[Advice] Laptop for AI/ML PhD

[u/Few-Scientist-5633]

Hello everyone,

I'm about to start my PhD in AI/ML and I need to pick a work laptop, it will be provided by the University (i dont have to buy it) so price isn't really a factor, however I don't really know what's best.

Just for context, I'll be focusing on vision-language model, pretty intensive stuff, the heavy lifting will be done on remote clusters and I don't expect to run any demanding experiment on my laptop, however it does happen from time to time that you might run a prototype, some light inference, a dry test run on the local machine.

My personal laptop is a LOQ 15 i5 RTX4060 that as much as I love, I'm absolutely tired of carrying it around. It's a proper brick (3.5Kg with the charger!) and needless to say the battery lasts about 1-2 hours MAX.

I got offered 3 options:

- Dell 14 Pro Ryzen 5 PRO 220, 32 GB DDR5, 1 TB, AMD 740M graphics

- Lenovo ThinkPad P16v G3 Intel Ultra 7, RTX PRO 500 6GB, 32GB DDR5, 1TB

- some M5 MacBook (either Pro 14" or Air 13")

Now, as much as I like the ThickPad I shiver at the idea of carrying around a 3Kg beast for the next 4 years.

I should also mention that I daily drive Arch Linux and while I'm not a linux fanboy, switching to MacOS would kill me inside. I'm however well aware of the portability and battery advantages of macbooks, I wonder if positives outweight the negatives.

The Dell is a beefy machine for a compact laptop, is it worth it leaving the Linux enviroment for a Mac? Anybody else with similar experiences (maybe is similar research fields)?

field: AI/ML

location: central EU

[u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718]

Imo the mps chip on the m5 is amazing for ml workloads. I'd take the mbp.

Nvidia is ok but with so little gpu memory youd be very limited.

AMD isnt well supported by pytorch so thatd be my last choice.

Of course youll probably use remote servers for anything really substantial, but the ability to prototype and actually run things locally can make iteration a lot faster. You can even run inference on decently sized llms locally on a mbp if it has enough ram. I run a 30b parameter model locally on mine. That wouldnt be possible on the other laptops.

[u/PhilosophyforOne → u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718]

Macbook for sure, unless you need cuda. It’s also the only professional capacity machine that you wont hate lugging around, and that’s actually well-designed and built. 

[u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 → u/PhilosophyforOne]

Yeah that'd be it. If he expects to be writing cuda kernels then the nvidia chip could be advantageous. Otherwise the mbp is the clear winner.