Apple Mac Studio cluster: 4 x M3 Ultra systems use half the power of a network switch at idle

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).

When 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.

• Read more: Apple M3 Ultra runs DeepSeek R1 with 671B parameters: only 200W power
• Read more: Apple intros M3 Ultra chip: dual M3 Max with UltraFusion tech
• Read more: Apple's new M3 Ultra Mac Studio: 32-core CPU, 80-core GPU, 512GB RAM, 16TB SSD costs $14099

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.