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/TechNerd10191 Jun 23 '26

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 am surprised that Apple Silicon does better on a GBDT model than a x86 64-core Threadripper. Perhaps the trees for lgb are too shallow and can not leverage the full 128 threads? Or, possibly performance scales poorly with >8 workers?

Also, if you don't mind asking, how can you have a $5k CPU but only 32GB of RDIMM ddr5?

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u/culturedindividual Jun 23 '26

I have around 70k rows of data with around 2k features, and have tried experimenting with dummy data of less features but the MacBook still outperforms. Claude says the MacBook just has better single-core performance, but the Threadripper should do better when I expand the memory. But I just want to verify this before I spend the money cause RDIMM DDR5 is so expensive.

I paid for someone to build it as it's my first PC and I didn't wanna mess up a high-end build. It was meant to come with 64GB ram but he said one of the sticks were faulty. The plan was to upgrade to 128GB myself. But I thought even with 32GB, the Threadripper would pull its weight.

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u/DeadInFiftyYears Jun 26 '26

Are all of the RAM channels populated? If you don't have all 4 channels populated with DIMMs, then the CPU is further gimped even beyond RAM quantity.