That's pretty accurate to what I've seen, I'd definitely recommend a smaller model for active agentic use on that hardware.
It definitely seems to be the leader on 'general intelligence' on this hardware from my casual usage, but the newer Qwen or Gemma series models are much more usable speed-wise for agentic use, and often is as good or better than DS4 on that front.
The demand is not coming from 'normal Apple customers' it's coming from people who want a machine that can run local AI.
It has nothing to do with Macs being especially good at AI. It has everything to do with being one of the last 'cheap' devices being sold with that much unified RAM.
Curious how people feel about this compared to DS4 Flash, given they are pretty close in size. Also curious how well it holds up to heavy quantization.
DS4 Flash can currently run reasonably well on systems with ~96gb+ RAM, I wonder if Hy3 can compete there.
For anyone considering these devices, the only reason I would recommend against them is if you plan on getting multiple to link together - the DGX Spark has a much, much faster interconnect bandwidth ceiling than the AMD devices do.
It depends - for what? If your security model is sandboxing an agent to ensure they don't nuke your PC, then there are a lot of options, you can use something like bubblewrap[1] or a microVM like libkrun[2] if your goal is light-weight, up to full Docker if you want the tooling that comes with that.