Apple's new Mac Studios have been used in a cluster of 4 systems, where they're combined idle power consumption is less than a network switch at around 33W.
Content creator and developer Alex Ziskind deployed his own personal Mac Studio cluster with 4 machines, which are powered by Apple's new M3 Ultra processor. Each of the Mac Studios feature an ethernet port, with Ziskind running all 4 systems into a network switch at the bottom where he runs multiple commands through a single network (and it looks great, too).
Popular Now: PS5 emulator running GTA 5 shows GTA 6 might be possible on PC before official releaseWhen he ran the 4-way Apple Mac Studio cluster, Ziskind noticed that the idle power consumption of the M3 Ultra-powered cluster was sitting between 32W and 34W of power, but noticed that the network switch at the bottom was actually consuming more power than the Mac Studio cluster at idle. Even fully fired up and all threads loaded, the M3 Ultra is an extremely impressive piece of silicon.
We recently reported on another user running DeepSeek R1 models on his new M3 Ultra-powered Mac Studio with impressive results: 671 billion parameters, using 448GB of RAM and only 200W of power.
This is far less than a high-end graphics card like the GeForce RTX 4090 or RTX 5090, where you're looking at double that power consumption, even high-end Intel CPUs will chow down on over 200W of power easily.
