[HN Gopher] A Dive into Ray Tracing Performance on the Apple M1
___________________________________________________________________
A Dive into Ray Tracing Performance on the Apple M1
Author : tempodox
Score : 47 points
Date : 2021-05-31 05:39 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.willusher.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.willusher.io)
| ksec wrote:
| For CineBench R23 Score. ( In case anyone will read it the wrong
| way )
|
| Intel(r) Core(tm) i7-1165G7 by default is an 15W TDP CPU,
| especially true if you are spreading load across all cores. ( 28W
| if you are on single Core TurboBoost ) It is on 10nm SuperFin (
| equivalent to ~TSMC 7nm ), Quad Core and 8 Thread, Not sure about
| its AVX 512 clock speed limitation I dont have time to dig that
| up.
|
| The Apple M1 is ~ 24W TDP, 8 Core 8 Thread, with 4 being High
| Efficiency Core on TSMC 5nm.
|
| You are looking at a ~60% higher TDP number. The results are
| still impressive, but needs these additional context before it is
| consumed.
|
| I will also not be surprised if A15 has a major GPU uArch change.
| ( Something similar to IMG B-Series )
| hajile wrote:
| M1 is barely 20-25w at the wall. Actual chip peak TDP is more
| like 14-18w.
|
| Intel chips have much higher peak and sustained actual power
| usage than their TDP indicates. At the wall, those "15w"
| systems are actually much closer to 40-60w on sustained loads.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| It's very hard to estimate the true power consumption of
| laptops since they are all primarily fed from the battery not
| the charger. There are almost no passthroughs anymore even in
| "gaming" laptops. Only a handful of DTR laptops still employ
| a passthrough with a high wattage PSU or dual PSU set up and
| I honestly haven't seen those for the last 2-3 gens...
|
| The last one I've seen that had it was a 8700K with dual
| 1080's DRT monstrosity.
| qayxc wrote:
| > It's very hard to estimate the true power consumption of
| laptops since they are all primarily fed from the battery
| not the charger.
|
| That's news to me. I try to keep up to date with laptops,
| and all the reviewers have pretty accurate power
| consumption measurements. Even just using the internal
| reporting reveals quite a few details [1].
|
| Even a "12W" TDP 11th gen Intel CPU can draw up to 50W in
| turbo mode [2].
|
| The 11th gen "45W" laptop CPUs have a PL2 power draw of
| 135W [3], which, thermals and VRMs permitting, can be held
| indefinitely according to the specs (which is what makes
| Intel's whole TDP-rating useless indeed).
|
| So yes, it's very hard indeed to estimate newer laptop's
| power consumption, but for entirely different reasons. It's
| primarily the cooling and OEM's choice of how to implement
| the very loosely defined (Intel!-) specs that define power
| draw. If you have excellent cooling, there's nothing to
| stop an 11800H from drawing 135W for minutes at a time...
| (which can be measured, both internally and from the wall
| no problem).
|
| AMD CPUs on the other hand mostly adhere to the published
| power rating (give or take 20% - again, cooling permitting
| and configurable by the OEM).
|
| [1] random example: https://bit.ly/34xLKpM
|
| [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-
| review...
|
| [3] https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/eight-core-intel-
| tiger...
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| Side note. Apple is great at waiting on tech until it's ready,
| and then making sure everyone knows about it (through a combo of
| a product launch and marketing).
|
| Retina displays, multitouch on touchscreens, and now ARM
| processors. The notable thing is that Apple makes the enabling
| incremental change (to a point where the product is good enough
| for mass market) seem like a step function.
| mhh__ wrote:
| I didn't realize Intel had shipped a mobile chip with AVX-512.
|
| Also, Intel for the love of God sort out your product names, use
| a proper system rather than /dev/random Lake
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| The code names are not the problem. Basically all companies use
| engineering code names so that engineers can talk about
| unreleased products without accidentally revealing things. And
| since you should not be able to divine anything about the
| products from them, picking random geographical features is
| _just fine_.
|
| The problem is that their actual product naming is such a
| massive mess that people prefer to learn the code names instead
| of trying to figure out what, exactly, a i7-1165G7 is and how
| it relates to, say, a i5-11400H?
| Zevis wrote:
| I had no idea they'd gone back to 4 numbers for some of their
| CPUs. What does G7 even mean?
| acqq wrote:
| Only four? i5-11400H is a real name too:
|
| https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/213805
| /...
| masklinn wrote:
| Yes but that's the normal pattern: the historical naming
| was XYYY where X was the generation and YYY was the SKU.
| With the 10th generation, this became XXYYY, continuing
| the pattern.
| masklinn wrote:
| Graphics Level 7. Basically a relative indication of the
| iGPU capabilities.
| zokier wrote:
| The problem is Intels incredible tendency to cut, slice, and
| dice their market into tiny slivers of segments. For example
| Comet Lake has 80ish SKUs listed on its wiki page:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Lake_(microprocessor)
|
| Combine this with the fact that they have completely
| different processor families for different segments
| concurrent with these, there are going to be hundreds of SKUs
| in total on the market at any point.
|
| I don't know if there is any sort of naming system that can
| salvage that to make any intuitive sense. The actual product
| names mostly serve to function as keys to search ARK.
| masklinn wrote:
| > The problem is that their actual product naming is such a
| massive mess that people prefer to learn the code names
| instead of trying to figure out what
|
| They actually have a guide explaining all the bits. It
| doesn't really matter since most of it is arbitrary and
| marketing (including uarch rebadging same as the GPU
| vendors), so even within a generation it tends to tell you
| very little in and of itself.
| mhh__ wrote:
| That too, but if the microarchitectures had a numeric
| identity for example (even in parallel to the xyz lake name)
| the route to a better numerical ID for CPU's would be easier.
| masklinn wrote:
| That's originally what the generation was.
|
| Then it became inconvenient so generations and uarchs got
| disconnected (because marketing, and then more marketing as
| they had to introduce uarch refreshes because they couldn't
| move through their plans)
| smoldesu wrote:
| For anyone looking to find real-time raytracing examples, this is
| not it. The author seems to be investigating static renders like
| you would do in Blender, offloading it to the CPU instead of the
| GPU. Unsurprisingly, the M1 does not support hardware-accelerated
| ray tracing. However, almost any CPU made in the last 10 years is
| capable of software-accelerated ray tracing with software like
| Pixar's Renderman and the open-source Cycles engine.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| > software-accelerated ray tracing
|
| Is this a particular term/concept, or do you just mean non-
| hardware-accelerated ray tracing?
|
| If the former, what does it mean for something to be "software-
| accelerated?"
|
| If the latter, I apologize if this comes off as nit-picking.
| smoldesu wrote:
| When I say software-accelerated, I'm referring to anything
| that doesn't offload any rendering processes to the GPU. It's
| not necessarily a turn of phrase, but I think most people
| familiar with the topic will grok that software rendering =
| no GPU offload.
|
| Though I do understand the desire to be pedantic, because
| ISAs like this and their SIMD instructions can kinda blur the
| lines between what constitutes as "hardware accelerated".
| That's why I try to avoid it as much as possible for the sake
| of simplicity.
| tralarpa wrote:
| I think parent was wondering what the word "accelated" in
| "software-accelerated" could mean. Faster than what?
| (faster doing the calculations by hand? :)
| zokier wrote:
| I think it is neat demonstration how weird the CPU performance
| has been in recent past that on one hand M1 has very impressive
| performance, but on the other hand 7 year old CPU puts out
| competitive numbers. It is also demonstration how much
| performance we have left behind as we have adopted laptops as the
| mainstream computing platform/
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-05-31 23:00 UTC)