What happens when you run a fruit fly brain simulation on a 30 million won M5 Ultra Mac Studio?

What happens when you put a fruit fly's brain into an ultra-high-performance computer costing as much as 30 million won? Recently, scientists released a map of the fruit fly's brain and nervous system online, and a simulation that makes the fruit fly move in a virtual space has become a hot topic. According to a video from 'Omokgyo Electronics Market', the results of directly testing the massive amount of computation required by a fruit fly's neural network using a Mac Studio equipped with Apple's M5 Ultra have been revealed.

A neural network with 1.6 billion connections: Why even a 30 million won computer struggles

The software used in the test, 'Flybird', is based on a 'Connectome' map that depicts the nerve bundles extending from the male fruit fly's brain to its body. This map includes 24.47 million connections between approximately 1.67 billion neurons. In the video, the entire brain and body of the fruit fly are simulated, visualizing neural signals from the brain, visual signals, and muscle movements. Interactions are possible, such as the fruit fly being pushed away when the user blows wind in the virtual environment or eating when sugar is provided. Additionally, through the 'Plus Fly' feature, the number of fruit flies can be increased; however, as the number of individuals increases, CPU usage rises, showing a limit where the browser window is forcibly closed when reaching approximately 330,000 flies.

However, implementing this tiny living creature in real-time is an extremely difficult task. The amount of computation the Mac Studio must process while a single fruit fly lives for 1 second is beyond imagination. It must update all 165,000 neurons 2,000 times per second and perform physical calculations for 67 body parts and 110 muscles 5,000 times per second. Furthermore, it must simulate 1,442 light rays from both compound eyes 50 times per second. In the video, a 'slow motion' phenomenon occurred where it took about 5 to 6 seconds of real time to calculate 1 second of the fruit fly's time. This creates a scene where the fruit fly moves very slowly, much like the gravity planet in the movie 'Interstellar'.

Even the 30 million won Mac Studio 'screams' when stimulating 'Hub Neurons'

To test the limits of the simulation, an experiment was conducted to stimulate specific neurons. In particular, when 100 'Hub Neurons', which are more heavily connected to other neurons, were selected and forcibly activated 150 times per second, even the M5 Ultra model struggled to run the brain of just a single fruit fly in real-time. The previous generation, M3 Ultra, was unable to run even a single fly in real-time. The video suggests that in simulating a fruit fly's brain, which is smaller than a sesame seed, the biological computing power is so powerful that even a Mac Studio, which is hundreds of millions of times heavier, finds it burdensome.

Meanwhile, it was revealed that the 'fruit fly brain benchmark app' used in this experiment was directly created by the presenter using local AI (Q1 27B model). By utilizing the unified memory architecture of the M5 Ultra, large AI models can be run without an internet connection; indeed, the AI token generation speed of the M5 Ultra recorded 5.0 seconds, which is about 4 times faster than the M3 Ultra (19.62 seconds), showing an overwhelming performance difference. The model operates based on the M5 Ultra's 36-core CPU and 256GB of unified memory.

Birth of a fruit fly 'Super Gamer' and virtual world flight training

To test the intelligence of the fruit fly, learning the game 'Flappy Bird' was also attempted. By generating hundreds of fruit flies simultaneously to play the game and selecting only those individuals that went a little further for the next generation through an evolutionary method, a 'Super Gamer fruit fly' was born that completed 99 out of 100 rounds after about 80 generations. During this learning process, the M5 Ultra recorded 464 seconds, showing a processing speed about 1.4 times faster than the M3 Ultra (658 seconds). This figure is consistent with the M5 Ultra's Geekbench 7 scores (single-core in the 3,700s, multi-core in the 52,000s) and Cinebench 2016 scores.

Furthermore, flight training using a 3D virtual world generated by local AI was conducted. The AI reproduced the landscape of the game 'Crimson Desert' into a 3D space, and 600 neurons involved in flight were extracted from the fruit fly brain map for training. After overnight training, the fruit fly brain learned the movements of the dragon (wyvern) in the game screen, leading to the result of directly flying through the virtual world's sky. This was presented as an experimental case showing that a fruit fly's brain can receive visual information from a virtual environment and convert it into physical movement. Currently, this Mac Studio is a top-spec configuration in the 30 million won range, and a 512GB memory model is scheduled to be released at the end of October.

Finally, checking the gaming performance of the Mac Studio, it ran 'Cyberpunk 2077' at an average of 70 frames per second at 4K resolution (Ray Tracing OFF). In the case of Ultra options with Ray Tracing turned on, it achieved 70 frames at QHD and 51 frames at 4K. However, it was confirmed that there is a difference in graphics performance compared to the RTX 5090, which recorded 101 frames at 4K with the same options. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that 'Crimson Desert' runs natively on Mac, implementing 60 frames based on 4K Ultra options.