That’s probably the trash can Mac Pro from 2013.
In December 2013, Apple released a new cylindrical Mac Pro (colloquially called the “trash can Mac Pro). Apple said it offered twice the overall performance of the first generation while taking up less than one-eighth the volume. It had up to a 12-core Xeon E5 processor, dual AMD FirePro D series GPUs, PCIe-based flash storage and an HDMI port, but lacked PCIe expansion slots. Thunderbolt 2 ports brought updated wired connectivity and support for six Thunderbolt Displays. Reviews initially were generally positive, with caveats. Limitations of the cylindrical design prevented Apple from upgrading the cylindrical Mac Pro with more powerful hardware.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Pro
This ridiculous machine was on sale until 2019 when Apple returned to the tower form factor. We had to wait until 2023/2024 for the prices to go down and they have gone down significantly… Freefall.
I chose a Late 2013 model with a 12-core Xeon processor, 32GB of RAM, 1TB SSD storage, and dual AMD FirePro D500 for $209 on eBay. This itself is one of the cheapest desktop computers you can get. When I tested the CPU, it turned out to still be very capable. It even outperformed the M1 Mac (not the Max) in Cinebench 2024 Multicore. Then I tried Ollama with Llama3.1 on the CPU and was pleasantly surprised by its speed.
- total duration: 1m11.025461943s
- load duration: 26.551362ms
- prompt eval count: 18 token(s)
- prompt eval duration: 1.271476s
- prompt eval rate: 14.16 tokens/s
- eval count: 565 token(s)
- eval duration: 1m9.721466s
- eval rate: 8.10 tokens/s
Okay, if you try to compare it to a beefy GPU or an online service, this is laughable. However, if you consider the price of $209, this is probably one of the cheapest ways to do local inference with reasonable speed. Plus, you also get a very stylish, compact packaging and almost completely silent operation.
Here’s the recording:
Or you can try it out for yourself here (till it’s on):
Last though
If you can find a lower tier version at a much cheaper price, feel free to go for it. You can always upgrade the CPU later. The 12-core E5 Xeons are currently selling for around $25 on eBay. You can also upgrade the DDR3 RAM for a very affordable price (maximum capacity of 64GB). Additionally, you can add an M.2 NVMe drive using a Mac M.2 SSD adapter.