An RTX 3090ti with 24GB of VRAM is widely available now that the crypto markets have crashed for $1150 or so. They were $2500 a year ago if you could find them.
A twist on the above comment: I _already own_ an M2 Mac, but I'm never gonna buy a high-end GPU to play around with this sort of tech. If the things people (who aren't gamers, crypto miners, or ML researchers) already own can be useful for some hobby-level work in the space, we'll see a lot more work and experimentation in the space. Its super exciting stuff.
The gaming PC market is huge. Have a look at https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210329005150/en/Glo... to get some numbers. There is a list of shipments in a year. Apple sells a lot of units, but not nearly enough to match the accumulated household supplies of gaming PCs - in how much, 2 years, while gaming PCs and laptops are still being sold?
Don't take that comment personally please, but this "perhaps" is a perfect example of being in a complete Apple bubble. It's so far from reality it is frankly unfathomable.
It’s different kinds of people. I know more people with an apple mx computer than with a gaming computer (people have a console to game or nothing at all).
Arguably the cost effective solution is to use cloud services, since we're talking just a few seconds difference (or you might be lucky like one HN reader who got allocated an A100 today.)
But to play devil's advocate there are clear strengths available to the different platforms. PCs can readily upgrade into high end GPUs, but the compromise is that this becomes a requirement as basic GPUs don't feature enough VRAM and CPU-only mode is woeful.
On the mac side of things, the GPU is not going to be the latest and greatest, but the M-series features unified memory, so a relatively normal M-series mac is going to have the necessary hardware to load the models. Not the fastest (but still fast), and ready to go. (Also as it stands the M-series can offer additional pathways to optimisation.)
It's not clear if the shortages will happen with this new release as they did last time. Ethereum mining is going away and not as many people are stuck at home because of Covid. On the other hand, the performance increase looks to be substantial, increasing the demand.
