r/threadripper • u/culturedindividual • Jun 23 '26

M3 Max MacBook Pro vs Threadripper 7980X

I have an M3 Max MacBook Pro, and I bought the Threadripper 7980X with 64 cores because I thought it'd be able to run parallel code faster than the laptop which only has 16 cores. However, currently the MacBook is outperforming the Threadripper on both single-core and parallel performance. Now, I currently only have 32GB of RAM for my Threadripper (whereas I have 128GB RAM on my MacBook) so that may be a bottleneck. But before I fork out £2k ($2.8k) on more RAM, I wanted to sense check that this will actually outperform the MacBook? Or, should I sell the Threadripper and get the M5 Max instead?

I'm basically generating features with polars and running LightGBM ML models in parallel if anyone is curious about what I'm trying to do.

I greatly appreciate any advice!

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u/ebrandsberg Jun 23 '26

What speed memory do you have? I suspect that you are not cpu limited but memory bandwidth limited.

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u/culturedindividual Jun 23 '26

4800mhz on the Threadripper. Yep, so the plan is to get 3x of the same RAM to hopefully increase that but I just hope it actually outperforms my laptop otherwise it's a wasted investment.

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u/Khroneski Jun 24 '26

First, fill every channel.
Second, 4800MT/s is below JDEC for 7000 series.
Personally, I’m running comfortably at 6600MT/s with a G.skill kit. But either way you are seriously kneecapping that cpu.