them, and the failure mode of these macs is to just never boot up ever again, even with an external drive), and then I heard about the GPD Win Max 2 with an AMD 7840U. It's a lesser known brand, and I'll have to wait for early october to get mine with 64GB LPDDR5, but seeing some people receiving small parts after breakage/malfunction for previous gen also tipped the scale. For LLMs, it should be about a third the speed than a portable M2 Max, but it's a quarter the price, and I like some stuff that it can do that no other laptop can, so I'm fine with the tradeoffs.



Unconventionally choice of device!

I’ve had decent luck with zen minipcs- though the earlier gen 4700u. Take 64gb but too slow for LLMs realistically. Plus only 8gb max assignable to gpu.


I don't know if it applies to older gen, but the team behind mlc-llm are suggesting that at least with steamdeck's APU you can go beyond the cap, hopefully it applies to other APUs:

https://blog.mlc.ai/2023/08/09/Making-AMD-GPUs-competitive-f...

Regarding the choice of device, I'm regularly in places where 24h electricity/internet is not guaranteed, so renting cloud gpus: nope, bulky gaming laptop that chews through battery in a couple of hours: nope (even though I came really close to getting one with a RTX 4090 for 2600€, but I'm done with space heaters), frame.work 13? RAM to slow...

Mobile devices with at least 64GB of lpddr5 with decent battery consumption? The choice is quite limited.




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