[HN Gopher] Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max
___________________________________________________________________
Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max
Author : xrayarx
Score : 137 points
Date : 2021-11-22 19:20 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tlkh.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (tlkh.dev)
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| Good to see a detailed benchmark. I'm pretty impressed by the
| performance in real-world applications as well - the machine is
| easily 2.5--3x as fast at running various builds and processing
| jobs as my 15" from 2018 was, and it's cool and quiet while doing
| it.
|
| The performance claims have been a bit overblown in some quarters
| - it's not going to replace a 5950X with a big GPU, and some of
| the rhetoric is a bit silly. But it's _surprisingly_ close -
| watching a silent laptop rip through a build faster than the 125W
| TDP i9-10900K we have in the office is pretty cool!
| Jack000 wrote:
| One thing I don't see anyone mention is that the M1Max is the
| probably the cheapest GPU memory you can buy. The only other way
| to get >=64Gb GPU memory is with the A100 (?) which is like 20k
| by itself.
|
| So this would be great specifically for finetuning large
| transformer models like GPT-J, which requires a lot of memory but
| not a lot of compute. Just hoping for pytorch support soon..
| aantix wrote:
| Would it make sense to mine BTC with it?
| officeplant wrote:
| At this point it doesn't make sense to mine BTC on any GPU.
| grishka wrote:
| BTC mining isn't memory-bound, it's compute-bound. The more
| sha256 hashes you can compute per second, the better. And I'm
| highly doubtful that any general-purpose hardware at all
| could even begin to compete with mining ASICs.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| I also got an M1 Max. The chip is amazing. Compile times are a
| _lot_ faster than on the 6 core Intel Mac mini I had before.
|
| But at this point it's really held back by Apple's software.
|
| Anything related to Apple ID and iCloud regularly hangs 30-60
| seconds, showing a spinner with no progress indicator whatsoever.
|
| Apps randomly take 20 seconds to launch, maybe because of [1]?
|
| The Open/Save dialog taking 30 seconds to show.
|
| ControlCenter using 8GB of RAM to show a few sliders (I hope they
| fix that bug soon).
|
| The scanning feature in Preview is so unreliable that I started
| using my Windows machine for scanning something on my HP all-in-
| one.
|
| Some of those problems may be issues with 3rd party software
| (drivers), and others are just things that slipped through QA,
| and will hopefully be fixed in an update.
|
| But some of the issues are structural issues, where Apple has
| made questionable decisions that means issues can never be fixed.
|
| Eg. designing a security architecture that requires synchronously
| checking a binary signature during app startup with a web service
| is bound to cause performance issues.
|
| Or the design of the XPC system, which uses asynchronous message
| passing between services that are implicitly launched on demand
| sounds nice in theory, but it has been the source of so many
| bugs, causing temporary or permanent app hangs that are
| impossible to debug. The system was introduced in macOS 10.7 (!)
| and it still doesn't work reliably! At this point I've lost hope
| it will ever work properly.
|
| [1]: https://sigpipe.macromates.com/2020/macos-catalina-slow-
| by-d...
| lowercased wrote:
| You're not alone. my m1 mac mini is better, but i still see
| random beach balls, though the duration is less than on the
| intel mbp.
|
| For anyone saying "I never see this" or "something's wrong with
| your system" - I've seen these sorts of problems, in some
| capacity or another, over ... 12 years, multiple macbooks and
| imacs, multiple OS versions, multiple internet providers, from
| various parts of the world. I think the folks saying "never
| affects me" simply _do not notice_ this stuff. I don 't know
| how/why you can't notice stuff like this, but I've been present
| where I've noticed people getting beach balls, I've pointed it
| out, and was told "oh, didn't see that". Not saying every
| single person is missing every single instance 100%, but I've
| no doubt this interrupts peoples' flow different from mine.
|
| If I've paid $4k for a laptop and click a button, I don't
| expect to wait for... 1-2 seconds, then see a beach ball, then
| wait.... then wait some more... before a button click is
| recognized. It's _better_ today than last year, and the year
| before, but... wtf... it 's still there.
| mdavis6890 wrote:
| Hardware used to get faster more quickly than software got
| slower, so you could make forward progress by upgrading
| hardware. Then it seemed about the same, so following a
| hardware upgrade things would be about as fast as they had
| been when my previous hardware was new several years prior.
|
| Now we seem to be at a point where the software is getting
| slower more quickly than the hardware is getting faster, so
| that following a hardware upgrade everything is a bit slower
| than it was following the prior upgrade.
|
| Software sucks, and hardware is amazing.
| bserge wrote:
| Isn't that just... normal? Windows and Linux also have weird
| delays sometimes. It will happen on any hardware.
|
| And if you're paying more than 3k for a laptop, you're either
| rich or an idiot. Anything over that price is just brands
| price gouging for minimal to zero functional return.
| nouveaux wrote:
| "If I've paid $4k for a laptop and click a button, I don't
| expect to wait for... 1-2 seconds, then see a beach ball,"
|
| Is this even possible? I don't think a 50k computer can
| guarantee no wait on software. How would any hardware prevent
| excessive software utilization?
| dwighttk wrote:
| That sounds terrible, but none of that is happening on mine.
|
| The only slowness I've noticed has been related to the beta
| private relay
| mcculley wrote:
| The beachballing in Contacts has been driving me crazy for
| almost two years now. I have 7,413 cards in Contacts and even
| went so far as to completely delete my address book and
| reimport it from VCF. There is very clearly some synchronous
| dependency on iCloud. Turning Wi-Fi off is the only way I can
| use Contacts without it beachballing.
| amelius wrote:
| If software is the issue, can't you run Linux on it?
| breuleux wrote:
| Meh, every OS has its problems. The issues I have had with
| Linux have been consistently more annoying than those I have
| had with MacOS. I'm sure it's the opposite for some people.
| cheeze wrote:
| Does anyone really think that running Linux on custom Apple
| hardware is actually going to make things _better_?
| smoldesu wrote:
| It certainly rescued my a1502 from the trash bin.
| emilsedgh wrote:
| I have an M1 Air and can't wait to install Linux on it.
| Backed marcan's efforts and counting days until I go back
| to Linux again.
| jcelerier wrote:
| I don't know how it holds with the current M1s but I was
| much happier with Linux than macOS under my 2014 MBP,
| everything was incredibly much snappier.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| I'm a Mac app developer, I'm stuck with Xcode.
|
| But it's not all or nothing. For example I've started using
| Syncthing instead of iCloud Drive for some use cases and that
| works surprisingly well (Syncthing isn't without flaws
| either, but at least it shows exactly what it's doing making
| it a lot easier to debug).
| Ginden wrote:
| AFAIR if you have Mac, you are legally allowed to run MacOS
| in VM on that computer.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| Running macOS in a VM is okay for testing purposes, but
| in my experience it's not a great experience for
| productive work. There are a lot of graphics glitches
| because macOS assumes that you have hardware graphics
| acceleration, but no VM that I know supports that for
| macOS guests.
| xoa wrote:
| It doesn't help at all on notebooks which of course are
| the subject of this discussion, or even nearly any Apple
| hardware at all at this point. But FWIW on systems that
| can support multiple GPUs using PCIe passthrough to a
| macOS Guest VM will make it perform very well. Of course
| legally that means only the now highly mediocre multi-
| year old price-unchanged Mac Pro. But running a
| hackintosh virtualized can work quite nicely. While very
| unlikely, perhaps this will become an officially possible
| option again someday if Apple ever does another
| expandable system.
| stepbeek wrote:
| The issue is that Linux isn't running well enough on the
| apple silicon to be a viable option (yet).
| RealityVoid wrote:
| Was playing around with it just this weekend. It's... not
| there yet. It will be, but it's a work in progress.
|
| You could run it today if you wanted to, but there are a
| bunch of things that are missing.
| spudwaffle wrote:
| My M1 Pro has none of these problems. I would try a fresh
| install.
| howinteresting wrote:
| Yes, this is the classic solution to problems with Mac (and
| Windows): reformat and start over from scratch.
| astrange wrote:
| Maybe you have DNS issues? It's always DNS, so they say.
|
| XPC is not asynchronous; that's up to the individual caller.
| The synchronous methods are easier to debug for sure.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| > XPC is not asynchronous
|
| It's been some time since I dug into the internals of XPC,
| but my assumption was that the underlying protocol is
| asynchronous, and if you do sync calls the wrappers just do
| the waiting for you.
|
| The problem is that it has a tendency to get stuck in some
| rare cases, where services just don't reply for some reason.
| Then the sync calls are the worst -- the UI of the app is
| completely frozen and there's nothing you can do except
| restart the app. If the problem is with an Apple service
| (like Apple ID) then the only way to fix it is to restart the
| Mac and hope it doesn't happen again.
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| XPC sync is not in fact async underneath in recent macOS
| versions. It's a severe performance pessimization to use
| async in many cases, because sync propagates thread
| priority and async often can't.
|
| You don't seem to have a full grip on the reasons for the
| intermittent hangs you're experiencing. Can I suggest two
| things?
|
| 1 Grab a sysdiagnose during one of the hangs and file a
| feedback report with Apple
|
| 2 Use the `sample` command line tool to see what's actually
| hanging a particular process for yourself
| ksec wrote:
| >Anything related to Apple ID and iCloud regularly hangs 30-60
| seconds, showing a spinner with no progress indicator
| whatsoever.
|
| On Safari that happens when you have lots of Bookmarks,
| History, Open Tabs etc.
| foobiekr wrote:
| >The Open/Save dialog taking 30 seconds to show.
|
| This is _infuriating_ as a user. There is no possible good
| reason for this.
| cyberge99 wrote:
| I wonder if he has nfs shares or if he's running a pihole or
| similar. Apple may be expecting certain things in his
| configuration that are timing out.
|
| I've never experienced any of these issues (multiple macs in
| various profiles).
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Interesting. For what it's worth, I've never had any of these
| issues on my Intel-based MacBooks (I've been using them since
| 2007).
| smcleod wrote:
| Are you running any 3rd party kernel extensions, if so which
| ones? (E.g. littlesnitch, FUSE, etc....).
|
| I've got an M1 and M1 Pro and I've never seen anything like
| this, macOS in general has some long standing software bugs
| around the performance of apps like Music and Preview that I've
| seen hit on the M1 processor but they seem to make less of an
| impact to the usability compared to the Intel processors.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| I'm not running any kernel extensions on this Mac, the first
| iCloud related hang happened during the setup process before
| I installed anything at all.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I avoid iCloud problems by not using iCloud. Seems to be a
| lot more trouble than it's worth!
| threatofrain wrote:
| I'm on a slower setup and don't encounter this at all. You may
| want to get Apple to replace your laptop.
| joconde wrote:
| I have an M1 MacBook Air and the Open/Save dialog opens in less
| than a second. I think your system has a defect.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| These issues are intermittent and only happen sometimes. My
| system is not broken, it's a design defect/tradeoff in macOS
| sandbox. I've seen it on at least 5 different Macs on a lot
| of different versions of macOS. It's been an issue ever since
| they use a separate process to show the dialog.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| I don't know if your system has a defect, but I've used
| many, many Macs over fifteen years on all released versions
| of macOS, and I've never once encountered the issues you're
| raising.
| wiredfool wrote:
| I think it's probably something between Mojave and Big Sur
| based on my recent upgrades. Sandbox is as good of an
| explanation as any.
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| It sounds like you may have a undiagnosed local networking
| issue. I've been using Macs since 1991 and the last time I
| had the sort of issue you're talking about was classic
| macOS, where AppleTalk would literally hang the entire OS
| when it went into the weeds.
| foobiekr wrote:
| This is intermittent and has been an issue since Catalina (on
| x86) and occurs on my (fresh install, no migration, nothing
| weird) M1 mini on occasion.
| bjoli wrote:
| My mother-in-laws m1 macbook air exhibits the same issue, and
| she hasn't installed anything but apple's own software on it.
|
| Not every time, mind you. Only about once in 50 times.
| Sometimes she goes for weeks without it. Sometimes it happens
| several times in a day.
|
| My 2016 imac has some weird issues as well, like not
| supporting some of my keyboards when I use a nonstandard
| layout file (swedish dvorak)- even though they work just fine
| with apples own keyboards.
|
| Apple has some issues with quality control. Things have
| gotten steadily worse since 10.5, even though I do enjoy the
| new features.
|
| Not just weird things like the one above, but basic things
| like standard shortcuts not working when you have Swedish
| layout. Now I cant remember which one it was, but it was
| something that should do a common thing, but instead brought
| up the "search in the help files" instead.
|
| I have been bitten by it every time I use a new mac or do a
| fresh install.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| For all the (truly) amazing performance from the M1.*, how much
| of the benefits are just coming from Mac users not realising how
| laggy their OS is on non-extreme hardware? I used MacOS for two
| years on a '15 i5 MBP and didn't realise how persistently
| sluggish it was until i blew everything away and chucked on
| Xubuntu. (Nothing magic about linux here, Gnome and KDE were as
| bad as MacOS)
|
| Is the incredible performance of the M1 just going to enable a
| whole new generation of inefficient software?
| jonstewart wrote:
| This article literally benchmarks a variety of low-level
| compute heavy operations and compares them with a Ryzen. It's
| about as far away from your take as possible.
| nicce wrote:
| You might have missed the point - he means that more we get
| performance from the hardware, less we care about optimising
| software. And this is already a problem with Electron for
| example.
| wayeq wrote:
| Yes.. software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder if they'll somehow include the AMX 'instruction' (or
| whatever it is) into BLIS kernels. GEMM isn't everything, but it
| is a pretty important building block in linear algebra. (I mean
| that's the big observation of these fancy tile based BLAS
| implementations).
| jeffbee wrote:
| Didn't numpy remove Apple Accelerate support recently because it
| has numerical problems? Their docs are still warning against it.
| lopuhin wrote:
| Yes, but then they brought it back here
| https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/18874 - apparently Apple
| developers fixed these issues.
| musicale wrote:
| The memory bandwidth result is impressive.
| noveltyaccount wrote:
| Finally some benchmarks beyond just encoding video (which is
| admittedly a huge use case for these CPUs). I've been on Windows
| for decades, and this step change in computing performance is a
| Siren's call for me to switch, I've never wanted an Apple product
| so much as this before.
| m15i wrote:
| Regarding training ResNet50, even though img/sec is less than the
| 3090, could a 64gb m1 max accommodate larger image sizes than the
| 24gb 3090?
| lopuhin wrote:
| Probably they would be close - M1 still needs to use memory for
| the OS and other stuff, while 3090 can use fp16/mixed
| precision, which in many cases almost doubles effective memory.
| Also if we talk about training, then a more mature CUDA
| implementation of things like batch normalization and
| optimizers can also result in lower memory usage compared to a
| likely less mature TF Metal support.
| brrrrrm wrote:
| for those curious about running their own matmul benchmarks, I
| wrote a script a while back that works with both linux and MacOS
| that should make comparison easy.
|
| https://jott.live/code/blas_test.cc
|
| I saw ~1.2tflops on the regular M1
| matja wrote:
| On Linux I had to use `-lcblas` instead of `-lblas`. "6.63171
| gflops" with a 24-core AMD EPYC 74F3
| homerowilson wrote:
| I used OpenBLAS on my cheap last-generation AMD Ryzen 7 4700U
| laptop like so:
|
| git clone https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS && cd OpenBLAS
| && make PREFIX=/opt/openblas install && curl
| https://jott.live/code/blas_test.cc | sed -n
| "/<code>/,/code>/p" | tail -n +2 | head -n -1 > blas_test.cpp
|
| inspect blas_test.cpp file, and then...
|
| g++ -I/opt/openblas/include/ blas_test.cc -lopenblas
| -std=c++11 -O3 -L/opt/openblas/lib/ -o blas_test &&
| ./blas_test 512 512 512 100 100
|
| and got a peak of about 192 gflops, averaging closer to 180.
| So yeah, the M1 is > 6x faster in this simple single-
| precision matrix test.
| matja wrote:
| 541 gflops here, following those steps. Well done Apple for
| making a laptop CPU over 2x faster than a 250W server CPU
| released this year :)
| kitestramuort wrote:
| With my Ryzen 7 5800U laptop I get around 530 gflops, with
| a peak of 596 if I compile the test against MKL with
|
| g++ -I/opt/intel/mkl/include/ blas_test.cc -lmkl_intel_lp64
| -lmkl_gnu_thread -lmkl_core -lgomp -std=c++11 -O3
| -march=native -L/opt/intel/mkl/lib/intel64 -o blas_test_mkl
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Great detailed benchmarking.
|
| This mirrors my experience with my M1 Max: Absolutely amazing
| battery life and performance in a laptop. I'm thrilled to have
| it. Huge step up from last gen Apple laptops.
|
| But at the same time, it feels like some of the rhetoric around
| the performance claims got a little out of hand in the wake of
| the launch. It's fast, but it's not actually crushing my
| AMD/nVidia desktop like a lot of news outlets were suggesting it
| would.
|
| In fact, a lot of the GPU tests here show more or less what I've
| seen: That Apple has matched the power/performance of other
| leading-edge GPU hardware:
|
| > Pretty much what we would expect, with the M1 Max having about
| 8x less performance, but at 8x less power, so performance per
| watt is surprisingly quite comparable between the two.
|
| This is actually an impressive accomplishment out of Apple. I'm
| just afraid it might get overshadowed by the fact that it doesn't
| live up to some of the fairly extreme performance claims that got
| tossed around in the days following the launch.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Pretty sure the panegyric performance claims are from Mac
| people comparing it to the rather sad previous generation of
| Macbooks.
| hereforphone wrote:
| Do you run virtual machines on it?
| whynotminot wrote:
| But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the
| same breath is kind of the whole reason it _is_ amazing. Like
| that 's the rhetoric--holy shit _your laptop_ is doing this.
|
| Apple hasn't even released the Pro desktop stuff yet.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I doubt that they can make another giant performance leap. I
| wager that most of their gains are from being a node ahead of
| the competition (5nm vs 7nm TSMC) and placing RAM on package
| for much fatter bandwidth. I am, however, _very_ interested
| in seeing what the competition does in response.
| ls612 wrote:
| The rumors are that the M1 supersized version they are
| putting in the new Mac Pro is 20 CPU cores and 128 GPU
| cores, which would place it at a little under twice the
| performance of a 3090. Not saying that Nvidia can't catch
| up with a hypothetical 4090 next year but it'll be a tall
| order.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Yeah. I'm worried that they may have played their trump
| cards already, so to speak.
|
| I wonder if future perf gains will come, game console-
| style, from areas besides general purpose computation --
| specialized instructions / cores for specialized tasks.
|
| Imagine an entire core optimized for Safari and its
| Javascript engine. Their next chip is called the "M1
| Marathon Edition" and you get 36 hours of real-world
| battery life with Safari. And/or the iWork suite. And maybe
| they have a behind the scenes collab with Slack and select
| other app makers so that they can be a part of the
| "Marathon" program too.
|
| I dunno, just spitballing. Not saying that's likely or even
| what I'm pining for, just one possible avenue once they've
| plucked all the low-hanging general purpose computing
| fruit.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The things that take up time and energy in browsers -
| i.e. things like garbage collection, JIT compilation, and
| so on - are already things that CPUs are hyper-
| specialized for. And the code that is ultimately intended
| to execute is also well-specialized for CPUs.
|
| It's already possible to target GPUs in-browser directly;
| and most older HTML primitives were recast in terms of
| GPU operations around the time of the original iPhone.
| The only thing I can think of that's still been left on
| the table is rendering vector geometry on-GPU; but most
| sites don't redraw so much as to make this a huge
| performance win.
|
| Video decode has been offloaded to hardware for decades
| as well. The only reason to decode video on-CPU is if
| you're decoding crazy-old formats[0] that don't have
| hardware decoder blocks present for them.
|
| The other huge problem is networking - which is also
| heavily hardware-optimized and has been for a while.
| Large assets mean keeping your Wi-Fi or LTE baseband on
| for longer. You could mitigate this with compression;
| which _can_ be hardware optimized... though I 'm not sure
| how much of a benefit that provides outside of game
| consoles[1].
|
| [0] In my personal experience: I wrote a Sorenson H.263
| decoder for Ruffle. Right now it not only executes on-
| CPU, but blocks the event loop main thread. However, the
| video files in question are so low-quality that this
| isn't a significant problem for most Flash movies and
| everything works fine (though I do want to try on-GPU
| video decoding at some point).
|
| [1] Current-gen game consoles (PS5/XSeries) have hardware
| decompression blocks. However, the intent is to quickly
| decompress gigabytes worth of data quickly; most websites
| aren't nearly that bloated.
| kbenson wrote:
| > I'm worried that they may have played their trump cards
| already, so to speak.
|
| I'm not. Let them all scramble and pull out the big guns
| to try to compete. That's capitalism at it's finest,
| which isn't exactly what we've been seeing in the CPU
| space for the prior decades. We got lucky that AMD caught
| Intel with their pants down recently (if only because it
| strengthens AMD and makes them a better competitor), but
| a duopoly isn't necessarily what I would consider a good
| market condition for progress (as we've seen with iOS vs
| Android). Lots of different experiments with feedback
| from people on what they find good would be much
| preferable, and while a constrained CPU such as Apple's
| isn't perfect, it does represent more choice and pressure
| on other players to evolve in ways they may have been
| resistant to previously.
|
| > And maybe they have a behind the scenes collab with
| Slack and select other app makers so that they can be a
| part of the "Marathon" program too.
|
| RIP the general purpose computer. :(
| vel0city wrote:
| Sounds like a nightmare to me. Want to change browsers?
| Buy a new device with a different processor or suffer
| massive battery or performance penalties. Want to change
| media players? Buy a new device with a different
| processor or suffer massive battery or performance
| penalties.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| By that logic, any time anybody optimizes for _anything_
| , they're somehow punishing everybody else with
| "penalties."
|
| What if somebody on the Intel/AMD side of things includes
| some optimizations for SSE, AVX, etc? Are they punishing
| everybody else?
|
| At any rate, my idea was less than half baked and again,
| not exactly something I'm pining for. Was just thinking
| about things Apple might conceivably be able to try with
| their unique vertical integration.
| novok wrote:
| Most of the time the hardware accelerators are available
| for everyone to use, if they program to it. Ex ffmpeg and
| other media encoding engines all have the ability to
| write coders / decoders against certain hardware
| accelerators. You can choose CPU coders, Nvidia specific
| ones, etc.
| sharikous wrote:
| Except that they locked access to the hardware
| accelerators via their APIs. The Neural Accelerator is
| only available through CoreML and even some of the
| benchmarks show features that are not available to the
| public (int8)
| CamJN wrote:
| That's already the case, though. The battery life
| difference using Safari versus Firefox/Chrome is
| staggering. Sure, you don't have an option to buy a
| FF/Chrome mac atm, but you've definitely bought one where
| safari is the only decently efficient browser.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| We know (more or less) exactly what the Pro desktop chips
| will be, in the same way that these laptop chips weren't
| much of a surprise - they'll be basically exactly this, but
| bigger. More of it.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| They can't get that much bigger. The Max is already over
| 400mm^2. For comparison, the biggest chips are around
| 600. Apple can't realistically get much bigger than this
| since yield already drops off a cliff at 600. Getting
| bigger than that will be tough for them since it isn't
| clear that apple has put R&D into interconnect tech
| needed to make effective multi-chip modules.
| rsanheim wrote:
| They are probably going to do two M1 Max chips in the
| imac, so basically take the existing m1 max, and double
| it (at least for multicore perf, who knows how single-
| threaded will play out).
| foobiekr wrote:
| They almost certainly will not do this and it would be a
| NUMA nightmare if they did.
| bogantech wrote:
| Not sure why you were downvoted for this.
|
| Considering that some of the magic in these things is the
| shared, local memory with a very wide bus it would seem
| obvious that trying to go multi chip would indeed be a
| massive headache in this regard
| soneil wrote:
| It looks like they were designed for chiplets from the
| start. So desktops could simply be the existing chips
| stacked.
| [deleted]
| dhosek wrote:
| There were a lot of people saying things like this after
| the M1 too. I'm not expecting another huge leap with
| whatever comes next in the M-series, but I won't be
| surprised if there is one either.
| dtech wrote:
| I wouldn't say M1 max is another leap. It's mostly
| scaling for linear performance gains.
| MR4D wrote:
| When you look at it from a compute perspective, sure. But
| from a power perspective, it is indeed a leap.
| smoldesu wrote:
| They didn't really improve the M1 with the Pro and Max
| chips though. They really just added more cores to the
| SIP, which doesn't necessarily improve performance so
| much as it makes more performance available.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Maybe not next year, but TSMC's 3nm isn't that far off.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in
| the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing.
|
| Right, and I acknowledged the battery life as amazing.
|
| But currently, I can't buy an M1 Max desktop if I wanted to.
| So instead I have a 16" MacBook Pro semi-permanently attached
| to my monitor and keyboard at my desk. It's basically a
| desktop for me.
|
| I don't expect a laptop to outperform my AMD/nVidia desktop
| workstation. And sure enough, it doesn't! But it comes
| surprisingly close for common tasks and I'm very happy to
| have it.
| p1necone wrote:
| They're mentioning their desktop because Apples marketing
| hype mentions the desktop, not because the comparison is
| _actually_ valid. As you can see in the benchmark - lower
| power, proportionally lower performance.
|
| To be clear - Apples M1 hardware is good, even great. It's
| just that Apples marketing hype is _so_ over the top, and so
| many people buy into it _so_ hard that people (such as me)
| still feel the need to bring it down to earth.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > They're mentioning their desktop because Apples marketing
| hype mentions the desktop, not because the comparison is
| actually valid.
|
| The third party testing does show that the comparison is
| valid.
|
| >The chips here aren't only able to outclass any competitor
| laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop
| systems out there, you'd have to bring out server-class
| hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max - it's just generally
| absurd.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-
| performanc...
| minhazm wrote:
| > lower power, proportionally lower performance
|
| Except it's not. The performance per watt is significantly
| better on average. Only one of the examples in this post
| really talked about power usage and that example also says
| that the 3090 is using a special compiler and gets to use
| the special tensor cores in the 3090, but for the M1 Max it
| wasn't able to use the neural cores or the special compiler
| and still achieves a similar performance per watt.
|
| If you look at more detailed benchmarks from Anandtech:
|
| > In the SPECfp suite, the M1 Max is in its own category of
| silicon with no comparison in the market. It completely
| demolishes any laptop contender, showcasing 2.2x
| performance of the second-best laptop chip. The M1 Max even
| manages to outperform the 16-core 5950X - a chip whose
| package power is at 142W, with rest of system even quite
| above that. It's an absolutely absurd comparison and a
| situation we haven't seen the likes of.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-
| performanc...
| jshier wrote:
| Apple's marketing page for the new MacBook Pros with the M1
| Pro and M1 Max strictly mentions laptops and laptop GPUs in
| its comparisons. Apple makes no comparison to desktop
| systems directly. At most they make general comparisons to
| the power curves of PC CPUs and GPUs, but mostly when
| introducing the M1 and explaining why they built it.
| neogodless wrote:
| There were really similar discussions in mid-2020 when the
| Ryzen 4000 mobile chips launched, because they were beating
| Intel desktop chips.
|
| That doesn't diminish how excellent Apple Silicon is for
| Macbook users (and Mac Mini users).
|
| It's just an exciting time when laptops (with the right
| silicon) can do more than ever before, reducing the need to
| have a desktop for a lot of tasks, and also... largely not a
| great time to be using Intel chips. (Alder Lake is very high
| performing, but power hungry and desktop only.)
| ziml77 wrote:
| Not just that it's even comparable to a desktop but that it
| also has excellent battery life. You've been able to get
| portable desktop replacements before, but they were power
| hungry even when barely doing anything.
| ardit33 wrote:
| I was like you at first, seeing that my chrome speeds don't
| feel that fast, then I did my first XCode build. Holly.. it is
| so much faster than my 2017 Macbook Pro.
|
| Super fast builds, and A huge productivity boost. I think it
| shows that if software is optimized for it, M1 can be/feel
| crazy fast.
|
| Unfortunately, anything running with Roseta, will not feel that
| fast, as it's performance will be hobbled by the emulation
| layer.
| glandium wrote:
| Note that one part of this is that llvm is significantly
| faster to generate code for arm64 than for x86_64. I'm not
| saying that accounts for all the difference, but it helps.
| officeplant wrote:
| Even the M1 port of Chrome is clunky, but then again chrome
| has always been clunky with MacOS.
|
| Firefox's M1 port actually got me to finally start
| transitioning out of chrome after being a fairly devoted
| chrome user since it released. It's the only third party
| browser on M1 macs that comes close to Safari in speed and
| handles window size changes (especially when video is
| playing) leagues better than Chrome.
| thatswrong0 wrote:
| Yet even still under Rosetta, my M1 Pro can handle more than
| twice as much "stuff" in my Ableton projects vs. my 2018 MBP,
| all while barely heating up and without _any_ fan noise
| (whereas my 2018 MBP starts sounding like a jet engine almost
| immediately after opening any sizeable project).
|
| So for me, its performance completely lives up to the hype. I
| don't think I'll need a new machine for a loooong time.
| herpderperator wrote:
| Imagine how much better it will be with the native build:
| https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/live-111-apple-silicon-
| suppo...
| thatswrong0 wrote:
| The main issue with that is a looot of plugins I rely on
| day to day still haven't been updated with native
| support, so they wouldn't be usable while running Live
| native. I really don't understand the hold up since some
| of my plugins were updated almost immediately after the
| original M1 was released.
| r00fus wrote:
| It's kind of hard to compete with raw power if you don't want a
| space heater of a device (hint: not wanted in laptop form
| factor).
|
| However, part of me thinks this is Apple doing iterative
| rollout best - they could have created a 20-core desktop
| version of this in 2021 but will likely delay that to next year
| for the new Mac Pro and iMac Pro.
| Thaxll wrote:
| I don't understand why people keep talking about power
| performance per watt, do we know for a fact that a 90w Apple
| GPU would perform 4x faster if it was running at 500w? Does the
| performance scales linearly?
|
| The other thing is price, the m1 max cost $5k here. You know
| what kind of PC you can get for that price? A 3080 MSRP is $700
| and beat any mac GPU right ( and that's a GPU from last year ).
| 5900x cost $480.
| rsanheim wrote:
| One reason: try to work alongside a 3080 or 3090 running at
| full power for awhile, and you will understand. Especially if
| you don't have really good AC in your work area during
| summer. =)
| tambourine_man wrote:
| > Does the performance scales linearly?
|
| On GPUs, pretty much. It's even called embarrassingly
| parallel for this reason.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| The obvious answer is that performance/watt is literally
| _everything_ when talking about laptops. Most people favor
| laptops these days even if they (like me) leave their
| machines "docked" 90% of the time. do we
| know for a fact that a 90w Apple GPU would perform
| 4x faster if it was running at 500w
|
| It's somewhat besides the point IMO, but don't GPU workloads
| tend to scale well simply by adding more compute units? This
| should be pretty easy to extrapolate by comparing M1 / M1 Pro
| / M1 Max power consumption and performance relative to the #
| of GPU cores.
|
| I would certainly like to see Apple go nuts and make a true,
| cost-and-power-consumption-are-no-object world destroying
| GPU. If only as a halo product. But I wouldn't hold my
| breath.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Performance/watt it not everything. It's not really even
| something. It's a derivative concern.
|
| The only reason I care about performance/watt is because I
| actually care about noise, heat and battery life. I'm not
| running a data center off a laptop so the cost benefits of
| performance/watt are not even a concern.
|
| Its a nice chip but we shouldn't confuse the marketing for
| the actual benefits.
|
| If a higher performance/watt but much lower absolute
| performance chip was released, I wouldn't be interested.
| dboat wrote:
| I think increasing cores/power limits just gets you up to
| some other bottleneck.
|
| At some point you are adding 90% more power use for 3% more
| performance.
| grishka wrote:
| I do fully expect to be blown away by the performance of the M1
| Max when I finally receive mine as I'm coming from a 2012 MBP.
| I'm getting tired of the entire system grinding to a halt when
| I open one of those 25k-line classes in android studio.
| Probably even the regular M1 would handle this much better.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| For M _1_
| tromp wrote:
| I wonder if it could perform much better than 1/8 of the 3090
| on memory bound applications, given that its 400GB/s bandwidth
| is 1/2.34 that of the 3090's 936 GB/s...
| willvarfar wrote:
| Excellent investigation.
|
| I have the first M1 MBP pro 13" and have done a lot of data stuff
| on it. My experience was also that python flew - cpython on the
| M1 being almost as fast as pypy on my 2019 i7 laptop - and java
| compilation was much faster too. The CPU is fast and the memory
| is really fast.
|
| The performance pain points though was anything involving
| containers, random 10-30 sec stalls in boot and app startup (I
| think it's corporate firewall stuff) and a general preference I
| have for Linux desktop over OSX (yeah I'm a programmer).
| nicce wrote:
| Delay in app start-up might be also related into binary
| signature checking on the cloud. (Built-in anti-virus...)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-11-22 23:00 UTC)