The new M4 Apple Silicon chips look to have pretty impressive performance.
Has anyone tried Stan on the an M4 Mac yet?
If so, have you had any technical issues?
Are you getting noteworthy speed ups compared to your old set-up?
The M2 and M3 Macs perform really well for Stan. This is because we’re largely memory bottlenecked in large models and the ARM series is much better at dealing with asynchronous memory access.
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I got one of the base-level $500 M4 Mac Minis to play around with – have only run a few Stan models on it so far, but noticing a 1.5-3x speedup relative to my laptop (a 2019 MBP w/ an i9-9980HK), which is consistent with the ~2.5x difference in Geekbench 6 scores. Note also this was using 8 chains in parallel and taking the average across chains (to better reflect the 4p + 6e core composition of the 10c M4 chip).
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