Side-by-side, with the numbers that matter.
Two rigs, one table. Higher numbers win in cobalt; TDP and price flip.
Rig A
El Capitan
HPE / AMD · workstation
Change
- 1X Neo
- Agility Robotics Digit
- Alibaba Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct (Q4 quant)
- AMD Instinct MI300X
- AMD Instinct MI325X
- AMD Instinct MI355X
- Anthropic Claude Opus 4.7
- Apple Mac Pro (M2 Ultra, 2023)
- Apple Mac Studio (M3 Ultra)
- Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch, M4 Max (2024)
- Apptronik Apollo
- Aurora
- AWS Trainium2
- Boston Dynamics Atlas
- Boston Dynamics Spot
- Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine 3
- El Capitan
- Figure 02
- Frontier (OLCF-5)
- Google Cloud TPU v5p
- Groq Language Processing Unit
- Intel Gaudi 3 HL-325L
- MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid
- NVIDIA B100
- NVIDIA B200
- NVIDIA DGX B200
- NVIDIA DGX H200
- NVIDIA DGX Spark
- NVIDIA Eos DGX SuperPOD
- NVIDIA GB200
- NVIDIA GB200 NVL72
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition
- NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper
- NVIDIA H100
- NVIDIA H200
- NVIDIA HGX B200
- NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor
- NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell
- NVIDIA RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell
- NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell
- OpenAI GPT-5
- SambaNova SN40L Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit
- Sanctuary AI Phoenix
- Tesla Optimus
- The Stargate Project
- Unitree B2
- Unitree G1
- Unitree H1
Rig B
Apple Mac Studio (M3 Ultra)
Apple · mac
Change
- 1X Neo
- Agility Robotics Digit
- Alibaba Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct (Q4 quant)
- AMD Instinct MI300X
- AMD Instinct MI325X
- AMD Instinct MI355X
- Anthropic Claude Opus 4.7
- Apple Mac Pro (M2 Ultra, 2023)
- Apple Mac Studio (M3 Ultra)
- Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch, M4 Max (2024)
- Apptronik Apollo
- Aurora
- AWS Trainium2
- Boston Dynamics Atlas
- Boston Dynamics Spot
- Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine 3
- El Capitan
- Figure 02
- Frontier (OLCF-5)
- Google Cloud TPU v5p
- Groq Language Processing Unit
- Intel Gaudi 3 HL-325L
- MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Suprim Liquid
- NVIDIA B100
- NVIDIA B200
- NVIDIA DGX B200
- NVIDIA DGX H200
- NVIDIA DGX Spark
- NVIDIA Eos DGX SuperPOD
- NVIDIA GB200
- NVIDIA GB200 NVL72
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition
- NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper
- NVIDIA H100
- NVIDIA H200
- NVIDIA HGX B200
- NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor
- NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell
- NVIDIA RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell
- NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell
- OpenAI GPT-5
- SambaNova SN40L Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit
- Sanctuary AI Phoenix
- Tesla Optimus
- The Stargate Project
- Unitree B2
- Unitree G1
- Unitree H1
0 of 37 fields comparable
⇄ swap sides| Spec | El Capitan | Apple Mac Studio (M3 Ultra) |
|---|---|---|
| Accelerator | AMD Instinct MI300A (APU) | — |
| Bandwidth GB S | — | 819 |
| Base Price USD | — | 3,999 |
| Comparator 5090 | — | 5,090 |
| Cores | 11,340,000 | — |
| CPU | AMD 4th Gen EPYC 24C 1.8GHz | — |
| CPU Cores 512gb Config | — | 32 |
| GPU Cores 512gb Config | — | 80 |
| Hpcg Tflops | 17,406 | — |
| Installation Year | 2,024 | — |
| Interconnect | HPE Slingshot-11 | — |
| Launch Date | — | 2025-03-05 |
| Location | DOE/NNSA/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory | — |
| M Series Version | — | 3 |
| Manufacturer | HPE | — |
| Model | HPE Cray EX255a | — |
| MSRP (USD)↓ better | — | 9,499 |
| Only 96gb Config From | — | 2026-05-05 |
| Option 512gb Removed | — | 2026-03-05 |
| Power KW | 29,684.62 | — |
| Rmax Pflops | 1,809 | — |
| Rpeak Pflops | 2,821.1 | — |
| Status | — | discontinued |
| Status Checked | — | 2026-09-24 |
| Successor | — | Mac Studio with M5 Max / M5 Ultra (up to 512 GB unified memory) |
| Successor M5 Ultra Base Price USD | — | 5,499 |
| Superseded ON | — | 2026-08-25 |
| TDP (W)↓ better | — | 270 |
| Top500 Jun2026 NO1 | LineShine (National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, China) | — |
| Top500 Rank Jun2026 | 2 | — |
| Top500 Rank Nov2024 | 1 | — |
| Top500 Rank Nov2025 | 1 | — |
| Unified Memory Base GB | — | 96 |
| Unified Memory MAX GB | — | 512 |
| Unified Memory MID GB | — | 256 |
| Upgrade 512gb USD | — | 4,000 |
| Upgrade Chip USD | — | 1,500 |