"Here we see that, despite only being twice the price, the 7995WX x86 ISA offers 7x more raw compute power than the M2 Ultra ARM ISA, and nearly the same token generation speed, which is likely thanks to its 384mb L3 cache. When I bought this chip, I had to expand support in llama.cpp for bfloat16 and AVX512 before I could fully test its capabilities. My work means you can now run LLaMA 2.8x faster on Zen4 than you could before."
A complete desktop computer with the M2 Ultra w/64GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD is $4k.
The 7995WX processor alone is $10k, the motherboard is one grand, the RAM is another $300. So you're up to $11300, and you still don't have a PSU, case, SSD, GPU....or heatsink that can handle the 300W TDP of the threadripper processor; you're probably looking at a very large AIO radiator to keep it cool enough to get its quoted performance. So you're probably up past $12k, 3x the price of the Studio...more like $14k if you want to have a GPU of similar capability to the M2 Ultra.
Just the usual "aPPle cOMpuTeRs aRE EXpeNsIVE!" nonsense.
So from a CPU perspective you get 7x the CPU throughput for 3x to 4x the price, plus upgradable RAM that is massively cheaper. The M2 uses the GPU for LLMs though, and there it sits in a weird spot where 64GB of (slower) RAM plus midrange GPU performance is not something that exists in the PC space. The closest thing would probably be a (faster) 48GB Quadro RTX which is in the $5000 ballpark. For other use cases where VRAM is not such a limiting factor, the comparably priced PC will blow the Mac out of the water, especially when it comes to GPU performance. The only reason we do not have cheap 96GB GDDR GPUs is that it would cannibalize NVIDIA/AMDs high margin segment. If this was something that affected Apple, they would act the same.
I didn't see benchmarks that suggest the 7950X is faster than M2 Ultra. I only saw performance numbers for 7995WX which has 6x the cores and 6x the cache.
Either way, I think these comparisons are moot since an M2 Ultra comes with 2x M2 Max GPUs and an NPU and up to 192GB of unified memory running at 800GB/s. In other words, you wouldn't want to run your LLM on the CPU if you have an M2 Ultra.
The point of OP is to increase LLM performance when you don't have a capable GPU.
"Here we see that, despite only being twice the price, the 7995WX x86 ISA offers 7x more raw compute power than the M2 Ultra ARM ISA, and nearly the same token generation speed, which is likely thanks to its 384mb L3 cache. When I bought this chip, I had to expand support in llama.cpp for bfloat16 and AVX512 before I could fully test its capabilities. My work means you can now run LLaMA 2.8x faster on Zen4 than you could before."