For those people who use a high workstation, what is the typical price? I feel like people spending more than 10k on a machine must not be bothered, they want the performance
$10k is easily double what a beast workstation has traditionally cost. Yes, you've been able to configure Mac Pros or iMac Pros for similar prices in the past, but it's always been the ultra high-end with niche use cases, currently if you max out a Mac Studio you're up to around $10k.
That's with 20x general compute cores, 32x neural engines, and 64x GPU cores, 128GB RAM, and 8TB of storage. I guess it's probably useful for 8K video workloads, but not much else.
If the article is right and they're targeting a $10k base price for the Extreme version of the chip, then they better get it VERY right for it to be worth the effort, and I wouldn't expect many customers to be lining up regardless.
10k is fairly normal for professional workstations when you factor in high memory Quadros and xeons.
I would really not recommend comparing to home built machines. Studios tend to lease from Dell/HP and those workstations will often be in the 10k+ range.
> $10k is easily double what a beast workstation has traditionally cost
I was thinking similarly. Not Mac, but $4-5k will get you an extremely well specced Dell/HP workstation suitable for nearly anything. Staying under $5k can also make it easier to push it through finance where higher price premiums typically require more paperwork.
Here (research lab doing computational materials science), we get a €8k workstation every three years or so. AFAIK there is no review from the accounting people below €15k. In any case, honestly, the expense is tiny compared to the salary and other costs of whoever is using it for 3 years (close to a quarter million overall).
I regularly see people in the scientific and engineering fields spend more than 10k on a workstation without blinking. A company I work with that does antenna design for example dropped 12k (plus a bit more) on a workstation within the last year. No fancy video cards, just super beefy CPUs and tons and tons of RAM.
$employer procures workstations equipped with 64C Threadripper Pro + A6000 48GB GPUs for CG artists. They haven't said what they're actually paying but list prices of those machines are north of 15k. Devs get a similar setup except smaller GPUs.
