[HN Gopher] Apple M1 Ultra
___________________________________________________________________
Apple M1 Ultra
Author : davidbarker
Score : 1122 points
Date : 2022-03-08 19:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.apple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.apple.com)
| mwcampbell wrote:
| I wonder how long it will be until a CPU as capable as this one
| will be the required baseline for ordinary apps. Is there any
| hope that the upgrade treadmill will stop any time soon?
| FredPret wrote:
| One day we'll be up to our eyeballs in computronium, and it
| will never be enough.
|
| Thinking is a superpower even better than being the first
| species to develop sight.
|
| See also "The Last Question" by Asimov.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| There will always be apps that use all the power you throw at
| them. Raytracing scales pretty much linearly with the core
| count. Compression does too.
|
| But your everyday apps like your browser have been fast for at
| least a decade.
| ip26 wrote:
| Yes, but your current browser is probably not very fast on a
| Nehalem. That is what they are lamenting. Will a M1 Ultra one
| day be too slow to run Calculator?
|
| Answer: Just wait for some genius to figure out how to run
| Electron inside Electron, and port Calculator to it.
| xedrac wrote:
| While I'm not on the Apple train, I love how they are pushing
| AMD, Intel and NVidia out of complacency. No more of these little
| tiny incremental improvements to milk the industry. Bring your
| BEST to the table or get left behind!
| 3836293648 wrote:
| None of those three were anywhere near complacent before Apple
| released the M1. A few years ago, before Zen, absolutely, but
| now it's actually very competitive. But more competition
| doesn't hurt
| dartharva wrote:
| This can also backfire on consumers if the competitors decide
| to keep up with their user-hostile practices as well: locked-
| down walled gardens, zero customisability/upgradability for
| hardware, low repairability, low interoperability with set
| standards to "distinguish" their products, planned
| obsolescence, etc.
| olliej wrote:
| I'm find the slow drip of M1 extensions to be kind of ehn -
| like the tick part of the old intel cycle, only in this case
| it's literally just gluing more of the same cores together
| (obviously work is involved, but not at the level of an
| architecture rev)
|
| (edit: calm down people, I recognize it's impressive, but it's
| just not as fun an announcement as an architecture rev, which I
| was hoping for after a year :D )
| teilo wrote:
| It's literally not.
| outworlder wrote:
| If 'gluing cores together' were this simple, every random
| desktop CPU would have 20 cores. That's not the case.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| You're forgetting price. If simplicity was the main
| concern, every random desktop CPU _would_ have 16+ cores
| right now.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| what? the unified memory growth IS an architecture rev
| soheil wrote:
| Milk?
| mulmen wrote:
| milk verb 2 : to draw something from as if by
| milking: such as b : to draw or coerce profit or
| advantage from illicitly or to an extreme degree : exploit
| milk the joke for all it's worth
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/milk
| jonplackett wrote:
| Makes you wonder how many they can glue together. Looking at
| you Mac Pro
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Probably at least four together with LPDDR5X to get up to 1.5
| TB and forty cores.
| amelius wrote:
| Let's hope they don't also push their lock-in business models
| onto others.
| pphysch wrote:
| > This enables M1 Ultra to behave and be recognized by software
| as one chip, so developers don't need to rewrite code to take
| advantage of its performance. There's never been anything like
| it.
|
| Since when did the average developer care about how many sockets
| a mobo has...?
|
| Surely you still have to carefully pin processes and reason about
| memory access patterns if you want maximum performance.
| KolenCh wrote:
| For any applications people use to justify buying a more than
| one socket machine needs this.
|
| Eg simulation softwares often used in the industry (but the one
| I've on top of my head is Windows only.)
|
| Anyway, the point the make is this: if you claim doubling
| performance, but only the selected few softwares as you
| observed would be optimized to take advantage of this extra
| performance, then this is mostly useless to the average
| consumer. So their point is made exactly with your observation
| in mind, that all your softwares is benefiting from it.
|
| But actually their statement is obviously wrong for people in
| the business--this is still NUMA and your software should be
| NUMA aware to be really squeezing the last bit of performance.
| It just degrades more gracefully to non optimized code.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I think its more the case that OSX hasn't really had SMP/numa
| for a long time.
|
| My understanding was the the dustbin was designed with one big
| processor because SMP/numa was a massive pain in the arse for
| the kernel devs at the time so it was easier to just drop it
| and not worry.
| jra101 wrote:
| They are referring to the GPU part of the chip. There are two
| separate GPU complexes on the die but from the software point
| of view, it is a single large GPU.
| grork wrote:
| I thought that to extract peak performance out of NUMA based
| systems, you had to get down-and-dirty with memory access &
| locality to ensure you don't cross sockets for data thats
| stored in RAM attached to other CPUs.
|
| Or am I out of date on NUMA systems?
| pphysch wrote:
| The big dies these days (M1 included) have non-uniform memory
| access baked in because they distribute the memory caches. If
| you want maximum performance, you will certainly want to be
| aware of which "performance core" you're running in.
| otherjason wrote:
| This is what they were referring to. To get optimum
| performance out of NUMA systems, you need to be careful about
| memory allocation and usage to maximize the proportion of
| your accesses that are local to the NUMA domain where the
| code is running. Apple's answer here is essentially "we made
| the link between NUMA domains have such high bandwidth, you
| don't even have to think about this."
| adfgadfgaery wrote:
| This line is nonsense and you can safely ignore it. There have
| been multi-chip-modules that act like a single socket for many
| years. In particular, pretty much every current AMD CPU works
| that way. I guarantee you that for the M1 Ultra, just like
| every CPU before it, the abstraction will be leaky. Programmers
| will still care about the interconnect when eking out the last
| few percent of performance.
|
| Remember the Pentium D? Unfortunately, I used to own one.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| The existing AMD CPUs aren't _quite_ like that. Technically
| they are all UMA, not NUMA - the L3 cache is distributed, but
| they are all behind a single memory controller with
| consistent latencies to all cores. But the Threadripper 1st
| gen was absolutely like that. Straight up 2+ CPUs connected
| via infinity fabric pretending to be a single CPU. So is that
| 56 core Xeon that Intel was bragging about for a while there
| until the 64 core Epycs & Threadrippers embarrassed the hell
| out of it.
| adfgadfgaery wrote:
| >Technically they are all UMA, not NUMA - the L3 cache is
| distributed, but they are all behind a single memory
| controller with consistent latencies to all cores.
|
| This stuff rapidly starts to make my head spin. I have not
| studied interconnects and have never written any NUMA-aware
| software. I will just post this link (read the "Memory
| Latency" section):
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/16529/amd-epyc-milan-
| review/4
|
| As I understand it, the I/O die is partitioned into four
| quadrants. Each quadrant has two memory controllers and is
| attached to two compute dies. CPUs can access memory
| attached to the same quadrant with lower latency than going
| to another quadrant. This is a NUMA system that can be
| configured to appear as one logical NUMA node.
|
| I believe their smaller parts with two or fewer compute
| dies will be UMA, but with the same non-uniform latency to
| L3.
|
| >So is that 56 core Xeon that Intel was bragging about for
| a while there until the 64 core Epycs & Threadrippers
| embarrassed the hell out of it.
|
| I believe the 64-core Epycs and Threadrippers came first.
| The 56-core Xeon was a purpose-built part for HPC, so it
| wasn't _quite_ a marketing gimmick.
| yuuko11 wrote:
| Not sure what is required of a dev, but as an example, Adobe
| Premiere pro doesn't take any advantage of >1 CPU, at least on
| Windows. https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Should-you-
| use-a-...
| masklinn wrote:
| It's probably not "average developer" either but some of the
| big box software still has per-socket licensing, or had until
| recently anyway.
| w0mbat wrote:
| Article is 5 years old.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| CPU as in core or socket? These days most CPUs are "many-CPU-
| cores-in-1-socket" and having X CPU cores over 1 or 2 sockets
| make a small difference, but software does not care about
| sockets.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Plenty of enterprise software is licensed on a per-socket
| basis.
| pphysch wrote:
| And if they read this press release they will probably
| try to switch to per-core licensing.
| excerionsforte wrote:
| They say this is the M1 Ultra Benchmark
| https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/13330272 Wow.
| mberning wrote:
| Single core does not appear any better than m1 mini.
| MBCook wrote:
| That's not too surprising, it's the same base chip. The core
| designs are identical, there are just more of them and they
| _may_ run at a slightly higher clock.
|
| I wouldn't expect single-threaded improvement until the M2.
| lend000 wrote:
| Are the neural engines actually used for anything, to anyone's
| knowledge?
|
| Edit: Apparently in iPhones, they are used for FaceID.
| iamgopal wrote:
| Or does any popular ML libraries support it ?
| can16358p wrote:
| Probably object tracking in videos will be the best use of
| them.
|
| Or, there will be some new form of video generation (like the
| ones generating video from Deep Dream etc, but something aimed
| at studio production) using ML that wasn't practically usable
| before.
|
| It opens many doors, but it will take at least many months, if
| not years, to see some new "kind" of software to emerge that
| efficiently makes use of them.
| daggersandscars wrote:
| Adobe uses them Lightroom / Photoshop for some functions.
|
| https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/apple-m1-chip-makes-...
| acchow wrote:
| I thought it's also used to activate Siri by voice without any
| CPU usage
| bm-rf wrote:
| Would something like huggingface transformers ever be able to
| support this? Or is it best fit to just use the GPU.
| sharikous wrote:
| CoreML models may run on them to macOS's discretion. If you
| manage to get your neural network in CoreML's format you may
| use it.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Adobe Photoshop, Premiere etc make use of it for scene
| detection, content aware fill, "neural filters" and so on
| poyu wrote:
| This[1] neural filter?
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq8DgpgtSQQ
| speed_spread wrote:
| It's to build a giant distributed Aleph in which a preserved
| digitized Steve Jobs can live once again.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| I think the most important use of the neural engines so far is
| for the internal camera postprocessing. Better camera
| postprocessing is the reason why people buy new iPhones.
| piyh wrote:
| Throw in translation, on device image labeling, stuff like on
| body walking/biking detection, voice recognition.
| sercand wrote:
| Neural Engines may be used in CoreML models. I don't know it
| can be used with Apple's BNNS library [1]. You can use with
| TensorFlow Lite with coreML delegate as well [2]. And some
| tried to reverse engineer it and used it for model training
| [3].
|
| [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/accelerate/bnns
|
| [2] https://www.tensorflow.org/lite/performance/coreml_delegate
|
| [3] https://github.com/geohot/tinygrad#ane-support-broken
| vmception wrote:
| > M1 Ultra can be configured with up to 128GB of high-bandwidth,
| low-latency unified memory
|
| Nice! Good enough to run a Solana node!
|
| I was slightly annoyed that the M1 Max's 64gb RAM puts it just
| under the system requirements, at that premium price
|
| But I don't have any other theoretical use case for that much
| resources
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Didn't AMD do something similar with putting 2 CPU chips together
| with cache in-between? What's the difference here in packaging
| technology? (maybe there is no shared cache here)
| diamondlovesyou wrote:
| Yes. AMD has had integrated CPU+GPU+ _cache-coherent HBM_ for a
| while. You can 't buy these parts as a consumer though. And
| they're probably priced north of 20k$/each at volume, with the
| usual healthy enterprise-quality margins.
| paulpan wrote:
| I think you're referring to AMD's 3D V-Cache, which is already
| out in their Epyc "Milan X" lineup and forthcoming Ryzen
| 5800X3D. https://www.amd.com/en/campaigns/3d-v-cache
|
| Whereas AMD's solution is focused on increasing the cache size
| (hence the 3D stacking), Apple here seems to be connecting the
| 2 M1 Max chips more tightly. It's actually more reminiscent of
| AMD's Infinity Fabric interconnect architecture.
| https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/infinity_fabric
|
| The interesting part for this M1 Ultra is that Apple opted to
| connect 2 existing chips, rather than design a new one
| altogether. Very likely the reason is cost - this M1 Ultra will
| be a low volume part, as will be future iterations of it. The
| other approach would've been to design a motherboard that
| sockets 2 chips, which seems would've been cheaper/faster than
| this - albeit at expense of performance. But they've designed a
| new "socket" anyway due to this new chip's much bigger
| footprint.
| calaphos wrote:
| They have been shipping multi die CPUs for quite a while, but
| the interconnect is closer to a PCIe connection (slower, longer
| range, less contacts).
|
| Intels upcomming Saphire Rapid server CPUs are extremly
| similar, with wide connections between two close dies.
| Crossectional bandwith is in the same order of magnitude there.
| adfgadfgaery wrote:
| AMD is currently shipping high-end CPUs built with up to nine
| dies. Their ordinary desktop parts have up to three. They are
| not built with "cache in-between". There is one special I/O die
| but it does not contain any cache. Each compute die contains
| its own cache.
| MBCook wrote:
| This doesn't seem to be two cores connected in standard SMP
| configuration, or with a shared cache between them. Apple
| claims there were like 10,000 connection points.
|
| It _sounds_ like this operates as if it was one giant physical
| chip, not two separate processors that can talk very fast.
|
| I can't wait to see benchmarks.
| haneefmubarak wrote:
| Modern SMP systems have NUMA behavior mostly not because of a
| lack of bandwidth but because of latency. At the speeds
| modern hardware operates at, the combination of distance,
| SerDes, and other transmission factors result in high
| latencies when you cross dies - this can't be ameliorated by
| massively increasing bandwidth via parallel lanes. For
| context, some server chips which have all the cores on a
| single die exhibit NUMA behavior purely because there's too
| many cores to all be physically close to each other
| geometrically (IIRC the first time I saw this was on an 18
| core Xeon, with cores that themselves were a good bit smaller
| than these).
|
| It's probably best to think of this chip as an extremely fast
| double socket SMP where the two sockets have much lower
| latency than normal. Software written with that in mind or
| multiple programs operating fully independent of each other
| will be able to take massive advantage of this, but most
| parallel code written for single socket systems will
| experience reduced gains or even potential losses depending
| on their parallelism model.
| sairahul82 wrote:
| I agree that M1 is great but the entire press release is full of
| adjectives. I never read any press release like it.
| jdlyga wrote:
| The Apple M1 Megazord, supporting 16 external monitors and 5
| power rangers.
| msoad wrote:
| At what point Apple will put those chips in their servers or sell
| server chips? It only makes sense for them to take this
| architecture to the cloud deployments
| ghostly_s wrote:
| Unfortunately I still don't think the market has much interest
| in energy-efficient servers. But maybe the energy-sector crunch
| created by Putin's war will precipitate some change here...
| FredPret wrote:
| Energy is probably the biggest bill for a data centre.
|
| Lower TDP = lower electric bills and lower airconditioning
| bill. Win win
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I bet someone will make a bracket to hold a bunch of Mac
| Studios in a rack.
| lambda_dn wrote:
| They could be secretly working on their own cloud platform,
| with their data centres having a choice between M1, Pro Max
| ultra instances. $$$$
| memco wrote:
| Don't they already offer Xcode build as a service? That
| presumably is using Mac servers so it wouldn't be totally out
| of the blue to have more Mac SaaS.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| For a company betting so heavily on "services," it would be
| borderline incompetence if they weren't working on this. Even
| just for internal use it would still be a better investment
| than the stupid car.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| It's going to be a couple years. The guys who bought those
| power workstations and servers will be very peeved if it
| happens too quickly
| arcticbull wrote:
| They likely won't re-visit the Xserve, IMO. No reason to. They
| can't sell them at a premium compared to peers and its outside
| their area of expertise.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I don't know, the performance per watt has a big effect on
| data-centers, both in power budget and HVAC for cooling.
| em500 wrote:
| > They can't sell them at a premium compared to peers
|
| Intel is believed to have pretty good margins on their server
| CPUs
|
| > and its outside their area of expertise.
|
| That's what people used to say about Apple doing CPUs in-
| house.
| npunt wrote:
| FWIW, Apple's been helping define CPU specs in-house since
| the 90s. They were part of an alliance with Motorola and
| IBM to make PowerPC, and bought a substantial part of ARM
| and did a joint venture to make Newton's CPU. And they've
| done a bunch of architecture jumps, from 6502 to 68k to PPC
| to Intel to A-series.
|
| Folks who said CPUs weren't their core expertise (I assume
| back in 2010 or before, prior to A4) missed out on just how
| involved they've historically been, what it takes to get
| involved, the role of fabs and off the shelf IP to
| gradually build expertise, and what benefits were possible
| when building silicon and software toward common purpose.
| eli wrote:
| To be fair, that _exact_ criticism has been leveled against
| them multiple times before and been proven wrong.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I doubt they'll go after the web server market. But I wonder
| if they might go after the sort of rendering farms that
| animation studios like Pixar use. Those guys are willing to
| pay silly money for hardware, and are market Apple has a long
| history with.
| xyst wrote:
| It makes sense, although what I am concerned about is the cost.
| Apple isn't exactly know for providing services at or near
| cost.
| adfgadfgaery wrote:
| It doesn't make much sense to me. The M1 is designed to have
| memory in the same package as the processor. This leads to
| reduced latency and increased bandwidth. Moving to off-package
| memory might totally destroy its performance, and there is an
| upper limit on how much memory can go in the package.
|
| The M1 Ultra is already a little light on memory for its price
| and processing power; it would have much too little memory for
| a cloud host.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| As more developers move to ARM architecture by buying Macbooks
| (I did it last year the first time in my life), ARM cloud will
| grow very fast, and Apple needs growth, so they can't afford
| not to do it in a few years (probably with M2 architecture they
| are already thinking of it). Regarding the exact timeline: I
| don't know :)
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| They'd have to go all-in on supporting third party OSs like
| Linux first. Sure, there are projects to bring linux to the
| M1, but enterprises that buy commercial server hardware will
| demand 1st party support
| ksubedi wrote:
| Knowing Apple, their version of "cloud" servers would
| probably be some sort of SDK that lets developers build
| applications on top of their hardware / software stack, and
| charge per usage. Kind of like Firebase, but with Apple's
| stack.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| It will be a hard business decision for them, as at this
| point it's extremely hard to compete with Amazon, Google
| and Microsoft. Maybe they will buy up some cloud services
| provider, we'll see.
| tylerjd wrote:
| The major Linux providers already offer 1st party supported
| Linux on AWS. Both RHEL and Ubuntu instances offer support
| contracts from their respective companies, as well as
| Amazon Linux from AWS themselves. It is already here and a
| big force there. You can provision ElastiCache and RDS
| Graviton instances too.
| OJFord wrote:
| Yes but on architectures that are already supported
| outside of AWS. It's not about running Linux in AWS, it's
| about running Linux on the chosen chip.
| superkuh wrote:
| It sounds like the chip is fast but I wonder, if like other M1
| products, the computers built with it will be fairly restricted,
| like a console, in terms of the hardware they're able to use (not
| being able to boot off external HDDs, problems with thunderbolt 3
| compatibility in peripherals, having to use abstraction layers to
| run most of the software world indirectly or have specific
| porting projects dedicated to M1, etc).
| aaomidi wrote:
| > having to use abstraction layers to run most of the software
| world indirectly
|
| Nearly everything I use daily is built for M1 now.
|
| https://isapplesiliconready.com/
|
| And honestly, if it's not, its a good indication that it's time
| to move away from that product as they don't care about a huge
| segment of their users.
| drcongo wrote:
| Dropbox and Signal are the only two I ever use, and yeah, the
| lack of interest in porting to M1 from both of those
| companies is increasing my lack of interest in their apps.
| nintendo1889 wrote:
| That page says that both of those apps are supported.
| MBCook wrote:
| I believe Dropbox was in the last few months. Which was
| still over a year after public release of the M1.
| superkuh wrote:
| I'm sure most extremely popular corporate software has
| been ported. But that's just a tiny fraction of the
| available software. I know most Apple users don't try
| anything outside their walled garden so it doesn't make a
| difference to them, but the vast majority of possible
| software has not and will not ever be ported to a form
| that can run on the M1 architecture. Whereas on x86 Apple
| computers you can compile and run pretty much everything.
| cersa8 wrote:
| Maybe this is the same marketing speak as we've seen with the
| 1600 nits peak, and 1000 nits sustained brightness claim for
| the new mini led displays. Which later became 500 nits for SDR
| content, when ambient temperature allows. [0]
|
| I want to see proper benchmarks before getting too exited.
|
| [0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-new-MacBook-Pro-14-only-
| ma...
| jjuuaann wrote:
| Geee wrote:
| This is insane. They claim that its GPU performance tops the RTX
| 3090, while using 200W less power. I happen to have this GPU on
| my PC and not only it costs over $3000, but its also very power-
| hungry and loud.
|
| Currently, you need this kind of GPU performance for high
| resolution VR gaming at 90 fps, but its just barely enough. This
| means that the GPU will run very loudly and heat up the room, and
| running games like HL Alyx on max settings is still not possible.
|
| It seems that Apple might be the only company who can deliver a
| proper VR experience. I can't wait to see what they've been
| cooking up.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Why would you believe that it tops the RTX 3090? It's just 2 of
| their prior chips in the same package? This is purely marketing
| nonsense with nothing to back it up.
|
| At least in the US You can get a 3090 for 2200 even with markup
| and an almost as good 3080 for $1150. If you wait until its in
| stock at a big box store you can get one for less even. A
| machine could be built with a 3080 for $2000.
|
| Meanwhile a system based on on the 64 core GPU will run you
| $5000 and as such is affordable to nearly nobody thus few will
| get a chance to see it drastically under perform in the gaming
| arena on any of the games that don't support mac on arm.
|
| With an absolutely invisible market share in the gaming desktop
| there will never be any incentive for anyone to change this
| insofar as direct support leaving you reliant on translation
| from x86 and from windows executables paying doubly in terms of
| compatibility and performance from an already very expensive
| and lackluster starting point.
| willis936 wrote:
| The relative graphics claims are particularly dubious. M1 Ultra
| has 10% less memory throughput than a 3090. I somehow doubt
| that nvidia has left performance on the table that Apple is
| picking up, even with the power savings of being on a smaller
| node. On the balance of things this just seems wrong. The
| intuitive range of relative performance for a 3090 in flat-out
| single precision vector workloads should top out at 90% but
| more likely 75% or less.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| But it's still impossible to replace RTX 3090 with this new Mac
| Studio because games just will not run on MacOS.
| idonotknowwhy wrote:
| Maybe Valve can port proton to mac
| OOPMan wrote:
| That would not help. The reason proton works so well is
| because Linux on x86 and Windows on x86....are both on x86.
|
| Proton on ARM Mac's would involve Rosetta and while that
| does a surprisingly good job of running x86 on ARM I'm not
| sure it's up to the job of running games at high speed...
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Games seem playable running through Microsoft's inferior
| x86 compatibility layer in a Windows ARM VM on M1
| Pro/Max, so I don't see how running games through Rosetta
| would be any worse.
| opless wrote:
| Real world example M1 Max;
|
| GTAV on Win11 Arm VM - okay, but not great.
|
| GTAV on Crossover - much much better, lack of joystick
| support (but that's a crossover issue)
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| If you have some monster like 3090, you expect it to run
| games smoothly on "ultra" settings. In reality, some
| games are pushing its limits even on "middle" settings
| (Cyberpunk 2077 @ 2k, RDR2 @ 4k). Any emulator will hit
| performance, so if you want some top-of-the-top
| performance - you still need Windows PC with RTX 3090.
| And it will not be even more expensive than Mac Studio ;)
| dcow wrote:
| I want my game to vsync with my monitor. That is _all_ I
| care about.
| OOPMan wrote:
| Your 4k monitor?
| dcow wrote:
| I have a 5k monitor, but yes. That is literally all I
| care about.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Congratulations, no video card in the world is able to
| keep up a 5k res at 60FPS while doing even slightly
| demanding things. Nor will the M1 Ultra be.
| charrondev wrote:
| My 3090 can drive 4k100hz for most demanding games at
| their highest settings.
|
| Some games are a stable 4k120 and others are more like
| 4k75.
|
| I feel the 3090 could feasibly drive 5k60 as a result.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| They are not the most demanding games, that's why :)
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| They used to have a Proton port for Mac, and discontinued
| it.
| ceroxylon wrote:
| I play Rust (the game, not the language) with decent graphics
| on an M1 Air with no issues other than heat, which an external
| fan quickly mitigates.
|
| Really looking forward to Apple's VR offering after seeing the
| performance of their compact SoC
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| But Rust runs even on intel integrated graphics without any
| problem (HD4000)
| eyegor wrote:
| Ehh, I wouldn't put too much stock in graphs of "relative
| performance" on a 0-200 scale like these. Marketing can cook up
| whatever they like when they want to make a product look good.
| Wait for actual benchmarks before trying to judge the product.
| Their base claim is >2x the m1 max, which is still nowhere
| close to the performance of a 3090.
|
| Apple's footnotes don't even pretend to explain what these
| charts are.
|
| > Performance was measured using select industry-standard
| benchmarks.
| mwint wrote:
| Remember last time Apple put out these weird relative
| performance charts, and we all thought they were hiding
| something?
|
| The M1 announcement. They turned out to be pretty accurate.
|
| So I'll wait and see real benchmarks, but it wouldn't
| surprise me if this does have incredible performance.
| chippiewill wrote:
| _Some_ of the claims were pretty accurate.
|
| A lot of them, particularly the GPU benchmarks, were
| misleading because they only looked at performance that
| they had dedicated silicon for.
| batiudrami wrote:
| Their GPU claims weren't accurate though. The M1 max
| doesn't have real world performance anything like the 3070
| as claimed.
| josephg wrote:
| For what its worth, they were comparing the M1 max to
| nvidia's _mobile_ 3070, which is a completely different
| card than the desktop 3070.
|
| My understanding was that it was a reasonable comparison
| in some benchmarks, though when plugged in to power the
| mobile 3070 still had more headroom.
| gilgoomesh wrote:
| On raw Metal performance, yes it does get the same
| performance. The benchmarks showed this.
|
| The problem was the implication that you'd get 3070
| _gaming_ performance. That was never going to be true
| because of the un-optimisation tax for games on Mac.
|
| There doesn't exist a AAA game built for Metal and the
| Mac. The closest are games like World of Warcraft,
| Divinity Original Sin 2 - and even they are just "good
| ports" not originally designed for Mac (and are _far_
| from AAA graphics). This is why on Intel Macs, games
| under Bootcamp always ran 30%-50% faster, even though the
| hardware was the same.
|
| Games on M1 Max run as you'd expect - about 30% slower
| than a 3070 for the same old reasons (and some new ones,
| like not being compiled for Apple Silicon at all). The
| GPU _is_ about the same speed as a 3070 and it 's doing
| what you'd expect, given the 30% unoptimization-tax
| workload.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| I know that Baldur's Gate 3 looks pretty frigging awesome
| on my mbp-max, and it has a native arm binary, so no need
| for Rosetta and uses Metal2.
| eoerl wrote:
| pushing all this to "un-optimization tax" is an easy pass
| on apple. - nvidia really is a software company, it's the
| running joke in the industry. when you buy a nvidia gpu,
| you pay for the drivers & the frameworks (cuda, dlss,
| optix, ..). Apple does close to nothing there, they
| support Metal and CoreML and call it a day, you can
| decently lay some of the blame at their feet
|
| - the workloads in games can vary a lot, vertex/fragment
| shaders imbalance, parallel compute pipelines, mixed
| precision (which the M1 gpu does not do), .. So another
| explanation is that you can get some 3070 parity on a
| cherry picked game, like a broken clock is right twice a
| day, but that does not make it generally true. Objective
| benchmarks have put the M1 gpus way slower than 3070 on
| average, and software support seems like an easy but
| false distraction given the Proton tax on Linux (which is
| not 30/50%)
|
| - the M1 gpus are lacking a ton of hardware, matrix mul,
| fp16 again, ray tracing, VRR probably (not sure about
| this last one). These are used by modern games or
| applications, you may find a benchmark which skip them,
| but in the grand scheme of things it's something that the
| M1 gpu will have to emulate more often than not, and this
| has a cost
|
| Waving all that as "the GPU is about the same speed" is
| technically wrong, or not really backed by facts at the
| very least
| gameswithgo wrote:
| unless it has its own gddr6 it won't be anything like a 3090
| for games
| TheKarateKid wrote:
| What we're seeing right now with Apple's M1 chips for desktop
| computing is on the same level of revolutionary as what the
| original iPhone did for mobile phones.
|
| The advancements in such a short period of time in the amount
| of computing power, low power usage, size, and heat usage of
| these chips is unbelievable and game-changing.
| schmuelio wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, the benefits of using ARM architectures
| for general purpose vs. x86 are really compelling.
|
| The performance of x86 has been a leader for a while mostly
| because of the sheer amount of optimization work that has
| gone into them, but the cruft of the x86 instruction set and
| the architectural stuff you have to do to make the
| instruction set work is really showing it's age.
|
| That being said, the GPU performance claims are incredibly
| misleading. The previous "relative performance" benchmarks
| that were done on the M1 Max for GPU performance were
| misleading as well, they definitely cannot keep up with a
| mid-tier modern discrete GPU.
|
| The GPU claim isn't an ARM/x86 comparison like the CPU
| performance would be. This is comparing a 64 core 800GB/s GPU
| with a 10k core 900GB/s GPU and trying to make them look
| equivalent through misleading marketing.
|
| None of this is to say that the M1 Ultra is bad necessarily,
| even if it performs roughly the same as a mobile GPU or
| powerful iGPU it would still be a very good chip, and I'd
| love to use one if I could use it in my environment properly.
| I'm just saying don't put too much faith in the GPU
| performance measurements provided here.
| inkyoto wrote:
| > The performance of x86 has been a leader for a while
| mostly because of the sheer amount of optimization work
| that has gone into them
|
| Without denying _some_ good work and engineering having
| gone into _some_ x86 chips, they are not the reasons for
| the x86 becoming a leader. The duopoly of Intel and
| Microsoft - coupled with the aggressive Intel strategy to
| undermine competitors on the pricing and the sheer
| production volume they could quickly ramp up - has squeezed
| every single other viable competitor out of the market and
| relegated very few to become niche players (e.g. POWER) and
| entrenched the duopoly as a unfortunate leader. And then
| complacency and arrogance had set in for years to come
| until recently.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| GP was talking about performance not marketshare.
| bradmcgo wrote:
| It really feels like this is all in the name of their AR/VR
| efforts. The killer device as far as I can think would be a
| simple headset that packs the capabilities of full-blown
| workstations. Apple Silicon seems like it could totally be on
| that track in some way.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| True but I can only imagine the cost of that headset. It
| will be sure the 1% of the 1% :'(
| bodge5000 wrote:
| The problem is, last time I checked, you're not able to really
| make use of it for gaming. Obviously MacOS doesn't run all that
| many games compared to Windows and now Linux (with Proton, or
| to be honest quite possible even without), and something like
| parallels can't take advantage of the M1's power.
|
| Not to say it'll never happen, but its not a done deal
| basically, and to my knowledge the process hasn't yet started
| namlem wrote:
| The 3090 should have no problem playing all but the most poorly
| optimized VR games at max or near-max settings. Often times the
| difference between "very high" and "ultra" is indistinguishable
| btw, with "ultra" just being shit that wasn't well optimized to
| begin with.
| ChrisRR wrote:
| You're right, it is insane, but this is Apple.
|
| So expect what that graph actually means is some extremely
| specific, cherry-picked benchmarks
| wyager wrote:
| > you need this kind of GPU performance for high resolution VR
| gaming at 90 fps, but its just barely enough
|
| I run VR games on the index at 144hz with high settings without
| issue on a 3060 Ti.
|
| I've been on the market for a 3070-3090, but only because I
| want a card for which a water block is available, not because I
| need more power for any extant game.
| arvinsim wrote:
| After their comparison claims on the M1 Pro/Max and Nvidia
| GPUs, I would take these comparisons with a huge grain of salt.
| outworlder wrote:
| Too bad that historically Apple has not given any attention to
| Mac gaming.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Part of Apple's historic MO has been to not invest in areas
| they don't see themselves having a competitive advantage in.
| Now that they can make gaming happen with a very low wattage
| budget they may well try to enter that space in earnest.
| arvinsim wrote:
| Or maybe Jobs was just salty about the Halo buyout?
|
| In any case, it's a moot point. Apple clearly doesn't care
| about desktop gaming and it shows in both their hardware
| and software.
| torginus wrote:
| This has been always very strange for me. Apple chips used
| in smartphones were very consistently near the top of the
| pack even in terms of GPU performance, and unlike their
| Android counterparts, they rarely throttled, and could
| deliver said perf with decent battery life.
|
| Yet the iOS 'gaming' scene, despite being one of the major
| revenue drivers, consists mostly of low-quality F2P games.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| The gaming performance of the existing M1 GPUs is, well,
| crap (like far behind the other laptop competition, to say
| nothing of desktop GPUs). The Ultra probably isn't changing
| that, since it's very unlikely to be a hardware problem and
| instead a software ecosystem & incentives problem.
| Croftengea wrote:
| Yes, it's "crap" not because GPU is slow but rather that
| most triple A title games are optimized for Windows. So
| it's difficult to expect a good performance from a game
| that runs with API conversion layer(s) (Windows -> Mac)
| and then CPU emulation (x86 -> arm).
|
| So publishers/developers need to make more native games.
| Even though every Mac port will probably make 1/10th
| revenue of a Windows title I guess Mac users would be
| happy to pay more for better games. I certainly would.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| It is a video memory problem. Unified memory is nice but
| you need GDDR6 to feed a powerful GPU. But you don't want
| GDDR6 for the cpu.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I don't think the performance is _that_ bad. On a whim I
| tried running WoW on a 16" M1 Pro MBP and it consistently
| got FPS higher than the refresh rate (120hz) with the
| game rendering at 1x scale and most effects maxed out.
| Granted, that's not as good as what you'd get with a
| mobile RTX 3080 or something, but it's nothing to sneeze
| at for a laptop that doesn't get scorching hot and
| doesn't sound like a leaf blower when being pushed.
|
| I could definitely see the Max and Ultra with a beefier
| cooling system (like the Studio's) having pretty
| respectable performance.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| WoW isn't exactly the pinnacle of demanding performance.
| It's like saying you can run counter strike at 200FPS:
| congrats, so can everyone else, without paying $2000
| kllrnohj wrote:
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-
| performanc...
|
| M1 Max struggles to keep up with an RTX 3060 mobile.
|
| Now that's with the overhead of Rosetta 2 and all that,
| so it's of course "not fair" for the M1. But that's also
| the current reality of the market, so ya know.
| altairprime wrote:
| The difference between an Apple TV and a Mac Mini is
| essentially how powerful of Apple silicon it has, whether
| it runs tvOS or macOS, and whether it has HDMI out or not.
|
| The Studio is a more compact form factor than any modern 4K
| gaming console. If they chose to ship something in that
| form factor with tvOS, HDMI, and an M1 Max/Ultra, it would
| be a very competitive console on the market -- _if_ game
| developers could be persuaded to implement for it.
|
| How would it compare to the Xbox Series X and PS5? That's a
| comparison I expect to see someday at WWDC, once they're
| ready. And once a game is ported to Metal on _any_ Apple
| silicon OS, it's a simple exercise to port it to all the
| rest; macOS, tvOS, ipadOS, and (someday, presumably) vrOS.
|
| Is today's announcement enough to compel large developers
| like EA and Bungie to port their games to Metal? I don't
| know. But Apple has two advantage with their hardware that
| Windows can't counter: the ability to boot into a
| signed/sealed OS (including macOS!), load a signed/sealed
| app, attest this cryptographically to a server, and lock
| out other programs from reading with a game's memory or
| display. This would end software-only online cheating in a
| way that PCs can't compete with today. This would also
| reduce the number of GPUs necessary to support to one,
| Apple Metal 2, which drastically decreases the complexity
| of testing and deployment of game code.
|
| I look forward to Apple deciding to play ball with gaming
| someday.
| neetdeth wrote:
| This all makes sense, and in that context it's
| unfortunate that Apple's relationship with the largest
| game tools company, Epic, is... strained, to say the
| least.
|
| They could always choose to remedy that with a generous
| buyout offer.
| derac wrote:
| Seems unlikely that the general population would spend
| 2-4k on a console.
| codyb wrote:
| Don't gamers spend tons of money on gaming PCs?
|
| Also, might be cheaper a couple years down the line.
| afavour wrote:
| PC gamers do. Console gamers don't. And there are a lot
| more of the latter than the former.
| altairprime wrote:
| Well, only the macOS users would be spending a thousand
| dollars or more for their console-capable Macs, which are
| general purpose computers with absurd amounts of memory.
| TV users could spend a lot less for an Apple TV 4K with
| M1 inside, assuming Apple released it with less of this
| or that.
| ralfd wrote:
| The Apple TV (A12 chip) is currently $199. The new iPad
| Air with the M1 chip costs $599.
|
| They also don't need the display, camera, microphone. And
| could sell it at a loss and make the margins with TV+ and
| game sales.
|
| But they would need their own bundled
| controller/accessories and get serious about AAA gaming.
| philistine wrote:
| Apple has never sold a hardware product at a loss. Never.
| ralfd wrote:
| > I look forward to Apple deciding to play ball with
| gaming someday.
|
| I wish.
|
| But playing ball is more than hardware. It is spending
| billions to buy Activision or Bungie. And I can't
| honestly imagine Apple having the cultural DNA or leader
| aspiration to make a game like The Last of Us where the
| player is brutally beating zombies to bloody clumps.
|
| In video games the business side demands having
| exclusives, or timed exclusives, to sponsor twitch
| streamers playing your game and cutting special deals
| with studios. This is very different to the App store
| where Apple emphasizes their role as a neutral arbiter
| and a dev having the same deal as any other dev. Can you
| imagine the complains here on hn if Epic Games would get
| a a special deal just because they are a bigger fish and
| Fortnite is popular?
| madars wrote:
| Won't there be a Pluton-based anti-cheating solution?
| Seems like a natural opportunity for Microsoft.
|
| Edit: https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2022/01/pluto... says
|
| > Microsoft already used Pluton to secure Xbox Ones and
| Azure Sphere microcontrollers against attacks that
| involve people with physical access opening device cases
| and performing hardware hacks that bypass security
| protections. Such hacks are usually carried out by device
| owners who want to run unauthorized games or programs for
| cheating.
|
| So initially you could have Pluton-only servers and down
| the line non-Pluton hardware will simply be obsolete.
| altairprime wrote:
| Yep. On the plus side, anything with Apple silicon or a
| T2 chip has this available today already in macOS, so
| that's every shipping Mac starting in what looks like
| 2018: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208862
|
| They won't have the Ultra GPU, but Apple's been shipping
| for years and Microsoft is just _now_ bringing Pluton to
| market. I do wish them luck, but that 's a lot of PC
| gamer hardware to depreciate.
| t3rabytes wrote:
| A recent keynote compared an Apple series chip to an Xbox
| One S, can't remember which though.
| fomine3 wrote:
| Pippin atmark again!
| novok wrote:
| Every god damn child has an iPad already to keep them
| entertained and the hardware is plenty good enough. Going
| one step further in the age ranges to get big game revenue
| like the switch will help them capture more.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| $4000-$6000 is a toy for a tiny number of rich people or a
| work machine for a well paid professional.
|
| In the PC space the average spend is $800 and a PS5 is
| $500.
| onethought wrote:
| Except when Bungie was going to release Halo on Mac[0] and
| Microsoft swooped in bought them and made it an Xbox thing.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzrme9yWens
| lostlogin wrote:
| The Marathon days were really great. That jump was a huge
| loss to me, even if it wasn't to Apple.
| miohtama wrote:
| Apple has now too much money and is running out of core
| business areas. Expect more investing in non-Apple areas like
| gaming, cars, etc.
|
| Though every video game company on the planet hates them
| because of App Store terms.
| jen20 wrote:
| > Expect more investing in non-Apple areas like gaming,
| cars, etc.
|
| I remember people saying this about phones in 2006.
| nr2x wrote:
| The first half of the event was old wine in new bottles - I
| reckon that's the main growth area they are squeezing.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Or was it last seasons wine in old bottles?
| flipgimble wrote:
| "every video game company" = Epic Games, and mostly because
| they don't like to pay overhead for their Fortnite loot
| boxes that most parents wish they could have some control
| over. I don't have allegiance to either company mostly
| because they don't care about me, just my money.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > I don't have allegiance to either company mostly
| because they don't care about me, just my money.
|
| This criticism is something that is a positive to me.
| Opposing companies are often dependant on adverting money
| and the things this leads to are a whole lot worse in my
| view.
| t3rabytes wrote:
| Epic doesn't do lootboxes, next.
| codyb wrote:
| They used to? At least Rocket League had them for a long
| time. Unsure how long after Epic purchased it they had
| them though.
| derac wrote:
| In the spirit of his argument, they do use time-gated
| content and other methods to psychologically exploit
| their users into buying things.
| hajile wrote:
| Apple is the world's biggest and most profitable gaming
| company. For every AAA gamer, there are a hundred casual
| gamers (one reason why Nintendo consoles run circles around
| Sony and Microsoft).
|
| Apple has invested billions into their gaming division. The
| big thing they need right now is a new version of Metal that
| gets feature parity with Vulkan or DX.
|
| Also of note, there are very persistent rumors of an upcoming
| VR headset. Their M1 alone would blow away competition like
| the Quest. A Pro or max chip with some disabled CPU cores
| wouldn't cost a ton due to being scavenged cores and would
| positively stomp the competition.
| pjmlp wrote:
| In what concerns developer productivitiy, it is Vulkan that
| needs to get feature parity with Metal.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| Once they are confident of their graphics advantage I think
| they will enter the console market against Microsoft and Sony
| with Apple tv console
| [deleted]
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I wonder how it compares for crypto mining, and if that group
| would be buying these up
| tenuousemphasis wrote:
| Poorly compared to an ASIC which has the SHA-256 algorithm
| encoded as hardware circuits. Maybe better than GPUs when it
| comes to mining Ethereum or others where ASICs aren't as
| prevalent.
| wyager wrote:
| If you're mining crypto you want 95% of your capex to go to
| graphics cards/ASICs, not to RAM+NICs+CPU+case+etc.
| tanduv wrote:
| HL Alyx is actually quite well optimized, and you can
| definitely run it on Ultra with super-sampling on a 3090.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjNaC0-hiPE
| Geee wrote:
| I didn't see display resolution (or the model of HMD)
| mentioned in the video. I'm using Varjo Aero, which has
| 2880x2720 per eye, which is almost quapruple (per eye)
| compared to Valve Index. I think this resolution is enough
| for a good VR experience; pixels are almost invisible, and
| even small text is readable. However, HL Alyx doesn't run at
| 90 fps on full resolution.
| wyager wrote:
| That HMD looks pretty badass. Didn't realize hardware
| support for eye tracking/foveation already existed. Does
| any software support it? That would fix your perf issue.
| Geee wrote:
| Yes, that would probably fix it, but there's no software
| support yet in any games, afaik. It works only in desktop
| mode.
| ihuman wrote:
| The author of that video is using the valve index, which is
| 1440x1600 per eye
| needle0 wrote:
| Uh, Varjo Aero is a clear outlier in terms of resolution
| and definitely does not represent the current typical VR
| headset experience (which in early 2022 would be around
| Quest 2 or Valve Index). If you went out of your way to get
| an expensive niche high-end headset, it struggling on a
| 3090 is your problem, not HL:A's.
| Geee wrote:
| I'd say that its just a couple of years ahead of the
| mainstream curve. My thinking is that Apple probably
| wants to make a very high resolution VR headset (similar
| or close to Varjo Aero), and it seems that with their new
| chips, they might be able to pull it off.
| ralfd wrote:
| How is the foveated rendering? Is it noticeable?
| Geee wrote:
| There's no software support for foveated rendering in any
| games yet, afaik. It works in desktop mode and it's fast
| enough to be unnoticeable.
| lazyeye wrote:
| I'm surprised Apple found time outside of focusing on growing the
| Chinese economy to work on this.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/07/apple-chi...
| Razengan wrote:
| It's funny how during all the years that PC elitists turned their
| pince-nez'ed noses up at Macs and pooh-poohed Apple, the biggest
| factor holding Macs down turned out to be the commodity PC chips.
| :)
| gigatexal wrote:
| I used to be one of the biggest Apple fanboys/apologists but I've
| since put Linux on my MacBook Pro from 2013 and built a Linux
| workstation and rarely use my 2020 MacBook Pro anymore, I say
| this because I yawned at the over-the-top Apple marketing. The
| products are interesting, sure, but I wasn't blown away. It's
| mostly the prices. The hardware is just far above what I can
| afford these days -- even though my MacBook Pro from 2013 is so
| well made it still works now, and buying a 2 or 3 thousand dollar
| MacBook now I am sure it'd last just as long but it's just too
| much. Though I am saving for one for multimedia work, probably a
| used M1 MacBook Air.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| In some ways I wish this processor was available from a CPU chip
| seller. As a compute engine it gets a lot "right" (in my opinion)
| and would be fun to hack on.
|
| That said, the idea that USB C/Thunderbolt is the new PCIe bus
| has some merit. I have yet to find someone who makes a peripheral
| card cage that is fed by USBC/TB but there are of course
| standalone GPUs.
| BillinghamJ wrote:
| An eGPU enclosure is exactly what you're describing - PCIe x16
| over TB4. They're quite commonplace now
| Tepix wrote:
| No, TB4 is PCIe x4, unchanged since TB3.
| [deleted]
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > That said, the idea that USB C/Thunderbolt is the new PCIe
| bus has some merit. I have yet to find someone who makes a
| peripheral card cage that is fed by USBC/TB but there are of
| course standalone GPUs.
|
| I hope we get closer to that long-standing dream over the next
| few years.
|
| But right now you can see laptop manufacturers so desperate to
| avoid thunderbolt bottlenecks that they make their own custom
| PCIe ports.
|
| For the longest time, thunderbolt ports were artificially
| limited to less than 3 lanes of PCIe 3.0 bandwidth, and even
| now the max is 4 lanes.
| dheera wrote:
| > USB C/Thunderbolt is the new PCIe bus
|
| Oh please hell no.
|
| I have to unplug and plug my USB-C camera at least once a day
| because it gets de-enumerated very randomly. Using the best
| cables I can get my hands on.
|
| File transfers to/from USB-C hard drives suddenly stop mid-
| transfer and corrupt the file system.
|
| Don't ask me why, I'm just reporting my experiences, this is
| the reality of my life that UX researchers don't see because
| they haven't sent me an e-mail and surveyed me.
|
| Never had such problems with PCIe.
| delusional wrote:
| You have a very exotic configuration if you plugged your
| webcam and thumb drives into PCIe slots.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Webcam are often positioned as cheapish accessories so PCIe
| is exotic, but for internal drives (parent's comment wasn't
| about "thumb" drives) it's pretty mainstream:
| https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=pcie+drive
|
| TBH, even a thumb drive would have me pissed if it
| disconnected at random times. That's what I hated about
| using the SD slot of MacBooks to host a semi-permanent
| drive.
| icelancer wrote:
| My USB-C dongle (AMD processor, so not Thunderbolt) that has
| PD plugged into it permanently and is my "docking station"
| for the office, and I have to cycle its power (unplug/plug
| PD) to get the DisplayPort monitor that's connected to it to
| work, on top of the fact that there are other issues with it,
| especially with external drives as you also reported.
|
| So, I'm in total agreement.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Friendly reminder that USB-C is a form factor, and
| thunderbolt is the actual transfer protocol.
|
| Sounds like you're listing the common complaints with usb-3
| over usb-c peripherals, which are not a suitable replacement
| for PCIe. Thunderbolt is something different, more powerful &
| more reliable.
| toastal wrote:
| Thunderbolt 3 is USB4
| Tepix wrote:
| USB4 is the successor to USB 3.2 and TB3.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Thunderbolt is more reliable, but still weirdly unstable on
| the software support sometimes. I don't get why we still
| have external monitor detection issues on macs at this day
| and age for instance.
| jamesfmilne wrote:
| https://www.sonnettech.com/product/thunderbolt/pcie-card-exp...
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Thanks! Of course they are bit GPU centric but the idea is
| there.
|
| Very interesting stuff. I wonder both if the Zynq Ultrascale
| RFSOC PCIe card would work in that chassis and if I could get
| register level access out of MacOS.
| jamesfmilne wrote:
| Yes, you can interface with PCIe devices using DriverKit,
| Apple's new user-space device driver platform.
|
| No need to run inside the kernel for these things any more.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/driverkit
|
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/pcidriverkit
| jcadam wrote:
| Well, more reasonable than a mac pro, price wise. Might have to
| consider this when the time comes to replace my Ryzen9 rig.
| alberth wrote:
| I'm cross posting a question I had from the Mac Studio thread
| (currently unanswered).
|
| ----
|
| Mac Pro scale up?
|
| How is this going to scale up to a Mac Pro, especially related to
| RAM?
|
| The Ultra caps at 128 GB of RAM (which isn't much for video
| editing, especially given that the GPU uses the system RAM).
| Today's Mac Pro goes up to 1.5TB (and has dedicated video RAM
| above this).
|
| If the Mac Pro is say, 4 Ultra's stacked together - that means
| the new Mac Pro will be capped at 512GB of RAM. Would Apple stack
| 12 Ultra's together to get to 1.5TB of RAM? Seems unlikely.
| dagmx wrote:
| A few points to make...
|
| - the shared CPU+GPU RAM doesn't necessarily mean the GPU has
| to eat up system RAM when in use, because it can share
| addressing. So whereas the current Mac pro would require two
| copies of data (CPU+GPU) the new Mac studio can have one.
| Theoretically.
|
| - they do have very significant video decoder blocks. That
| means that you may use less RAM than without since you can keep
| frames compressed in flight
| arcticbull wrote:
| Also, the memory model is quite different - with the ultra-
| fast SSD and ultra-fast on-die RAM. You can get away with
| significantly less RAM for the same tasks, not just because
| of de-duplication but because data comes in so quickly from
| the SSD that paging isn't nearly the hit it is on say an
| Intel based Mac.
|
| I'd expect it to work more like a game console, streaming in
| content from the SSD to working memory on the fly, processing
| it with the CPU and video decode blocks, and insta-sharing it
| with the GPU via common address space.
|
| All that is to say, where you needed 1.5TB of RAM on a Xeon,
| the architectural changes on Apple Silicon likely mean you
| can get away with far less and still wind up performing
| better.
|
| The "GHz myth" is dead, long live the "GB myth."
| fpoling wrote:
| Another thing to consider is memory compression. If Apple
| added dedicated hardware for that, it can effectively
| double the total memory with minimal performance hit.
| rocqua wrote:
| Memory compression only works in certain scenarios. It
| requires your memory to actually have low entropy.
| fomine3 wrote:
| This is myth.
| masklinn wrote:
| > ultra-fast on-die RAM
|
| The RAM is not on die. It's just soldered on top of the SoC
| package.
|
| > All that is to say, where you needed 1.5TB of RAM on a
| Xeon, the architectural changes on Apple Silicon likely
| mean you can get away with far less and still wind up
| performing better.
|
| No, it does not. You might save a bit, but most of what you
| save is the _transfers_ , because moving data from the CPU
| to the GPU is just sending a pointer over through the
| graphics API, instead of needing to actually copy the data
| over to the GPU's memory. In the latter case, unless you
| still need it afterwards you can then drop the buffer from
| the CPU.
|
| You do have some gains as you move buffer _ownership_ back
| and forth instead of needing a copy in each physical
| memory, but if you needed 1.5TB physical before... you
| won't really need much less after. You'll probably save a
| fraction, possibly even a large one, but not "2 /3rd"
| large, that's just not sensible.
| martinald wrote:
| I agree, I got a 8GB mac mini (was really just curious to
| see the M1 in action and the 16GB model was backordered
| badly) and it performs extremely well memory wise. I often
| use 12GB+ and I never notice unless I check activity
| monitor.
| arcticbull wrote:
| That's what I based my assessment on too. I had an 8GB M1
| MacBook Pro (swapped for the 16GB M1 Pro MacBook Pro 14
| since) and I had no issues developing iOS and macOS apps
| with it using Xcode, and Rust development with VSCode.
| This brought my old 16GB Intel MacBook Pro to its knees.
| samatman wrote:
| This went by so fast I'm not sure I heard it right, but I
| believe the announcer for the Ultra said it the last in the M1
| lineup.
|
| They just can't ship a Mac Pro without expansion in the normal
| sense, my guess is that the M2 will combine the unified memory
| architecture with expansion busses.
|
| Which sounds gnarly, and I don't blame them for punting on that
| for the first generation of M class processors.
| skunkworker wrote:
| This is what I've been thinking as well, a M2 in a Mac Pro
| with 128/256gb soldered and up to 2TB 8 channel DDR5-6400
| expandable, and do a tiered memory cache
| [deleted]
| cehrlich wrote:
| I think some of this can be guessed from the SoC codenames
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apple_codenames
|
| M1 Max is Jade C-Die => 64GB
|
| M1 Ultra is Jade 2C-Die => 128GB
|
| There is a still unreleased SoC called Jade 4C-Die =>256GB
|
| So I think that's the most we'll see this generation, unless
| they somehow add (much slower) slotted RAM
|
| If they were to double the max RAM on M2 Pro/Max (Rhodes Chop /
| Rhodes 1C), which doesn't seem unreasonable, that would mean
| 512GB RAM on the 4C-Die version, which would be enough for
| _most_ Mac Pro users.
|
| Perhaps Apple is thinking that anyone who needs more than half
| a Terabyte of RAM should just offload the work to some other
| computer somewhere else for the time being.
|
| I do think it's a shame that in some ways the absolute high-end
| will be worse than before, but I also wonder how many 1.5TB Mac
| Pros they actually sold.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| How is slotted RAM slower? 6400Mhz DIMM exists. This would
| match the specs of the RAM on the M1 Max. Even octa-channel
| has been done before so the memory bus would have the exact
| same width, latency and clock frequency.
| fastball wrote:
| The memory bandwidth of the M1 Max is 400 GB/s with 64GB of
| RAM, where as the memory bandwidth of Corsair's 6400MHz
| DDR5 32GB RAM module is 51GB/s per stick, or 102GB/s for
| the M1 Max equivalent.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| 51GB/s * 8 (octa-channel, not dual channel as you are
| calculating) is 408 GB/s. Basically the same as the M1
| Max. It's not fair to use an off the shelf product since
| even if the RAM is slotted Apple wouldn't use an off the
| shelf product.
|
| Whether they use slotted RAM or not has nothing to do
| with performance. It's a design choice. For the mobile
| processors it makes total sense to save space. But for
| the Mac pro they might as well use slotted RAM. Unless
| they go for HBM which does offer superior performance.
| rocqua wrote:
| Is 8 channel RAM doable, are there downsides? If no to
| both, why don't high end x86 processors have it?
| rowanG077 wrote:
| High-end x86 do have it. Threadripper 3995WX for example.
| my123 wrote:
| Note that those are overclocked out of spec configurations
| today.
|
| https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/134599
| /...
|
| 4800 MT/s is the actual maximum spec, anything beyond that
| is OC.
| mnholt wrote:
| Agreed, I think they will use the 4C config to debut M2 and
| make a slash. They said in the keynote that M1 Ultra
| completes the M1 family. Timing works out well for November
| launch with the 2 year apple silicon transition timeline they
| gave themselves. Not sure what they are going to call it and
| if it will be A15 or A16 based.
|
| A16 would give great performance, and I think it's safe for
| them to have a two year iteration time on laptop/desktops vs
| one year for phone/tablet.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| Hard to believe it's already been almost 1.5 years!
| can16358p wrote:
| I think they will unveil M2 which can probably at least double
| the 64GB max to 128GB max RAM of M1-series.
|
| Then, on the highest configuration, I think they actually can
| put 6 M2-top-specced or more into the Mac Pro.
| bpicolo wrote:
| Does the mac studio potentially replace the mac pro concept? It
| seems targeted at exactly the audience that mac pros targeted
| (ridiculous amounts of video simul-editing)
| sharikous wrote:
| The presentor very explicitly said they are not done and they
| will replace the Mac Pro.
|
| But yes, I see a lot of folks replacing current Mac Pros with
| Studios.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| No this looks like a modular replacement of the iMac Pro. If
| it was to replace the Mac Pro they wouldn't have said at the
| end of the event "the Mac Pro will have to wait until next
| time".
| alberth wrote:
| To me, this seems to have killed the iMac Pro not the Mac
| Pro.
| Asmod4n wrote:
| The Mac Pro will have replaceable RAM. It will use the RAM
| soldered onto the CPU as cache.
|
| You'll most likely also be able to buy dedicated GPUs/ML
| booster addon Cards and the likes for it.
|
| It's the most likely thing to happen or they won't release
| another Mac Pro.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Why would they use soldered RAM as cache? It's not like it's
| faster then replaceable RAM. Unless they go HBM2 but I doubt
| that.
| fpoling wrote:
| The bandwidth of the soldered ram is much higher which
| makes it much faster for code that accesses a lot of RAM
| like video editors.
| [deleted]
| vimy wrote:
| The pro is most likely going to have ram and PCIe slots.
| ostenning wrote:
| I read "Apple unveils MK ULTRA"
| yurishimo wrote:
| Low key what if this was planned to change Google results to
| "Did you mean M1 Ultra?" when searching for the experiment? The
| CIA is using all that money for something consumers can use
| now!
|
| /takes off foil hat
| [deleted]
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| Can we trust the performance measurements that are listed?
| Lramseyer wrote:
| Yes, but assume that they're cherry picked. Don't get me wrong,
| these numbers are impressive, but it claims that it's GPU is
| faster than the highest end discrete GPU (RTX 3090) but it's
| unclear on what benchmark it used. It's important to keep in
| mind that their GPUs are not architected with gaming in mind,
| whereas the 3090 definitely is. So it's not unreasonable to
| find some metrics where their GPU performs better.
| theodric wrote:
| The price alone is turning me back into a Linux user after 20
| years. I simply cannot justify 6800 Swiss Francs (neighborhood of
| 7000 Euros or USD) for the max CPU/RAM and a 2TB SSD, and I
| cannot justify getting any less because it's soldered-down and
| not in any way upgradeable or repairable. Not to mention, even
| with AppleCare+ it's only guaranteed to work for 3 years (in
| Europe, I know you Americans can get long-term AppleCare
| subscriptions, but we don't have that option here).
|
| This is a tragedy for the future of computing. It might as well
| be encased in resin. Great performance, but I won't spend car
| money on something I can't upgrade or repair.
| bhewes wrote:
| Sweet chip! The copy, my eyes just glazed over.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| The very same dual-chiplet design marcan predicted - nice!
| klelatti wrote:
| I wonder if the max 128GB graphics memory opens up some
| applications that would not have been viable before?
| avl999 wrote:
| Yep, finally Electron apps will run smoothly on consumer
| hardware.
| freemint wrote:
| Not really. Thanks to the GPU interconnect NVLINK we have
| system 320GB. https://www.deltacomputer.com/nvidia-
| dgx-a100-320gb-3ys-edu....
|
| There are even some with 640GB. This is at a different price
| point though.
| klelatti wrote:
| Not on a single GPU though and it's 40x the cost!
| freemint wrote:
| Rewriting a CUDA application to use NVLINK is a lot easier
| then rewriting it for Apples GPU.
| 314 wrote:
| 640GB should be enough for anyone.
| manquer wrote:
| Perhaps until VR becomes more main stream and gets higher
| frame rates, resolutions etc.
|
| Rendering in VR takes a lot of memory at higher
| resolutions.
| yisonPylkita wrote:
| Bill said it 40 years ago and here we are with 2 orders of
| prefix more of memory. I wonder if in next 40 years we'll
| get to 640 peta bytes
| wpm wrote:
| Finally, enough RAM for Microsoft Teams!
| nintendo1889 wrote:
| Does it mine bitcoin well?
| judge2020 wrote:
| Not Bitcoin but Ethereum
|
| https://9to5mac.com/2021/11/10/m1-pro-macbook-pro-cryptocurr...
|
| M1 Pro -> 5.8 MH/s, with a 17w draw, means $12.82 a month
| profit. I don't imagine the M1 Ultra is too much better, maybe
| 20 MH/s at absolute most, but we'll see. It definitely won't be
| as economical as 3070 or 3080 FE cards at current profitability
| levels.
| vmception wrote:
| & $.10 per KwH, many residences are often higher but
| professional operations are closer to $.03 per KwH or
| sometimes even zero or negative
|
| also note that mining calculator they used assumes 2 Ether
| per block paid to miners
|
| In Ethereum it can be _much much_ higher because people pay
| to use that blockchain. Mining can be insanely profitable and
| I'm not aware of any calculator that shows it. Everyone is
| operating on bad data. A cursory look right now shows latest
| blocks having 2.52 Ether in them, which is 26% greater yield.
|
| Block 14348267 a few minutes ago had 4.83 Ether, 140% greater
| yield
|
| There have been prolonged periods of time, weeks and months,
| where block rewards were 6-9 Ether.
|
| Miners were raking it all in while the calculators said "2
| Ether"
|
| All this to say it could probably make $20-30 a month.
| cosmotic wrote:
| I'm sure an ASIC would best the M1.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Is it actually more powerful than a top of the line
| threadripper[0] or is that not a "personal computer" CPU by this
| definition? I feel like 64 cores would beat 20 on some workloads
| even if the 20 were way faster in single core performance.
|
| [0]https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-
| threadripper-3...
| jbellis wrote:
| Next-gen Threadripper Pro was also announced today:
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-details-ryzen-threadri...
| paulmd wrote:
| Bit of a wet fart though, even Charlie D thinks it's too
| little too late. OEM-only (and only on WRX80 socket), no
| V-cache, worse product support.
|
| https://semiaccurate.com/2022/03/08/amd-finally-launches-
| thr...
|
| The niche for high clocks was arguable with the 2nd-gen
| products but now you are foregoing v-cache which also
| improves per-thread performance, so Epyc is relatively
| speaking even more attractive. And if you take Threadripper
| you have artificial memory limits, half the memory channels,
| half the PCIe lanes, etc, plus in some cases it's _more_
| expensive than the Epyc chips. It is a lot to pay (not just
| in cash) just for higher clocks that your 64C workloads
| probably don 't even care about.
|
| AMD moved into rent-seeking mode even before Zen3 came out.
| Zen2 threadripper clearly beats anything Intel can muster in
| the segment (unless they wanted to do W-3175X seriously and
| not as a limited-release thing with $2000 motherboards) and
| thus AMD had no reason to actually update this segment when
| they could just coast. Even with this release, they are not
| refreshing the "mainstream" TRX40 platform but only a limited
| release for the OEM-only WRX80 platform.
|
| It was obvious when they forced a socket change, and then
| cranked all the Threadripper 3000 prices (some even to
| higher-levels than single-socket Epyc "P" skus) what
| direction things were headed. They have to stay competitive
| in server, so those prices are aggressive, but Intel doesn't
| have anything to compete with Threadripper so AMD will coast
| and raise prices.
|
| And while Milan-X isn't cheap - I doubt these WRX80 chips are
| going to be cheap either, it would be unsurprising if they're
| back in the position of Threadripper being more expensive for
| a chip that's locked-down and cut-down. And being OEM-only
| you can't shop around or build it yourself, it's take it or
| leave it.
| frant-hartm wrote:
| The PRO Threadrippers are not cut down, they have 8 memory
| channels and 128 PCIE 4.0 lanes. I think the only
| limitation compared to Epyc is that you can have 1 socket
| only.
| matja wrote:
| And WRX80 has dedicated chipset lanes
| (https://www.amd.com/en/chipsets/wrx80), so effectively
| more PCI-e than EPYC, and bootable NVME RAID support on
| top.
| dljsjr wrote:
| Apple's ARM chips can process a metric ton of ops per cycle due
| to the architecture of the chip:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25257932
| zamadatix wrote:
| But the answer to the question is still "no".
| klelatti wrote:
| Only if the only thing you compare is CPU performance -
| adding a big GPU on die adds a certain amount of 'power' by
| any measure.
| [deleted]
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Doesn't have to though. A Threadripper 3990X uses barrels
| of electricity, generates plenty of heat, comes with no
| GPU, has worse single-threaded performance, and still costs
| $4000 by itself without any of the parts needed to make it
| actually work.
| Nition wrote:
| The question is in relation to Apple's claim that it's
| "the world's most powerful and capable chip for a
| personal computer".
| gzer0 wrote:
| It might also be reasonable to say that the threadripper
| is a workstation chip, not a chip for personal computers.
|
| Edit: even AMD themselves call their threadripper lineup
| workstation chips, not personal.
|
| https://www.amd.com/en/processors/workstation
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Threadripper _Pro_ is the workstation chip. Regular
| Threadripper (non-Pro) was not aimed at workstations, it
| was aimed at the "HEDT" market. Strictly speaking it's
| considered a consumer market (albeit for the enthusiasts
| of enthusiasts)
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I'd call them personal chips. When I think of non-
| personal chips I think IBM POWER or Ampere Altra.
| freemint wrote:
| Why do you think of Altera as non-personal chips?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Not Altera, Ampere Altra. This:
| https://amperecomputing.com/processors/ampere-altra/
|
| If the purchase page says to "contact sales" and doesn't
| list a price then it is not for consumers.
| freemint wrote:
| Click where to buy tab, then there is a list of
| distributors. Including ones which sell workstation
| versions with a configurator and pricing.
| https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-altra-64bit-arm-
| workstati...
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Depends on what you define "capable" as. Remember, they
| specify that it is the most powerful and capable _chip_ ,
| not necessarily complete system.
|
| There's no other chip that has the power of an RTX 3090
| and more power than an i9-12900K in it - after all,
| Threadripper doesn't have a lick of graphics power at
| all. This chip can do 18 8K video streams at once, which
| Threadripper would get demolished at.
|
| I'm content with giving them the chip crown. Full system?
| Debatable.
| dathinab wrote:
| Through you would need to compare it to the coming
| threadripper 5000WX(?) or better the soon coming Ryzen
| 7000 CPUs (which seen to have integrated graphics).
|
| I mean they all are CPUs coming out this year as far as I
| know.
| zamadatix wrote:
| It's a fantastic chip but that wasn't the question. I
| love my M1 Max and I love my Threadripper workstation,
| each has their own strengths and that's alright.
| guelo wrote:
| It's bad for competition that only Apple gets to use TSMC's 5nm
| process. Though what's really bad is that Intel and Samsung
| haven't been able to compete with TSMC.
| paulmd wrote:
| AMD will be on TSMC N5P next year, which will give them node
| parity with Apple (who will be releasing A15 on N5P this
| year), and actually a small node lead over the current
| N5-based A14 products. So we will get to test the "it's all
| just node lead guys, nothing wrong with x86!!!" theory.
|
| Don't worry though there will still be room to move the
| goalposts with "uhhh, but, Apple is designing for high IPC
| and low clocks, it's totally different and x86 could do it if
| they wanted to but, uhhh, they don't!".
|
| (I'm personally of the somewhat-controversial opinion that
| x86 can't really be scaled in the same super-wide-core/super-
| deep-reorder-buffer fashion that ARM opens up and the IPC gap
| will persist as a result. The gap is _very wide_ , higher
| than 3x in floating-point benchmarks, it isn't something
| that's going to be easy to close.)
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| There is a third variable: Apple is putting ram much closer
| to the CPU than AMD. This has the advantage that you get
| lower latency (and slightly higher bandwidth), but the
| downside that you're currently limited to 128gb of ram,
| compared to 2tb for threadripper (4tb for epic). Amd's 3d
| cache that they're launching in a few months will be
| interesting since it lets the L3 go up a ton.
| astrange wrote:
| Latency to RAM is not any better. Bandwidth is extremely
| much better but not for this reason.
| Macha wrote:
| We've already seen x86 draw even with Intel 12th gen:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0bsjUMz3EM
| paulmd wrote:
| So in that one, you've got a 20-thread Intel part
| (6+8C/20T) at probably 3.5 GHz going against a 10-thread
| Apple part (8+2C/10T), at probably 3 GHz, and the Apple
| part still comes out on top by ~5% in Cinebench R23 MT.
| And that's with Intel having 50% more high-performance
| threads available.
|
| Work out the IPC there - the Intel has a 2x thread count
| advantage, a 17% clock advantage, and Apple comes out 5%
| ahead. So the IPC gap there is about 2.46x.
|
| It's not a perfect comparison of course, since we're
| mixing SMT and big/little cores, but in basically every
| area Intel should (on paper) have more resources
| available and Apple is coming out on top anyway by sheer
| IPC.
|
| That's what I'm saying - you can't really do that
| approach with x86. It's not power-advantageous or
| transistor-advantageous to go super wide on the decode or
| reorder buffer like that on x86. And regardless of the
| tricks x86 uses to mitigate it, you've still got a 2.5x
| IPC gap at the end of the day. A 2.5x IPC gap _will not_
| be closed up by just a single node shrink.
|
| And that's looking at MT, where your task scales
| perfectly. See where I'm going with this? Intel is using
| 2x the number of threads, and 3x the number of efficiency
| cores to get there. Apple can deliver that punch across a
| much lower number of threads - meaning ST-bottlenecked
| tasks will scale much much better on Apple.
|
| With a single-threaded test, the M1 is pulling 7W vs 33W
| for the Alder Lake intel. Obviously that tells us nothing
| about _efficiency_ , since we'd need to know the scores,
| but that's the downside, is for _normal, poorly-threaded_
| tasks, like surfing the web or editing code, the 12900HK
| is going to be boosting high to reach the same
| performance levels the M1 does at 3 GHz. And that 's
| exactly what you see in the power figures there.
|
| In short: you will likely see x86 able to keep up in one
| metric or another. You can win on performance if you just
| go nuclear on power. You can match on power on perfectly-
| threadable tasks that allow the x86 to deploy twice the
| threads (sharing instruction cache/etc). You can match on
| single-threaded battery life if you accept lesser
| performance. But the overall performance of the M1
| derives from the massive IPC it generates, and that's
| something that x86 can't match nearly as easily.
|
| Going ham on a single metric just to claim victory isn't
| nearly the same thing as the level of all-round
| performance and efficiency that Apple has achieved there.
|
| (see also, putting a 128-thread Threadripper 3990WX
| workstation up against a 10-thread M1 Max laptop just to
| win at rendering... and people here thought that
| disproved that Apple was great hardware lol)
| atq2119 wrote:
| I don't think there's anything specifically different
| about the reorder buffer between x86 and ARM.
|
| The reorder buffer size is just a logical consequence of
| the frontend width.
|
| And yes, scaling an Aarch64 frontend is dead simple
| compared to x86 due to the fixed instruction width. The
| disadvantage of x86 is serious, but I don't know if we
| can count it out quite yet. This is the first time Intel
| and AMD got any serious pressure on that front. I'm sure
| they're taking the challenge seriously, and it'll take
| some years before we'll see the results.
| sroussey wrote:
| x86 and ARM have different memory access assumptions
| which affects the reorder buffer in material ways. Apple
| added something to their chips to use the x86 memory
| model when flagged for Rosseta2.
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| How much little cores and HT contribute at this workload
| tho? If I say turn them off, could I claim the opposite,
| losing even 20% but using 40% less threads?
| jcranberry wrote:
| why so smug? who cares whichever company makes a better
| processor?
| alwillis wrote:
| It doesn't support your argument when we're talking about a
| massive processor like a threadripper vs. a M1 Ultra.
|
| The performance per watt isn't in the same universe and that
| matters.
| wyattpeak wrote:
| The article claims that the chip is "the world's most
| powerful and capable chip for a personal computer". It's
| reasonable to ask whether it genuinely is faster than another
| available chip, it's not an implicit argument that it's not
| powerful.
| adfgadfgaery wrote:
| The M1 Ultra is by a very wide margin the bigger of the two.
| According to Tom's Hardware [1], top-of-the-line Epycs have
| 39.54 billion transistors. That is about a third of the 117
| billion in the M1 Ultra. Apple builds bigger than anyone
| else, thanks largely to their access to TSMC's best process.
|
| The M1 Ultra is a workstation part. It goes in machines that
| start at $4,000. The competition is Xeons, Epycs, and
| Threadrippers.
| bpye wrote:
| That's not really a fair comparison. Apples chip spends
| most of that on their GPU, and the neural engine takes a
| chunk too. Threadripper is only a CPU.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| > The performance per watt isn't in the same universe and
| that matters.
|
| I couldn't give less of a shit about performance-per-watt.
| The ONLY metric I care about is performance-per-dollar.
|
| A Mac Studio and Threadripper are both boxes that sit
| on/under my desk. I don't work from a laptop. I don't care
| about energy usage. I even don't really care about noise. My
| Threadripper is fine. I would not trade less power for less
| noise.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| The vast majority of developers today has a laptop as their
| main machine. Performance-per-watt is absolutely crucial
| there.
| itstomkent wrote:
| I'll just never understand this. Chances are you are at
| the same desk day in and day out. You probably have
| monitors and external keyboard/mouse hooked up because
| hunching over a laptop and using a touchpad is
| unnecessary torture for a fixed workspace. Given that why
| would you hamstring yourself with a thermally constrained
| and overpriced-because-miniaturization-isn't free setup?
|
| Until maybe these M1's (and I'm not entirely convinced)
| I've not in the 20 years I've been computing seen a
| reasonably configured desktop (eg not just a laptop on a
| stick ala iMac but an ACTUAL desktop) ever not smoke the
| pants off of every single laptop you could put up against
| it. It's hard to beat the one-two punch of lots of power
| and room to cool it. If you are sitting at at desk why
| the heck wouldn't you leverage that?
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Meetings, working from home, travel, changing desks every
| few months. Not having a jungle of cables. Retina screen
| (still hard to find on external monitors). The vast
| majority of devs also don't need an insanely powerful
| machine. If Docker on Mac wasn't dog slow, I could easily
| get by with a $999 MacBook Air.
| arvinsim wrote:
| The only reason I also went up to 32GB RAM(almost bought
| the 64GB one) was because of Docker.
| lmm wrote:
| I was a desktop diehard until performance reached the
| point where laptops are good enough. Being able to take
| the same computer around with you and use it seamlessly
| in a different place is a big improvement.
|
| I still have a proper desk-based working environment
| hooked up to a docking station though. I _really_ wouldn
| 't want to use a laptop that doesn't have a first-party
| dock as my primary machine.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| That's cool. I am not the vast majority of developers. I
| am me. I use a desktop for high-end game development. I
| don't give a shit about web development or laptop
| development. I care about compiling large C++ projects as
| fast as possible.
|
| I agree that most developers are web/mobile developers
| who use a laptop. That's great. I am an increasingly
| niche developer.
|
| The root comment was a comparison against Threadripper.
| Normal developers should not waste money on a
| Threadripper. If someone is a niche developer that
| warrants a Threadripper then pointing out that most
| developers don't need a Threadripper is a waste of time.
| brokenmachine wrote:
| I care about power only because it means louder fans, and I
| like quiet.
| hu3 wrote:
| Same. That's why I use watercooling to keep the room
| silent.
| astrange wrote:
| Did you know noise pollution causes dementia?
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/sep/09/transport-
| no...
| hu3 wrote:
| Ouch. I wonder what Apple thinks about that after selling
| millions of noisy intel macbooks.
|
| As for desktops, watercooling makes computers dead
| silent.
| hu3 wrote:
| This is what some folks miss.
|
| One hour of my time is more expensive than an entire month
| of a computer electricity bill.
|
| Some people just want tasks to perform as fast as possible
| regardless of power consumption or portability.
|
| Life's short and time is finite.
|
| Every second adds up for repetitive tasks.
| ghshephard wrote:
| The power is only relevant because it makes the machine
| quite in a compact form. If you've got a bit of space,
| then a water cooled system accomplishes a lot of the same
| thing. For some people there is an aesthetic element.
|
| Power does make a big difference in data centers though -
| it's often the case that you run out of power before you
| run out of rack space.
|
| Where power for a computer might make a difference could
| be in power-constrained (solar/off grid) scenarios.
|
| I don't know if I've ever heard anyone make an argument
| based on $$$.
| altcognito wrote:
| The only reason I've ever cared about watts is that
| generally speaking 120 watt and 180 watt processors
| require more complicated cooling solutions. That's less
| true today than it ever was. Cases are designed for
| things like liquid cooling, and they tend to be pretty
| silent. The processors stay cool, and are pretty
| reliable.
|
| I personally stick to the lower wattage ones because I
| don't generally need high end stuff, so I think Apple is
| going the right direction here, but it should be noted
| that Intel has also started down the path of high
| performance and efficiency cores already. AMD will find
| itself there too if it turns out that for home use, we
| just don't need a ton of cores, but instead a small group
| of fast cores surrounded by a bunch of specialist cores.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Air coolers can handle 300 watts without any complexity.
| Just a big block of fins on heat pipes.
| altcognito wrote:
| I mean, yeah, but then you've got case issues and
| whatnot. I appreciate your point though.
| paulmd wrote:
| wattage doesn't really tell you how difficult it is to
| cool a part anymore. 11th-gen Intel is really easy to
| cool despite readily going to 200W+. Zen3 is hard to cool
| even at 60W.
|
| Thermal density plays a huge role, the size of the chips
| is going down faster than the wattage, so thermal density
| is going up every generation even if you keep the same
| number of transistors. And everyone is still putting more
| transistors on their chips as they shrink.
|
| Going forward this is only going to get more complicated
| - I am very interested to see how the 5800X3D does in
| terms of thermals with a cache die over the top of the
| CCD (compute die). But anyway that style of thing seem to
| be the future - NVIDIA is also rumored to be using a
| cache die over the top of their Ada/Lovelace
| architecture. And obviously 60W direct to the IHS is
| easier to cool than 60W that has to be pulled through a
| cache die in the middle.
| altcognito wrote:
| The Zen 3 stock coolers work pretty well. I've never had
| a problem.
|
| Looking it up though I do see a lot of concerns with the
| heat they generate. I can only conclude I don't push my
| chip very hard (which, honestly, I probably don't)
|
| I've been happy with the AMDs I purchased over the past 4
| years, we'll see how they hold up and how this next gen
| comes out. I did see that the recent Intels are quite
| competitive which is good for everybody.
| paulmd wrote:
| yup, the correct answer here is people need to stop being
| worried about the thermals as a metric in themselves, and
| look at the performance their chip is generating. If your
| chip is running at 90C, but you're hitting 100
| ScoreMarks, and attaching a 5hp chiller to it lets you
| hit 105 ScoreMarks, that's not really worth it.
|
| Yeah, longevity, blah blah, but laptop chips are designed
| to sit above 90C under load, it's fine.
|
| Just saying that "how hard it is to cool" doesn't solely
| depend on power consumption anymore. Heat density is
| making that harder and harder, even if power consumption
| stays the same.
|
| What does improve though is how much heat it pumps into
| your room. Yeah, a Rocket Lake at 200W might be roughly
| as hard to cool as an AMD at 90W or whatever... but one
| is still putting 200W into your room and the other is
| still putting 90W. Temperatures are not the same thing as
| _power dissipation_ either. I don 't like having my
| gaming PC running in my room during the summer, and I'm
| actually looking at maybe running cables through the
| walls to have it in the basement instead. I also have a
| 5700G and some NUCs that are much lower power that I
| prefer to use for surfing and shitposting.
| chaostheory wrote:
| It doesn't matter. Speaking as an Apple cult member imo
| Threadripper is better value if you're not using the machine
| for personal use.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| My 1st gen 16 core Threadripper is _barely_ faster than an M1
| Pro /Max at kernel builds, so a 64 core TR3 should handily
| double the M1 Ultra performance.
|
| But you know, I'm still happy to double my current build perf
| in a small box I can stick in my closet. Ordered one :-)
| mhh__ wrote:
| How many threads are actually getting utilized in those
| kernel builds? I don't work on the kernel enough to have
| intuition in mind but people make wildly optimistic
| assumptions about how compilation stresses processors.
|
| Also 1st gen threadrippers are getting on a bit now, surely.
| It's a ~6 year old microarchitecture.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Kernel compilation can be heavily parallelized.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| All of them. The CPU graph is pegged for most of the
| compilation.
| enedil wrote:
| Kernel has thousands of compilation units. Each of them is
| compiled by a separate compiler process. Only the linking
| at the end doesn't parallelise, however it should take a
| much smaller part of the time. The proportions change of
| course, if you develop kernel and do incremental builds
| lots of times. Then the linking stage might become a
| bottleneck.
|
| The above statement should also relate to most other C/C++
| projects.
| nextos wrote:
| Yes, it'd be interesting to see this comparison made with
| current AMD CPUs and a full build that has approximately
| the same price.
|
| I am curious whether there is a real performance
| difference?
|
| I do lots of computing on high-end workstations. Intel
| builds used to be extremely expensive if you required ECC.
| They used that to discriminate prices. Recent AMD offerings
| helped enormously. I wonder whether these M1 offerings are
| a significant improvement in terms of performance, making
| it worthwhile to cope with the hassle of switching
| architectures?
| modzu wrote:
| but do the m1s have ecc?
| manmal wrote:
| I wouldn't automatically expect a linear decrease in compile
| time with growing core count. That would have to be tried.
| gtvwill wrote:
| Thaxll wrote:
| Well compare that to a 400$ CPU like a 5900x, the first M1 is
| slower than this one and cost 2x the price.
| [deleted]
| cehrlich wrote:
| Seems like for things that are: 1. Perfectly parallel 2. Not
| accelerated by some of the other stuff that's on the Apple
| Silicon SoC's ...it will be a toss-up.
|
| Threadripper 3990X get about 25k in Geekbench Multicore [1]
|
| M1 Max gets about 12.5k in Geekbench Multicore, so pretty much
| exactly half [2]
|
| Obviously different tasks will have _vastly_ different
| performance profiles. For example it's likely that the M1 Ultra
| will blow the Threadripper out of the water for video stuff,
| whereas Threadripper is likely to win certain types of
| compiling.
|
| There's also the upcoming 5995WX which will be even faster: [3]
|
| [1] https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-
| threadrip...
|
| [2]
| https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q...
|
| [3] https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-
| threadripper-p...
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| Something is seriously fishy about those geekbench results.
|
| 24-core scores 20k, 32-core scores 22.3k, and 64-core score
| 25k. Something isn't scaling there.
| e4e78a06 wrote:
| Many GB5 (and real world) tasks are memory bandwidth
| bottlenecked, which greatly favors M1 Max because it has
| over double a Threadripper's memory bandwidth.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| Sort of. The CPU complex of the M1 Max can achieve ~200
| GB/s, you can only hit the 400 GB/s mark by getting the
| GPU involved.
|
| At the same time the Threadrippers also have a gargantuan
| amount of cache that can be accessed at several hundred
| gigabytes per second per core. Obviously not as nice as
| being able to hit DRAM at that speed.
| e4e78a06 wrote:
| That cache is not uniform time access. It costs over
| 100ns to cross the IO die to access another die's L3,
| almost as much as going to main memory. In practice you
| have to treat it as 8 separate 32 MB L3 caches.
|
| Also, not everything fits into cache.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Probably it's the thermals that don't scale. The more the
| cores, the lower the the peak performance per core.
| enneff wrote:
| Yeah, it's the real world tasks that GeekBench tries to
| simulate that don't tend to scale linearity with processor
| count. A lot of software does not take good advantage of
| multiple cores.
| fivea wrote:
| > A lot of software does not take good advantage of
| multiple cores.
|
| It sounds pointless to come up with synthetic benchmarks
| which emulate software that is not able to handle
| hardware, and then use said synthetic benchmarks to
| evaluate the hardware performance.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| It has a very specific point: communicating performance
| to people who don't know hardware.
|
| Most consumers are software aware, not hardware aware.
| They care what they _will_ use the hardware for, not what
| they _can_ use it for. To that end, benchmarks that
| correlate with their experience are more useful than a
| tuned BLAS implementation.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| That's certainly true. But if that's your workload you
| shouldn't be buying a 64-core CPU...
|
| I use a few 32 and 64 core machines for build servers and
| file servers, and while the 64-core EPYCs are not twice
| as fast as the 32-core ones due to lower overall
| frequency, they're 70% or so faster in most of the things
| I throw at them.
| brigade wrote:
| Does Geekbench actually attempt to simulate that in their
| multi-core score? And how?
|
| I was under the impression that all of their multi-core
| tests were "run N independent copies of the single-
| threaded test", just like SPECrate does.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Geekbench is extremely sensitive to the OS. Like the same CPU
| on Windows & Linux score _wildly_ different on Geekbench. For
| example the 3990X regularly hits 35k multicore geekbench when
| run on Linux: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/11237183
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Also of note is that half of the Mac Studio's case is
| dedicated to cooling. Up to this point, all M1 Max benchmarks
| are within laptops while all Threadripper benchmarks are in
| desktops. The M1 Max in the Mac Studio will probably perform
| better than expected.
| tacLog wrote:
| This is sound logic and probably be the case but I wonder
| if this effect will be less than what we have seen in the
| past because of the reduced TDP of the M1 processors in
| general.
|
| Maybe the cooling and power delivery difference between
| laptop formfactors and PC formfactors will be less with
| these new arm based chips.
| ip26 wrote:
| Maybe; every chip hits a point where feeding in more power
| doesn't make it go any faster.
|
| If I was to guess, the increased cooling probably helps the
| Studio sustain similar boost clocks as the laptops, but for
| longer.
|
| Although it's possible these are on N4x, which might
| increase the attainable boost.
| runako wrote:
| Having not seen benchmarks, I would imagine that claimed memory
| bandwidth of ~800 GB/s vs Threadripper's claimed ~166 GB/s
| would make a significant difference for a number of real-world
| workloads.
| paulmd wrote:
| Someone will probably chime in and correct me (such is the
| way of the internet - Cunningham's Law in action) but I don't
| think the CPU itself can access all 800 GB/s? I think someone
| in one of the previous M1 Pro/Max threads mentioned that
| several of the memory channels on Pro/Max are dedicated for
| the GPU. So you can't just get a 800 GB/s postgres server
| here.
|
| You could still write OpenCL kernels of course. Doesn't mean
| you _can 't_ use it, but not sure if it's all just accessible
| to CPU-side code.
|
| (or maybe it is? it's still a damn fast piece of hardware
| either way)
| runako wrote:
| Fascinating!
|
| Linking this[1] because TIL that the memory bandwidth
| number is more about the SoC as a whole. The discussion in
| the article is interesting because they are actively trying
| to saturate the memory bandwidth. Maybe the huge bandwidth
| is a relevant factor for the real-world uses of a machine
| called "Studio" that retails for over $3,000, but not as
| much for people running postgres?
|
| 1 - https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-
| performanc...
| crest wrote:
| On an M1 Max MacBook Pro the CPU (8P+2E) cores peak at a
| combined ~240GB/s the rest of the advertised 400GB/s memory
| bandwidth is only useable by the other bus masters e.g.
| GPU, NPU, video encoding/decoding etc.
| paulmd wrote:
| So now the follow-on question I really wanted to ask: if
| the CPU can't access all the memory channels does that
| mean it can only address a fraction of the total memory
| as CPU memory? Or is it a situation where all the
| channels go into a controller/bus, but the CPU link out
| of the controller is only wide enough to handle a
| fraction of the bandwidth?
| brigade wrote:
| It's more akin to how on Intel, each core's L2 has some
| maximum bandwidth to LLC, and can't individually saturate
| the total bandwidth available on the ring bus. But Intel
| doesn't have the LLC <-> RAM bandwidth for that to be
| generally noticeable.
| kiratp wrote:
| My workstation has a 3990x.
|
| Our "world" build is slightly faster on my M1 Max.
|
| https://twitter.com/kiratpandya/status/1457438725680480257
|
| The 3990x runs a bit faster on the initial compile stage but
| the linking is single threaded and the M1 Max catches up at
| that point. I expect the M1 Ultra to crush the 3990x on compile
| time.
| howinteresting wrote:
| Try mold.
| petecooper wrote:
| >Try mold
|
| Curiosity got the better of me:
|
| https://github.com/rui314/mold
| kiratp wrote:
| We plan to move to it once MacOS support lands (for the
| laptops).
| zerd wrote:
| From the tweet reply you used sccache with hot cache, which
| would probably be mostly single-threaded since it's just
| fetching and copying things from cache.
| kiratp wrote:
| I'm not trying to compare the details of SOC performance.
|
| Just that with the same hot caches, the average change-
| build-test loop that developers do 100+ times a day is just
| faster on the M1 Max.
| daniel-grigg wrote:
| Do you have any benchmarks of the two to share against a mean
| to ensure its built optimally? Maybe something like
| https://opendata.blender.org ? It's painful hearing random
| anecdotes only to learn the person didn't apply thermal paste
| to their cpu.
| atq2119 wrote:
| Are both cases compiling to the same target architecture? If
| not, you may well be comparing the relative performance of
| different compiler backends instead of comparing the
| performance of your CPUs.
|
| (+ now I see it's rust: how parallel is your build, really?)
| kiratp wrote:
| The target arch doesn't matter for the change-build-test
| loop d vs do. All that matters is how fast can you compile
| your code to test it.
|
| If the final x86 production build takes longer it doesn't
| matter - that happens on the cloud anyway.
|
| Edit: Rust builds are very parallel until linking. No
| different than any other LLVM build.
| runeks wrote:
| > The target arch doesn't matter for the change-build-
| test loop d vs do.
|
| It matters when comparing CPU performance, which is what
| this benchmark is being used for.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| that the arm backend is faster to compile for is a legit
| advantage for the developer though, even if its distinct
| from cpu perf
| ripley12 wrote:
| > now I see it's rust: how parallel is your build, really?
|
| Not the OP but I install a lot of Rust projects with Cargo
| and recently did some benchmarking on DigitalOcean's
| compute-optimized VMs. Going from 8 cores to 32 cores was a
| little disappointing:
|
| Bat (~40 crates): 68s -> 61s
|
| Nushell (486 crates): 157s -> 106s
|
| Compilation starts out highly parallel and then quickly
| drops down to a small number of cores.
| zamalek wrote:
| Intel was the single-threaded king until Zen3, so that's no
| real surprise.
|
| Try the same thing with mold.
| fivea wrote:
| > The 3990x runs a bit faster on the initial compile stage
| but the linking is single threaded and the M1 Max catches up
| at that point.
|
| Isn't linking IO-bound?
| codeflo wrote:
| For a clean build and a reasonably specced machine, all the
| intermediate artifacts will still be in the cache during
| linking.
| kiratp wrote:
| Exposing my limited understanding of that level of the
| computing stack - it is but Apple seems to have very very
| good caching strategies - filesystem and L1/2/3.
|
| https://llvm.org/devmtg/2017-10/slides/Ueyama-lld.pdf
|
| There is a breakdown in those slides discussing what parts
| of lld are single threaded and hard to parallelize so I
| suspect single thread performance plays a big role too. I
| generally observe one core pegged during linking.
| fivea wrote:
| > Exposing my limited understanding of that level of the
| computing stack - it is but Apple seems to have very very
| good caching strategies - filesystem and L1/2/3.
|
| That would mean that these comparisons between
| Threadripper and the M1 Ultra do not reflect CPU
| performance but instead showcase whatever choice of SSD
| they've been using.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| L1/2/3 are CPU caches, not SSD. Though there is a good
| chance these are mostly firmware optimizations, not
| hardware. So still not an apples-to-apples comparison of
| cpu design.
| fivea wrote:
| > L1/2/3 are CPU caches, not SSD.
|
| Why did you omit the reference to "file system"?
|
| Are we supposed to ignore the fact that a linker's main
| job is reading object files and write the output to a
| file?
|
| I find this sort of argument particularly comical given a
| very old school technique to speed up compilation is to
| use a RAM drive to store the build's output.
| astrange wrote:
| By firmware you mean microcode, but I don't think either
| of those actually use microcode to control this.
| nicoburns wrote:
| https://github.com/rui314/mold would suggest otherwise.
| Massive speedups by multithreading the linker. I think
| traditional linkers just aren't highly optimised.
| fivea wrote:
| > https://github.com/rui314/mold would suggest otherwise.
|
| Does it, though?
|
| I mean, if you read that link you'll notice it boasts the
| linker's performance by comparing it with cp and how it's
| "so fast that it is only 2x slower than cp on the same
| machine."
|
| Is cp supposed to be CPU-bound?
| nicoburns wrote:
| Yes, but that's for mold, which _is_ multithreaded. The
| original context of this thread being the question of
| whether a linker would see speedups from multithreading.
| Most people are using traditional single-threaded linkers
| which are an order of magnitude slower than mold. The
| fact that mold is so much faster suggests that a linker
| does indeed see big speedups from multithreading.
| rsynnott wrote:
| The data the linker is running on will generally largely
| be in memory (in their posted example, which is a warm
| compile, completely in memory).
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| It is worth noting that it has, at least according to Apple's
| graphs, slightly more than an RTX 3090 in graphics performance.
|
| So, even if it doesn't quite beat Threadripper in the CPU
| department - it will absolutely _annihilate_ Threadripper in
| anything graphics-related.
|
| For this reason, I don't actually have a problem with Apple
| calling it the fastest. Yes, Threadripper might be marginally
| faster in real-world work that uses the CPU, but other tasks
| like video editing, graphics, it won't be anywhere near close.
| komuher wrote:
| It wont be even close to RTX 3090 looking at m1 max and using
| same scaling maximum it can be close to 3070 performance.
|
| We all need to take Apple claims with grain of salt as they
| are always cherrypicked so i wont be surprise if it wont be
| even 3070 performance in real usage.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| I'm obviously going to reserve judgement until people can get
| their hands on them. Apple makes good stuff but their keynote
| slides are typically heavily cherrypicked (e.g. our video
| performance numbers compare our dedicated ASIC to software
| encoding on a different architecture even though competing
| ASICs exist kinds of things).
| Transisto wrote:
| Interesting how so many of their benchmarks are based on the
| number of 8k stream they can playback or edit at once but OSX
| doesn't support outputting to 8K resolution. Most likely crippled
| until Apple come up with their own 8K monitors.
| mst wrote:
| The new Studio Display appears to be 5K so it wouldn't surprise
| me if the second generation of that will be 8K,
| slapslash wrote:
| The word ULTRA appears 82 times on that page.
| tough wrote:
| I'm waiting for the MK Ultra
| spacexsucks wrote:
| gtvwill wrote:
| randyrand wrote:
| These CPU names are terrible. When did Apple get bad at naming
| things?
| mrcwinn wrote:
| Pro, Max, Ultra.
|
| The board has been set. M1 Endgame is nearly ready.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| With Ultra Fusion....UltraFabric next to stack them all
| vertically.
| jmull wrote:
| Superman could've kicked the crap out of Ultraman, just FYI.
| [deleted]
| neycoda wrote:
| I really wish popular companies would focus more on software
| optimization than hardware renovations. It's really sad to see
| how fast products die due to increasingly bloated and overly-
| complex software.
| zwaps wrote:
| So then, when will common ML frameworks work on Apple? I guess
| compiled Tensorflow works with some plugins or whatever, where
| afaik performance is still subpar. Apple emphasizes that they
| have this many Tensorcores... but unfortunately to use them one
| has to roll one's own framework on what Swift or something. I am
| sure it gets better soon.
| contingencies wrote:
| Desktop marketing seems to be getting desperate. Few people use
| the apps they show in the Mac Studio benchmarks. Fewer still care
| that their chips use less power... if they did, they would stay
| on their phones.
| etchalon wrote:
| The "few people" who use those apps are the people Apple is
| selling these systems to.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Large businesses do. I bet in some places you could get
| grant/loan incentives to replace a PC fleet with these things.
|
| Back in the Pentium-4 days, iirc I was able to get almost $250k
| in grants and $1.5M in subsidized loans to do accelerated
| refresh of a PC fleet and small datacenter, all through a
| utility's peak load reduction program.
| contingencies wrote:
| I don't deny such things happen but it's illogical. If you
| have 20 people on desktops a small fraction of them will use
| more energy for microwaving lunch, making coffee or on air
| conditioning than they will save in aggregate on this nominal
| reduction in power draw.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Microwaving lunch: 2 minutes at 800W; desktop with monitor:
| 8 hours at 150W, that is 45 times higher. Similar for
| coffee, no simple math for AC. If you can reduce 150W to
| 80W, it is both significant and achievable - this is what
| my desktop usually draws.
| contingencies wrote:
| You forget these things sit ~idle (or at browser load)
| 99% of the time. The magnitude of difference only
| expresses at peak consumption. Furthermore, what about
| the lost time/hassle for changeover plus embodied energy
| in throwing out the last system? It's insanity.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The average corporate PC device gets replaced every 39
| months.
|
| Acceleration of that cycle with a Mac replacement, which
| usually has a 50-60 month lifecycle, is a pretty
| significant savings.
| contingencies wrote:
| If those are real figures that's a good point :) I think
| we're well in to pedantry now. Call a somnambulance :)
| dddddddan wrote:
| How is it nominal? The current MacPro (which most of the
| target market would already be using) has a power supply
| that is >1kW. It's insane that this this is faster than the
| existing MacPro with a tiny power draw in comparison.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 20, yes, it's a waste of time. At 2000, reducing power
| consumption by 30%, may yield $100k annually.
| [deleted]
| yoloyoloyoloa wrote:
| MKUltra was a better chip
| pkaye wrote:
| I wonder if the project codename was MK Ultra?
| [deleted]
| danielktdoranie wrote:
| Pretty God damn impressive. I have a MacBook Air w/ the M1 and
| 16GB and it's more computer than I need for my work flows. Work
| gave me a MacBook Pro 16" M1 Max w/ a 10-Core CPU, 32-Core GPU,
| 64GB Unified Memory... it is a monster.
|
| Intel's got a lot of work to do to catch up. I think the only way
| Intel will catch up is to completely embrace RISC-V
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Ugh really wish that a non-Apple vendor could make an ARM chip of
| this calibre. Jealous but cat bring myself to use a proprietary
| OS and get locked into Apple.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| There is always Asahi Linux
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Last I heard not all of the chipset's features are working in
| Linux yet...
| nano9 wrote:
| My concern is cooling. Any reason to believe that this new chip
| will run cool and not be drowned in thermal paste when installed?
| My Intel i7 Macbook Pro loves to idle at 65 C, and some light
| browsing will kick that up to 80 C, which worries me.
| kristianp wrote:
| I wonder what clock rate the studio runs these chips at with the
| extra cooling. Frustrating that the marketing materials don't
| mention that.
| top_sigrid wrote:
| This is a very little discussed question but one of the most
| interesting unknowns I think.
|
| The pro and max come only in laptops, so the cooling difference
| should be quite significant, but also there is more chip and an
| interconnect to cool. Really looking forward to the in depth
| analysis of this.
| hobobaggins wrote:
| What are people doing with these CPUs on a _desktop_? I 'm just
| watching videos, surfing, and doing some programming -- on a 5
| year old Ryzen with 32GB and it seems perfectly fine. For my
| productivity needs, performance is mostly about I/O speed and so
| switching to SSD and then NVME was the biggest boost for me
| (Linux at work).
|
| When I get home, it's all about the GPU on my gaming PC
| (Windows). It's just that CPU just doesn't seem to be a huge
| bottleneck for me on the desktop anymore. Are Mac's different
| somehow where they need more CPU?
| Gigachad wrote:
| The Mac studio seems targeted at pro users doing things like
| video editing and CAD. The M1 regular is good but its
| insufficient in a lot of ways. It can only power one video
| output, it's capped at 16GB memory, and if you try to do
| anything sufficiently demanding like gaming, it really shows
| its limits.
|
| If you are doing CAD, things like fluid/particle physics
| simulations can really slam the CPU. The M1 Ultra isn't
| marketed to the normal user just doing some web browsing. Its
| the top tier chip for people who find the M1 insufficient.
| Kelteseth wrote:
| For compiling c++ code, this really matters. At home, I have a
| 16 core 5950x and at the office an 8 core 2700x, and it is a
| night and day difference. Even if it's just a few minutes of
| compile time, it creates a different mindset. At home: Yeah,
| let's just recompile and see the changes. At the office: Oh no
| I have to recompile, let's go to the kitchen and grab a coffee
| or so, I have the time.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Apple have some serious chip design abilities. Imagine if they
| entered the server market, with this architecture it could be
| very successful.
| jamesfmilne wrote:
| My guess is they will launch their own cloud platform powered
| by Apple Silicon.
|
| Click & deploy from within Xcode (I hate Xcode though.)
| throwawayboise wrote:
| They tried that before and flopped.
|
| The server market is different. Companies buy servers from the
| low bidder. Apple has never really played in that market.
| flatiron wrote:
| People care about performance per watt now. So they could
| compete. The real question is if they would support Linux. In
| our containerized world I can't see their servers getting
| super big running macOS
| greenknight wrote:
| The reason they dominate at PPW, is because they are on
| TSMCs 5nm process. No one else has made a cpu chip on this
| process yet. AMD are scheduled for later this year (they
| are currently using 7nm).
|
| It will be interesting to see the difference in performance
| and performance per watt, when both companies are on the
| same node.
| flatiron wrote:
| Arm I believe helps a bit as well.
| Sporktacular wrote:
| No, it's hetrogeneity, system integration, pipeline width
| and instruction set as well.
| ip26 wrote:
| Well, that's a relief then, all any data center needs to
| run these days is Apple's wide-ranging suite of in house
| services, such as applache, dovewin, pOSXgres, and
| SAPple.
| Sporktacular wrote:
| In the context of the server market of course you're
| right. But the idea that it's a given that AMD, Intel
| have similar PPW chips on the way still using the x86
| architecture, is not correct. There's going to be more to
| it than node size.
| hajile wrote:
| Apple's older 7nm chips still handily beat out Zen on the
| same 7nm process in performance by watt (and it's not
| even close).
| macintux wrote:
| Companies also want to know that the server OS is going to be
| a long-term play. Apple would have a long way to go if they
| wanted to try that again.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| This is pretty true. While people who buy racks consider
| vertical improvements they tend to think laterally and how
| easy is it to expand (aka how cheap is the +1 server)
| alwillis wrote:
| That was before people cared about performance per watt.
|
| Besides for some use cases, these Mac Studios will be racked
| and in data centers as is.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Haha, bloody hell, what a monster of a chip. I find my M1 Max
| already remarkably fast. The change is so huge. It's like in the
| old days when you'd get a new computer and it felt like it could
| do things before you could think of doing them.
|
| But surely the GPU things can't be real? The GPU in the M1 Ultra
| beats the top-of-the-line Nvidia? That's nuts.
| acchow wrote:
| > The GPU in the M1 Ultra beats the top-of-the-line Nvidia?
| That's nuts.
|
| We don't know yet. Apple is benchmarking against Workstation
| graphics cards
|
| "production 2.5GHz 28-core Intel Xeon W-based Mac Pro systems
| with 384GB of RAM and AMD Radeon Pro W6900X graphics with 32GB
| of GDDR6"
| sercand wrote:
| > Highest-end discrete GPU performance data tested from Core
| i9-12900K with DDR5 memory and GeForce RTX 3090.
|
| From the linked article. Apple is comparing against RTX 3090.
| lastdong wrote:
| Nvidia 3090, I wonder what Relative Performance equates to.
|
| Can't wait for the (real world) reviews to be published
| lastdong wrote:
| Just to add in any case Apple is solving a big problem
| related to limited GPU memory, which is quite cool
|
| Hopefully AMD, Nvidia, others can follow the trend
| bkyiuuMbF wrote:
| > But surely the GPU things can't be real? The GPU in the M1
| Ultra beats the top-of-the-line Nvidia?
|
| Dubious. https://www.pcgamer.com/apple-m1-max-nvidia-
| rtx-3080-perform...
| xsmasher wrote:
| Just for clarity, that article is about the M1 Pro and the M1
| Max chips from October.
| brutal_boi wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > Apple even says its new GPU is a match for Nvidia's RTX
| 3080 mobile chip, though you'll have to take Apple's word for
| it on that one. We've also reached out to Nvidia to see what
| it might have to say on the matter.
|
| > RTX 3080 mobile chip
|
| > mobile chip
|
| There's a 50%[1] (!) difference with mobile and non-mobile
| versions of the chip. So that's hardly a deal breaker.
|
| [1] https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
| gowld wrote:
| The "mobile" scam in GPUs is terrible. Nvidia flat out lies
| about Mobile performance by giving misleading product names
| (same as the desktop names).
| LegitShady wrote:
| its beyond that. the same chip might have several tdps
| and drastic performance differences between models, such
| that a high tdp 3070 mobile is faster than a low tdp
| 3080. you end up having to get benchmarks for each
| particular laptop configuration.
| Omniusaspirer wrote:
| Based on Anandtech benchmarks the M1 Max GPU is basically on
| par with a mobile 3080, which a quick search tells me is about
| 60% as fast as a desktop 3080. Not unreasonable to believe 2 of
| them combined will outperform a 3090- with nearly 128 GB of
| VRAM to boot.
|
| Even more incredible Anandtech reports the M1 max GPU block
| maxing at 43W in their testing. So a 90W GPU in the M1 Ultra is
| trading blows with a 350+ watt 3090.
|
| 1) https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-
| performanc...
| cassac wrote:
| What on earth are you talking about. That link shows it's not
| even half as fast as the 3060, let alone the 3080.
|
| In borderlands it got 24 FPS while the 3080 got 52 FPS. How
| is that on par?
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| If you buy a Mac for gaming, you're going to have a bad
| time. Look at the GFXBench 5.0 benchmark. The first graph
| on the page.
| [deleted]
| Omniusaspirer wrote:
| Gaming benchmarks are completely irrelevant when discussing
| the actual raw power of the GPU. As the other commenter
| said- look at the actual GPU benchmark in the first graph.
|
| Legacy games written for x86 CPUs obviously are going to
| perform poorly. I recommend you actually read the review
| and don't just scroll to the worst gaming benchmark you can
| find.
| cassac wrote:
| There are only two real gaming benchmarks and they are
| both real bad for the M1. In Tomb Raider it fairs even
| worse at 4K than it does in borderlands.
|
| It's a great chip but it doesn't trade blows with
| anything Nvidia puts out especially at comparable price
| points.
|
| Maybe you buy things to run benchmarks. I buy them to run
| the software I own. For games they come up short on fps
| and high on price. That is the inverse of what I'm
| looking for.
| Omniusaspirer wrote:
| If your interest is purely in playing unoptimized games
| coded for different architectures then absolutely there's
| better options.
|
| However if your workloads are in a more professional
| domain as mine are then it's entirely fair to say this
| chip is trading blows with Nvidia's best at lower prices.
| Don't forget this is an entire SOC and not just a GPU,
| power saving aren't irrelevant either if you actually
| work your hardware consistently as I do.
| mhh__ wrote:
| > Gaming benchmarks are completely irrelevant when
| discussing the actual raw power of the GPU.
|
| Maybe, but the "raw power" is useless if it can't be
| exploited.
|
| > Legacy games written for x86 CPUs obviously are going
| to perform poorly.
|
| Not if they're GPU-bound. Even native performance isn't
| that impressive
| Omniusaspirer wrote:
| If the power is substantial enough it will get exploited
| eventually. Hopefully even if Metal ports don't occur the
| eventual Asahi-adjacent open source drivers will open the
| gaming doors.
| Macha wrote:
| GPU scaling is absolutely not linear in that way. nvidia gave
| up on that in recent generations as without software support
| to match, you had situations where double 1080s were 95% as
| fast as one 1080 with worse frame times.
|
| Might be nice for e.g. ML where you can effectively treat
| them as entirely independent GPUs but for games I would be
| surprised if this matches a high end GPU.
| vimy wrote:
| macOS will see it as one gpu.
| teilo wrote:
| Given that it's basically double the performance of the Max,
| with massive memory bandwidth, seems reasonable to me. But
| Apple always fudges things a bit. Like, which Nvidia exactly is
| this being compared to, and under what workload exactly?
| make3 wrote:
| the problem on mac is the super tiny game selection
| Thaxll wrote:
| > But surely the GPU things can't be real? The GPU in the M1
| Ultra beats the top-of-the-line Nvidia? That's nuts.
|
| People that game on Mac know it's a lie, GPU for gaming on mac
| is vastly slower than recent graphic cards.
| [deleted]
| jlouis wrote:
| Insane claims requires insane evidence. We don't have that
| there.
|
| For some workloads i would not be surprised at all. But for all
| workloads, ...
| [deleted]
| thfuran wrote:
| That thing has four times as many transistors as a 3090.
| maronato wrote:
| Although true, transistor count is only tangentially related
| to performance
| mhh__ wrote:
| Cache size is _very_ related to performance.
| thfuran wrote:
| It's certainly not the sole determinant of performance but
| given two reasonably solid designs, one with a vastly
| larger transistor budget and major node advantage to boot,
| I know which one I'd pick as likely winner.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| That counts memory, right?
| wmf wrote:
| No, but it does include cache; the M1 Ultra should have
| 96MB of cache (>6B transistors) while Nvidia GPUs have
| relatively little cache. 128GB of DRAM has 1 trillion
| transistors.
| swyx wrote:
| was surprised to learn that the CPUs and GPUs on the M1x chips
| are essentially a single unit, and for the M1 Ultra they
| basically slapped two M1's together.
|
| in traditional PC building, the CPU is quite distinct from the
| GPU. can anyone ELI5 what the benefits are to having the CPU
| closely integrated with GPU like the M1 has? seems a bit unwieldy
| but i dont know anything about computer architecture
| pram wrote:
| Every single consumer Intel processor has had a GPU on it for a
| decade.
| Koshkin wrote:
| I remember how AMD 3DNow! and Intel MMX were meant to render
| GPUs obsolete.
| MBCook wrote:
| Having everything in one unit sharing the same pool of memory
| is quite common. PCs (and older) Macs didn't do it because the
| CPU and GPU evolved as physically separate parts and sharing
| memory was too slow.
|
| I believe some Intel/AMD low power chips (non-performance
| laptops) have use this unified memory model as well.
|
| But it became extremely common on phones where there was no
| historical baggage and it was thought out from day one. I
| believe all the consoles use a unified memory layout now, but
| I'm not 100% sure.
|
| The usual limitation is you're stuck with the on-die GPU, which
| can pale in comparison to a top of the line AMD or nVidia
| board.
| tediousdemise wrote:
| How does Apple manage to blow every other computing OEM out of
| the water? What's in the secret sauce of their company?
|
| Is it great leadership? Top tier engineering talent? Lots of
| money? I simply don't understand.
| MBCook wrote:
| One thing that other people aren't mentioning here is that they
| play the long game. They took their investment in the iPhone
| and ported it over to the Macs. They learned/improved a lot in
| that time. The M1 has over a decade of history behind it, in a
| way.
|
| They have talent, they have execution, they have data about
| what rubs on macs they can use to optimize really well. But
| they have the profits and the cash reserves to make big bets
| and wait them out.
|
| I think the M1 was expected 1 or 2 years before it was
| released. But they waited. Maybe it wasn't good enough. Maybe
| the software support wasn't there. But they didn't have to push
| it out anyway and hope for the best. They could afford to wait.
|
| Maybe that makes them willing to take bigger risks. Maybe
| through history they just knew Intel slowing down would happen
| (it bit them with 68k, then PPC, then G3/4/5) and we're
| prepared in a way only done one with their own chips could be.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| marketing and a forgiving audience.
|
| You have to remember that since the 2014 retina, Apple's
| offerings have been a bit crap.
|
| This is a return to form ( and a good one at that) but its not
| worthy of hero worship. They've done a good job turning things
| around, which is very hard.
| yurishimo wrote:
| I think it's mostly engineering and the cash to make things
| happen. You heard it today in the presentation that since they
| launched M1, sales have skyrocketed for Apple computers.
|
| Hopefully leadership is really looking hard at this trend and
| adjusting future offerings accordingly. Consumers WANT machines
| with high performance and great I/O and they're willing to pay
| for them.
|
| With Apple, Intel, and AMD really stepping up the last couple
| of years, I think the next decade of personal computing is
| going to be really exciting!
| stalfosknight wrote:
| Put simply, it is vertical integration paired with management
| that is adept at playing the long game.
| [deleted]
| amilios wrote:
| D) all of the above?
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| If I had to guess, their secret sauce is that 1) they're paying
| lots of money to be on a chip fabrication node ahead of both
| AMD and Intel, 2) since their chip design is in-house, they
| don't have to pay the fat profit margin Intel and AMD want for
| their high-end processors and can therefore include what is
| effectively a more expensive processor in their systems for the
| same price, and 3) their engineering team is as good as
| AMD/Intel. Note that the first two have more to do with
| economics rather than engineering.
| [deleted]
| forgotmyoldacc wrote:
| Apple isn't an OEM? They don't sell products that are marketed
| by another company.
| xyst wrote:
| "M1 Ultra Pro Max", wen?
|
| Naming scheme aside, this is great!
| iskander wrote:
| So little memory?
|
| The now outdated Mac Pro goes up to 1.5TB, only 128GB available
| here.
| masklinn wrote:
| Their design is basically gated by the number of memory
| controllers: 1MC tops out at 16GB (M1), 2MCs for 32 (Pro), 4
| MCs for 64 (Max), and I guess 8 MCs for 128 (Ultra which is
| apparently two Maxes stapled together).
|
| Hopefully the next gen will provide more capable and flexible
| memory controllers, both so they can scale the top end for a
| full Pro-scale offering, and so there is more memory
| flexibility at the lower end e.g. the ability to get an M1 with
| 32+GB RAM, or a Pro with 64+.
| bengale wrote:
| They mentioned the Mac Pro replacement is still to come.
| Indioli wrote:
| fulafel wrote:
| "Apple's innovative packaging architecture that interconnects the
| die of two M1 Max chips to create a system on a chip (SoC)"
|
| Did they get their terminology confused? Later it says "By
| connecting two M1 Max die with our UltraFusion packaging
| architecture [...]" which also sounds like it's a MCM and not a
| SoC.
| crazypython wrote:
| Intel 12th gen i9 is 11% better at single core and 42% slower at
| multicore. https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-
| intel_core_i9_1290...
|
| For most non-parallel tasks, my guess is the Intel 12900K will
| beat at performance.
|
| Intel's next generation will have 50% more cores and beat this
| chip at multithreading.
| birthday wrote:
| OK Microsoft, it's time to get started with Visual Studio ARM
| support.
|
| We need to be able to run it properly in a Windows ARM VM on the
| M1 chips!
| teilo wrote:
| And overnight, Intel's Ice Lake is again way behind.
| pjmlp wrote:
| 80% of the desktop market and 100% of cloud deployments won't
| care.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Would 80% of "the desktop market"--whatever that means--care
| about Ice Lake to begin with, or any high end chip at all?
| pjmlp wrote:
| What they definitely won't care is Apple hardware at Apple
| prices, specially outside first world countries.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Ya but they never have, and it seems a bit irrelevant in
| the context of this particular product. I'd see that
| being relevant if it was supposed to be a product with
| extremely broad appeal, but it isn't that even _for_
| first world countries.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It it relevant in the context that people keep
| celebrating M1 as if Apple would take over the whole
| computing world.
| manquer wrote:
| Desktop will care about noise of the fans.
|
| Data centers are also pretty conscious of power consumption,
| more power means more cooling infra required and higher
| energy bill, while it is not the top priority it certainly is
| a significant factor in decision making.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Buying M1 chips from Apple isn't happening.
| manquer wrote:
| Not chips, servers. Apple has sold those before.
| fastball wrote:
| I dunno, I think cloud is starting to think more and more
| about power consumption of the chips used, where Apple
| Silicon blows the competition out of the water.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Let us know when Apple starts a cloud business.
| Thaxll wrote:
| PC user don't pay 4k for a computer, on PC you can get 2x the
| speed for 2x less the price.
| samatman wrote:
| Link me to the $2K computer that's twice as fast as the M1
| Ultra. Take all the time you need.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| > Take all the time you need
|
| Check your replies in 10 years and I'll be able to list a
| dozen ;P
|
| But sarcasm aside yeah this chip looks insane.
| Thaxll wrote:
| It took less than 6month to have a faster amd / intel CPU
| than the m1 back then, Apple charts are showing
| performance / watt which for a desktop PC is kind of
| irrelevant. In pure speed amd / intel are faster or will
| be very soon.
|
| For graphic card I don't try to argue because fps on Mac
| are very inferior in games than a average modern card.
| It's not even on the same league.
| jamesy0ung wrote:
| > For graphic card I don't try to argue because fps on
| Mac are very inferior in games than a average modern
| card. It's not even on the same league.
|
| The M1 is as fast as the 1650. I'm getting great frame
| rates at 1440P High on X-Plane
|
| > It took less than 6month to have a faster amd / intel
| CPU than the m1 back then, Apple charts are showing
| performance / watt which for a desktop PC is kind of
| irrelevant. In pure speed amd / intel are faster or will
| be very soon.
|
| Perf/Watt is very relevant. Electricity costs money and
| you also want a cool room.
| ishansharma wrote:
| May I ask the $2000 desktop configuration with 2x the speed?
|
| Of course Apple chips won't work well for gaming, but what
| other benchmarks will this $2000 desktop win?
| joshstrange wrote:
| > PC user don't pay 4k for a computer
|
| I'm almost certain that's not true, especially for machines
| that would compete with the Studio
|
| > on PC you can get 2x the speed for 2x less the price.
|
| Citation needed. This hasn't been true for a long time as far
| as I can tell.
| [deleted]
| maronato wrote:
| This hasn't been true since M1's release
| Thaxll wrote:
| A CPU like the 5900x is better than the m1 and cost 400$.
| astrange wrote:
| I own one and it's worse because I had to go and read
| random forum guides to learn about undervolting so
| Windows would stop turning the fan on and off constantly.
| yurishimo wrote:
| That's one part of the equation though, not to mention
| it's a desktop chip. I can get a laptop with an M1 Max
| with hours of battery life running full tilt.
|
| Your $400 CPU needs at least another $1000 in parts just
| to boot (and those aren't even the parts you likely want
| to pair with it).
|
| Your cost comparison is silly. Nobody compares singular
| CPUs to entire machines.
| Thaxll wrote:
| People seem to think that the M1 is the ubber thing in
| term of performance which is not, it's great on many
| aspect, especially termal / perf per watt etc ... but for
| many it's a PC sitting bellow your desk it's less
| relevant. For laptop it's a different story.
| mhh__ wrote:
| If you're going to be smug why not use a recent Intel chip?
| adfgadfgaery wrote:
| Ice Lake shipped in 2019. The current generation is Alder Lake,
| which is slightly ahead of the M1 in single-threaded
| performance according to most benchmarks.
| teilo wrote:
| My bad. I meant Alder Lake.
| sharikous wrote:
| And massively behind in terms of power consuption
| adfgadfgaery wrote:
| Yes, certainly. I don't think that's relevant in this case,
| though. Why would anyone care if their workstation CPU
| draws 60W or 200W? It's easy to cool in either case and the
| power consumption is trivial.
|
| M1 is clearly the best design on the market for mobile
| devices and is merely _very good_ for desktops. Let 's keep
| the enthusiasm realistic.
| manquer wrote:
| Higher power means more cooling, which usually means more
| noise. A lot of people find value in quieter machines.
| secondcoming wrote:
| >Why would anyone care if their workstation CPU draws 60W
| or 200W?
|
| I care. I work from home and my main power sink is my
| desktop. Considering the soaring energy prices these days
| I really do care about what my usage is.
| abletonlive wrote:
| You say it's easy to cool but that's actually not the
| case, for anybody that cares about noise. Any music
| studio is going to happily take the 60W over 200W because
| they record and monitor music and need the quietest
| machine possible in the room.
|
| Unsurprisingly, it's called Mac _Studio_ , as in music
| studio, or art studio, or what have you studio, where
| these things matter.
|
| This is a machine aimed at content creators.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Its behind M1 but it's worth pointing out that Alder Lake
| is not a power-hog on "normal" workloads i.e. gaming when
| compared to it's other X86 competitors. It only starts
| cooking itself on extremely heavy workloads.
| didip wrote:
| The power leveling in this chip's naming scheme can rival Dragon
| Ball Z.
| amne wrote:
| How many CUDA cores? It's over ninethousaaaaa .. oh wait
| nevermind!
| Jetrel wrote:
| I for one am holding out for the ULTRA GIGA chips.
| willis936 wrote:
| My first thought was "does it include an LSD subscription?".
| ccwilson10 wrote:
| I wish HN was like this more often
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Be the comments you want to see in the HN
| et-al wrote:
| I don't.
|
| There's already Reddit if you want to crack puns and farm
| karma. Let's try to keep the signal:noise ratio higher here.
| rpmisms wrote:
| I appreciate that it's infrequent. Sure, it's fun to blow off
| some steam and have a laugh, but that's fundamentally not
| what this place is about. Confining it to Apple release
| threads makes it more of a purge scenario.
| technocratius wrote:
| I really hope it won't. Let's cherish the high quality
| comments of HN. Once this comment section becomes a karma-fed
| race to the bottom driven by who can make the most memeable
| jokes, it will never recover. Case in point: Reddit.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| the M1-O9000
| t_mann wrote:
| Would be interesting to get more info on the neural engine. On
| one hand, I find it fascinating that major manufacturers are now
| putting neural architectures into mainstream hardware.
|
| On the other hand I wonder what exactly it can do. To what degree
| are you tied into a specific neural architecture (eg recurrent vs
| convolutional), what APIs are available for training it, if it's
| even meant to be used that way (not just by Apple-provided
| featues lke FaceID)?
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| It's a general purpose accelerator. You have coremltools[1] to
| convert your trained model into a format or you can make your
| own using CreateML[2].
|
| [1] https://coremltools.readme.io/docs
|
| [2] https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/create-ml/
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Typical "neural engines" are intended for real-time network
| inference, not training. Training is highly parallel and
| benefits more from GPU-like vector processing.
| mlajtos wrote:
| Apple is pushing for training & fine-tuning on the devices
| too.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreml/model_custo.
| ..
| slimsag wrote:
| They're doing quite a lot of work here:
|
| https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/
|
| https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/create-ml/
|
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/createml
| slmjkdbtl wrote:
| Curious about the naming here, terms like "pro" "pro max" "max",
| "ultra" (hopefully there's no "pro ultra" and "ultra max" in the
| future) is very confusing and hard to know which one is more
| powerful than which, or if it's a power-level relationship. Is
| this on purpose or it's just bad naming? Is there example of good
| naming for this kind of situation?
| thfuran wrote:
| As long as Asahi Linux is in good working order by the time the
| M3 Plus Ultra: Max Quantum Pro releases, I'll get one despite
| the name.
| ip26 wrote:
| It probably is on purpose. They all sound positive, full of
| goodness and speeds and synergies for today's hip
| intelligentsia ( _which could be you!_ ). You didn't settle for
| a MacBook with a harvested midrange chip, no, that's a _pro_
| under your fingertips. What does that mean? Doesn't matter, it
| makes you feel good.
|
| It works for them because most of their products have only one
| or maybe two choices. It would never fly for white box sales,
| but Apple is not in that market.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I think the naming is based entirely around how the
| announcement sentence lands in the keynote. So they've
| optimized for "We're adding one last chip to the M1 family, and
| it's gonna blow your mind... (M1 Ultra appears on screen)".
| polyrand wrote:
| I think the GPU claims are interesting. According to the graph's
| footer, the M1 Ultra was compared to an RTX 3090. If the
| performance/wattage claims are correct, I'm wondering if the Mac
| Studio could become an "affordable" personal machine learning
| workstation (which also won't make the electricity bill
| skyrocket).
|
| If Pytorch becomes stable and easy to use on Apple Silicon
| [0][1], it could be an appealing choice.
|
| [0]:
| https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/47702#issuecomment...
| [1]: https://nod.ai/pytorch-m1-max-gpu/
| whoisburbansky wrote:
| Cursory look gives you a ~$3500 price tag for a gaming PC with
| a 3090 [1], vs. at least $4k for a Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra.
| Roughly the same ballpark, but I wouldn't call the M1 Ultra
| more affordable given those numbers.
|
| 1. https://techguided.com/best-rtx-3090-gaming-
| pc/#:~:text=With....
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _Cursory look gives you a ~$3500 price tag for a gaming PC
| with a 3090_
|
| That 3500 is for a DIY build. So, sure, you can always save
| on labor and hassle, but prebuilt 3090 rigs commonly cost
| over 4k. And if you don't want to buy from Amazon because of
| their notorious history of mixing components from different
| suppliers and reselling used returns, oof, good luck even
| getting one.
| zamalek wrote:
| The 3090 claims are overstated. There are multiple
| competitors in that space, and all of them need the TDP.
|
| Performance per watt? I could see that being disrupted, but
| an iGPU in 2022 will be orders of magnitude less powerful
| than a dGPU, if wattage is ignored.
| cma wrote:
| They are still a year+ ahead of 3090 on process node. Max
| was about equivalent to a 2080, so 2X max does line up
| with a 3090. A big difference is no ray tracing hardware,
| which takes up a lot of die space. Same process node and
| no ray tracing hardware and nvidia would come in at far
| less die space (3090 is 628.4 mm ^2, M1 ultra is
| 850mm^2).
|
| If Nvidia were on the same node and increased die space
| to match M1 (ignoring the CPU portion of the die size),
| they would then be able to run at a lower clock with more
| compute units and probably match the TDP discrepancy.
|
| An iGPU isn't necessarily slower if the system ram is
| fast, and M1 was one of the first consumer CPUs to move
| to DDR5. 3090 has 936.2 GB/s with GDDR6X, M1 Ultra with
| DDR5 memory controllers on both dies gets 800GB/s.
| udbhavs wrote:
| And there is usually a premium for small form factor
| prebuilts
| airstrike wrote:
| You mean I get to save _AND_ have fun building my own PC?
| _joel wrote:
| FSVO fun if you use Newegg
| chrisweekly wrote:
| FSVO: For Some Value Of
|
| (I've been accused of overuse of acronyms, but that one's
| rare!)
| unicornfinder wrote:
| Not to mention if you build your own PC you can upgrade
| the parts as and when, unlike with the new Mac where
| you'll eventually just be replacing the whole thing.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Since the context here is using these machines for work,
| a mid-level engineer will easily cost an extra $1000* in
| his own time to put that together :)
|
| EDIT: I'm quite confident this is not at all an
| exaggeration. Unless you have put together PCs for a
| living. $100/h (total employment cost, not just salary),
| 1-2 hours of actual build & setup, 8 more hours of
| speccing out parts, buying, taking delivery, installing
| stuff and messing around with windows/Linux (I've
| probably spent 40 hours+ in the past couple years just
| fixing stuff in my windows _gaming_ pc. At least 1 of
| those looking for a cabled keyboard so I could boot it up
| the first time, ended up having a friend drive over with
| his :D)
| gtvwill wrote:
| 1000 bucks for 45 mins work? Maybe 1.5hrs tops? I didn't
| realise their wage was >500 an hour?
| swiftcoder wrote:
| It's a lot closer than you might think.
|
| A senior engineer in the Bay can easily pull down
| $400k/year in total comp, which is $200/hour. The rule of
| thumb I've always heard is that a fully-loaded engineer
| costs roughly 2x their comp in
| taxes/insurance/facilities/etc.
|
| When someone costs the company north of $3k/day, it's
| cheaper all round to just plonk a brand new $6k MacBook
| Pro on their desk if they have a hardware issue.
| jtbayly wrote:
| It would take me over 1.5 hours just to figure out what
| parts I need to buy.
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| To be fair here, there is more to it than just assembly.
|
| You have to spec out the parts, ensuring compatibility.
| Manage multiple orders and deliveries. Assemble it.
| Install drivers/configuration specific packages.
|
| All of these things are easier today than ten or twenty
| years ago - but assigning it to a random mid-level
| engineer and I'd set my project management gamble on half
| a day for the busiest, most focused engineers least
| likely to take the time to fuss over specs, or one day
| for the majority.
|
| ofc. to get to $1000 for that they'd still have to be on
| $230k to $460k.
| rpmisms wrote:
| PC part picker will do the heavy lifting for you. There
| are also management tools that will let you install
| software bundles easily, no real extra time investment.
| asoneth wrote:
| Just knowing about services like PC Part Picker and the
| management tools you mention requires time and expertise
| that people generally do not have before they build a
| computer, so "no real extra time investment" may only be
| true for someone who can amortize those upfront costs
| across many builds.
|
| In my case I have built a couple PCs before, but it was
| so long ago that I'd have to re-learn which retailers are
| trustworthy, what the new connection standards are these
| days, etc. It's just not worth it to me to spend a dozen
| hours learning, specing, ordering, assembling,
| installing, configuring, etc to save a few hundred bucks.
| fouc wrote:
| Given that the last time I put together a PC computer was
| 2006, it'd probably take me DAYS to spec out a machine
| because of all the rabbit holes I'd be exploring, esp
| with all the advances in computer tech.
| momothereal wrote:
| I believed that until I realized I couldn't individually
| upgrade my CPU or RAM because I have a mobo with LGA1150
| socket and only supports DDR3 (and it's only 6 years
| old).
|
| So eventually you still have to "replace everything" to
| upgrade a PC.
| mixedCase wrote:
| AMD has never disappointed me in this regard.
| doublepg23 wrote:
| Zen 4 will being using a new socket, I wouldn't go buying
| a Zen 3 with plans to upgrade the CPU down the road.
| zamalek wrote:
| 8 years isn't a bad run for a CPU socket.
| arvinsim wrote:
| This is already known for a long time already. You would
| have to actively choose to not listen to AMD news to not
| know.
| doublepg23 wrote:
| I understand just making sure no one jumps on Zen 3 now
| with a promise of forwards compatibility.
| Macha wrote:
| You were unlucky to buy ddr3 near its end of life then
| (like someone buying ddr4 now), but you could still
| upgrade stuff like your GPU or drives independently. My
| first SSD (a 240gb Samsung 840) is still in service after
| 9 years with its smart metrics indicating only 50% of its
| expected lifetime cycles have been used, for example.
|
| You could also put a 4790k, 16gb of ddr3 and a modern gpu
| in that system to get a perfectly functional gaming
| system that will do most titles on 1080p high. Though
| admittedly we've passed the point where that's
| financially sensible vs upgrading to a 12400 or something
| as both devil's canyon CPUs and ddr3 are climbing back up
| in price as supplies diminish
| perfopt wrote:
| Right now not many DDR5 boards. In fact none for AMD
| goosedragons wrote:
| You can still buy DDR3 new for not that much? 16GB is
| about $50 from numerous brands on Amazon at the moment. I
| bought some for an old laptop a couple months ago.
|
| To do CPU upgrades you eventually have to replace the
| motherboard but you can keep using whatever your
| GPU/storage/other parts is. Sometimes that also means a
| RAM upgrade but it's still better than the literal
| nothing of modern Macs.
| fivea wrote:
| > I believed that until I realized I couldn't
| individually upgrade my CPU or RAM because I have a mobo
| with LGA1150 socket and only supports DDR3 (and it's only
| 6 years old).
|
| DDR4 was released in 2014, which would suggest you
| purchased your mobo two full years after DDR3 was already
| deemed legacy technology and being phased out.
|
| Also LGA1150 was succeeded by LGA1151 in 2015, which
| means you bought your mobo one full year after it was
| already legacy hardware.
| momothereal wrote:
| Yes, they entered the market around those years, but what
| does that change? DDR3 and LGA1150 were not deemed
| "legacy" the day DDR4 and LGA1151 motherboards entered
| the market. They were 2-3x the price, and DDR3 dominated
| RAM sales until at least 2017. In fact, the reason DDR4
| took so long to enter the market was incompatibility with
| existing hardware, and higher costs to upgrade. [1] I
| didn't go out of my way to buy "legacy hardware" because
| they weren't, at the time.
|
| Point being, PC-building makes it easier to replace and
| repair individual components, but in time, upgrading to
| newer generations means spending over 50% of the original
| cost on motherboard, CPU, PSU, RAM. Not too different
| than dropping $3K on a new Mac.
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20101219085440/http://www
| .xbitla...
| fivea wrote:
| > Yes, they entered the market around those years, but
| what does that change?
|
| It means the hardware was purchased after it started to
| be discontinued.
|
| It's hardly a reasonable take, and makes little sense, to
| complain how you can't upgrade hardware that was already
| being discontinued before you bought it.
|
| > DDR3 and LGA1150 were not deemed "legacy" the day DDR4
| and LGA1151 motherboards entered the market.
|
| I googled for LGA1150 before I posted the message, and
| one of the first search results is a post on Linux tech
| tips dating way back to 2015 on whether LGA1150 was
| already dead.
|
| And you purchased the Mobo one year after that.
| momothereal wrote:
| I think you are forgetting the context of my replies. I'm
| not saying it's unreasonable to have to upgrade
| discontinued hardware, even if you have to do it all at
| once. My take is that it's not too different from having
| to replace a Mac when the new generation comes in (which
| is usually every ~5 years for Apple, not too far from my
| own system's lifetime). Being able to upgrade individual
| parts through generations is a pipe dream.
|
| Also, we must have a different interpretation of
| "discontinued", because DDR3 and LGA1150 were still
| produced, sold, and dominated sales for way long after I
| bought that system. At the time (and for the next 1-2
| years), consumer DDR4 was a luxury component that most no
| existing hardware supported.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Prebuilt 3090 builds can often be found for less than the
| cost of the corresponding parts.
| freemint wrote:
| At MicroCenter you would be hard pressed to pay more then
| $250 on their PC building service, you'll even get water
| coling installed and tested for this price.
| https://www.microcenter.com/site/service/instore-custom-
| pc-b...
| ProAm wrote:
| I'm not being snarky but I dont believe Mac people would
| know how to build a PC given their history of non-
| modifiable hardware and no way to repair them.
| hajile wrote:
| I can't put a 3090 into a 3.5 liter case. Even a 10 liter
| case is really pushing it. That's before mentioning power
| savings. 3090 real world power when in use is something like
| 4x as high.
| vimy wrote:
| You also need to compare the right cpu. M1 Ultra cpu is the
| equivalent of the fastest threadripper. Which costs $3990. So
| a pc with similar performance would be $7500
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| Not the top-of-the-line threadripper (which can go up to
| 32c/64t), but probably similar to the 5950x (16c/32t),
| which costs like 1000$.
|
| But you're comparing apples to oranges, because the real
| advantage of M1 chips is the unified memory - almost no
| CPU-GPU communication overhead, and that the GPU can use
| ginormous amounts of memory.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| A threadripper also has many more PCIe lanes than a
| Ryzen. It's a bit of a different usecase I think although
| there's overlap.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| They are also absolutely massive and probably much more
| expensive long-term because of the massively increased
| electricity usage.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Unless you're running a farm of these, the power cost
| differences is going to be largely unnoticeable. Like even
| in a country with very expensive power, you're talking a
| ~$0.10/USD per hour premium to have a 3090 at full bore.
| And that's assuming the M1 Ultra manages to achieve the
| same performance as the 3090, which is going to be
| extremely workload dependent going off of the existing M1
| GPU results.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Hahaha good luck getting your hands on a 30xx series card
| though.
|
| Here in Australia, 3090's go for close to 3k on their own.
| Nursie wrote:
| I'm seeing 3080s, in stock in stores I might consider
| buying from, sub-1800 AUD. It is heading back towards RRP
| (still about 50% over I guess). 3090s are twice that, yep.
| dmz73 wrote:
| And cheapest Mac Studio with M1 ultra is A$6000 so yes....
|
| 20-Core CPU 48-Core GPU 32-Core Neural Engine
| 64GB unified memory 1TB SSD storage1 Front:
| Two Thunderbolt 4 ports, one SDXC card slot Back:
| Four Thunderbolt 4 ports, two USB-A ports, one HDMI port,
| one 10Gb Ethernet port, one 3.5-mm headphone jack
|
| A$6,099.00
| IndrekR wrote:
| I can right now (ok, in the morning actually) walk into a
| computer store across the road here and buy 3090 off the
| shelf for 2299..2499EUR (different makes and models). Those
| are in stock and physically on the shelf. Same for lesser
| cards of same series or AMD RX6000.
| Domenic_S wrote:
| Those are scalper prices. Anyone can get a 3090 tomorrow
| for that price.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Yeah, they can fuck right off with those prices.
| Ethereum's proof of stake switch can't come too soon.
| gambiting wrote:
| Here in UK it's not a big deal. Subscribe to discord alerts
| for FE series drops, last 3090FE drop in February the cards
| were in stock for a full day, at RRP(PS1399). I got a 3080
| drop at RRP this way too(PS649).
|
| But even ignoring the FE series, the prices have already
| crashed massively, you can get a 3080 AIB for less than
| PS1000, and 3090s frequently appear around PS1500-1600.
| sorry_outta_gas wrote:
| We've been buying tons of 3090s at work for about 1.6 USD-
| 2k USD without to much trouble
| nightfly wrote:
| > tons
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Hey, at 5lbs each a ton is only 400 cards!
| [deleted]
| arvinsim wrote:
| Don't know about Australia but in my area(Asia) the prices
| are now going back near MSRP.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I bought two on ebay no problem
| gameswithgo wrote:
| GPU claims at carefully chosen tasks that don't need GDDR6 to
| get top performance. It wouldn't game like a 3090 for instance,
| but then not many people are gaming on macs anyway.
| upbeat_general wrote:
| I'm very skeptical of this because until the CUDA strangehold
| is gone, it will be a pain to develop on. Even if the
| frameworks themselves support M1's GPU, there are still lots
| and lots of CUDA kernels that won't run.
|
| I really hope I'm wrong (as someone who owns an M1 Pro chip)
| but I find it hard to imagine things changing significantly in
| the next ~2 years unless someone is able (legally and
| technically) to release a CUDA compatibility layer.
| rasz wrote:
| Apple loves to compare incomparable stuff. G5 the "world's
| fastest personal computer" etc. Its easy to claim GPU
| performance when you dont support modern OpenGL nor Vulcan so
| nobody can just run modern games and verify and you end up with
| "relative performance" graph whatever that means.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| I know Nvidia has never really care much about TDP, but this
| still seems unbelievable to me. How could a relatively new
| design beat a 3090 with 200W less power, while having to share
| a die with a CPU? It just doesn't seem possible.
| schmuelio wrote:
| Unless the M1 Ultra is actually magic I don't think it is
| possible.
|
| My guess is they're putting a lot of weight on the phrase
| "relative power" and hoping you assume it means "relative to
| each other" and not "relative to their previous generation"
| (i.e. M1 Ultra -> M1 Max and RTX 3090 -> RTX 2080Ti) or
| "relative to the stock power profile".
|
| Put bluntly, if the M1 Ultra was capable of achieving
| performance parity with an RTX 3090 for any GPU-style
| benchmark then Nvidia (who are experts in making GPUs) would
| have captured this additional performance. Bear in mind the
| claim seems to be (on the surface) that the M1 Ultra is
| achieving with 64 GPU cores and 800GB/s memory bandwidth what
| the RTX 3090 is achieving with 10,496 GPU cores and 936.2GB/s
| memory bandwidth.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| It shocks me how much payroll and cap-ex is spent on the M1 and
| how little is invested in getting TensorFlow/Pytorch to work on
| it. I could 10x my M1 purchases for our business if we could
| reliably run TensorFlow on it. Seems pretty shortsighted.
|
| The GPU claims wouldnt even need to be on parity with NVIDIA,
| it would just need to offer a vertically integrated alternative
| to having to use EC2.
| hedgehog wrote:
| Having beaten my head on this for a while (and shipped the
| first reasonably complete ML framework that runs on Metal)
| Apple's opinion as expressed by their priorities is that it's
| just not important.
| moflome wrote:
| > reliably run TensorFlow
|
| What reliability issues are you having with TensorFlow on M1
| Macs?
| TuringNYC wrote:
| We've followed five different instructional and
| documentation pages to make it happen and none seem to
| consistently install. Throw in a corporate system where you
| need IT for root access to make changes and it is game
| over. So i've got an M1-max fully loaded and cant get TF
| running on it.
|
| Now i've got a team of data scientists in a fully MBP shop
| and we're holding off upgrades to M1 until this all gets
| resolved.
|
| On my personal M1, I managed to make it work, but its hard
| to know the layers of changes made and what exactly allowed
| it to work.
| fouc wrote:
| Could be worth tracking what you did and make a new set
| of instructions, and trying to reproduce with a fresh
| install.
| freemint wrote:
| This is something Apple should pay people for.
| hedgehog wrote:
| Deep learning support for Mac is not going to happen at a
| level of quality you can rely on for research & dev work
| (like PyTorch + TensorFlow). The underlying problem is no
| big company cares about Mac platform and the work to
| maintain framework support for a specific piece of
| hardware is way beyond a hobby project. If you want your
| own on-prem hardware just buy Nvidia.
| zamalek wrote:
| You can get off this GPU circus and simply go with
| purpose-built AI solutions.
|
| You can buy single tensor accelerators from Google:
| https://www.coral.ai/products/
|
| You can buy a bunch of those integrated into a single
| PCI-E card. https://iot.asus.com/products/AI-
| accelerator/AI-Accelerator-...
|
| Cheap too. Some of these work with Mac. More of them work
| for PC, because the hardware interface is outside of
| Apple's thin vertical slice/garden.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| Note the label on the y-axis. "relative performance" from
| "0-200" seems like marketing bullshit to me.
|
| "M1 Ultra has a 64-core GPU, delivering faster performance than
| the highest-end PC GPU available, while using 200 fewer watts
| of power."
|
| Note that they say "faster performance" not "more performance".
| What does "faster" mean? Who knows!
| fomine3 wrote:
| Anyway any benchmark from first party should be taken with a
| mountain of salt.
| Retric wrote:
| I have heard this argument before, if it's identical
| workloads you get faster output but the same total work. Thus
| "faster performance" seems correct for fixed workloads and
| "more performance" is correct on games or benchmarks where
| you get more FPS.
|
| I still think "faster performance" sounds sound odd, but I
| understand their point.
| savant_penguin wrote:
| And hopefully not make you deaf with their buzzing fans
| kllrnohj wrote:
| The GPU claims on the M1 Pro & Max were, let's say, cherry
| picked to put it nicely. The M1 Ultra claims already look
| suspicious since the GPU graph tops out at ~120W & the CPU
| graph tops out at ~60W yet the M1 Studio is rated for 370W
| continuous power draw.
|
| Since you mention ML specifically, looking at some benchmarks
| out there (like https://tlkh.dev/benchmarking-the-
| apple-m1-max#heading-gpu &
| https://wandb.ai/tcapelle/apple_m1_pro/reports/Deep-Learning...
| ), even if the M1 Ultra is 2x the performance of the M1 Max (so
| perfect scaling), it would still be _far_ behind the 3090. Like
| completely different ballpark behind. But of course there is
| that price & power gap, but the primary strength of the M1
| GPUs seems to really be from the essentially very large VRAM
| amount. So if your working set doesn't fit in an RTX GPU of
| your desired budget, then the M1 is a good option. If, however,
| you're not VRAM limited, then Nvidia still offers far more
| performance.
|
| Well, assuming you can actually buy any of these, anyway. The
| M1 Ultra might win "by default" by simply being purchasable at
| all unlike pretty much every other GPU :/
| 64bittechie wrote:
| trodrigues wrote:
| > Well, assuming you can actually buy any of these, anyway.
| The M1 Ultra might win "by default" by simply being
| purchasable at all unlike pretty much every other GPU :/
|
| Can we stop it with the meme that these GPUs are
| unobtainable? Yes, they are still overpriced compared to
| their supposed original prices and they'll likely never
| return to that price given that the base prices of
| manufacturing, materials and such have increased for multiple
| reasons.
|
| But stock has been generally available for many months now
| and it's possible to get them as long as you can afford them.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I am sure it has great GPU performance for what it is but
| comparing it to a top Nvidia chip just seems ridiculous on
| Apples part. Apple I think is going to have trouble
| conquering back the semi pro workstation market they
| abandoned not that many years ago if they do not start
| offering M1 chips along with Nvidia GPUs.
|
| Once again we get a Mac Semi-Pro Mini (seems like the Studio
| is more like a replacement for the Trashcan) that their
| marketing implies is maybe as good as a Mac Pro but is
| obviously not. It does look a lot better this time around -
| at least it has more ports :-D
| scarface74 wrote:
| Just a note: they explicitly said the Mac Pro is coming.
| oneplane wrote:
| Yeah, there are a lot more parameters here than just 'there
| are two chips and one is the bestestst', like the
| availability you pointed out.
|
| There is raw performance, but there is also performance per
| watt, availability and scalability (which is both good and
| bad - M1 is available, but there is no M1 Ultra cloud
| available). If you want a multi-use setup, an RTX makes more
| sense than most other options, if you can get one and at a
| reasonable price. If you want a Mac, the M1U is going to give
| you the best GPU. In pretty much all other setups there are
| so many other variables it's hard to recommend anything.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| For the market this is aimed at, performance per watt is
| really irrelevant. Performance per dollar or just outright
| performance are _far_ more important the vast majority of
| the time. That 's how we ended up with 125w+ CPUs and 300w
| GPUs in the first place.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > performance per watt is really irrelevant.
|
| Watts are dollars that you'll continue spending over the
| system life. It matters because you can only draw so many
| amps per rack and there will be a point when, in order to
| get more capacity, you'll need to build another
| datacenter.
| manigandham wrote:
| The market is not data center use.
| rbanffy wrote:
| You'll still spend another Mac Studio on energy in order
| to run a comparable PC for the next five years. To say
| nothing about not wanting to be in the same room as its
| fans.
| oneplane wrote:
| There are dedicated ML cards from Nvidia for that, far
| most powerful than a 3090, so that is indeed true. But
| PPW is never irrelevant when someone is doing things at
| scale, so the question becomes: who is doing this for
| money but somehow not at scale?
| blitzar wrote:
| The cost of powering my 3090 for a year is now more than
| the cost (RRP) of a 3090.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Where do you live that power is anywhere close to that
| expensive? And are you overclocking your 3090?
|
| Even assuming literal 24hr/day usage at a higher,
| "factory overclocked" 450w sustained, at a fairly high
| $0.30/kWh that's $1200/yr. Less than half the retail
| price of a 3090. And you can easily drop the power limit
| slider on a 3090 to take it down to 300-350w, likely
| without significantly impacting your workload
| performance. Not to mention in most countries the power
| cost is much less than $0.30/kWh.
|
| At a more "realistic" 8 hours a day with local power
| pricing I'd have to run my 3090 for nearly 10 years just
| to reach the $2000 upgrade price an M1 Ultra costs over
| the base model M1 Max.
| emteycz wrote:
| Wholesale electricity price in some EU states is
| EUR550/MWh today. Most EU states are above EUR250/MWh.
| kayoone wrote:
| prices in Europe right now are considerably higher than
| $0.30/kWh
| kllrnohj wrote:
| It seems safe to say prices _right now_ are not the norm
| due to, you know, that whole war thing going on that is
| impacting one of the EU 's primary power supplies. The
| 2021 EU average was otherwise $0.22/kWh.
| kayoone wrote:
| yeah but let's how fast we have those "normal" prices
| again, maybe this is the new normal, who knows.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| But do you really run it all year round?
| kllrnohj wrote:
| These aren't rack mount products aimed at cloud
| providers, they are essentially mini workstations. What
| are you calling "at scale" for this? You're basically
| always pairing one of these machines to one physical
| person sitting at it whose time is being paid for as well
| (even for a solo creator, time is still money). It's a
| terrible tradeoff to save pennies per hour on power to
| turn around and pay the person dollars more per hour
| waiting on results.
| fomine3 wrote:
| Note that Geforce RTX on cloud is prohibited by Nvidia.
| oneplane wrote:
| Yep, that's true. You have to use the DC SKUs which
| (IIRC) aren't the same silicon either. Worse: some of the
| server SKUs are restricted for market segmentation where
| your ML and hashing performance is bad but video is good
| (and the other way around).
|
| The silly thing about it is that most of the special
| engines can now be flashed into an FPGA which is becoming
| more common in the big clouds so special offload engines
| aren't that big of a deal when they are missing. So in
| some cases you can have your cake and eat it too; massive
| parallel processing and specialised processing in the
| same server box without resorting to special tricks (as
| long as it's not suddenly getting blocked in future
| software updates).
| freemint wrote:
| The part of the EULA which is supposed to enforce that is
| not enforceable in Germany. It is complicated. There
| might be other ways you can circumvent agreeing to the
| EULA based on your location.
| kube-system wrote:
| How do they functionally do that? I googled and found
| this?: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/rtx-
| server-gaming/
|
| Honestly asking because I'm kind of out of the nvidia
| loop at the moment.
| fomine3 wrote:
| They disallow such usage for "GeForce" by proprietary
| driver's EULA, and they limit open source driver
| performance (IIRC they require signed binary blob).
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Technically: the driver detects if it is run in a
| virtualization environment, it is _at least_ able to
| detect KVM and VMware. On the upside, it 's relatively
| easy to bypass the check.
|
| Legally: I assume no cloud provider will assume the legal
| risk of telling their customers "and here you have to
| break the EULA of the NVIDIA driver in that way to use
| the service". In Europe where the legal environment is
| more focused on interoperability, this might not be as
| much of a problem, but still it may be too much risk.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> 370W continuous power draw._
|
| Don't know if it's the same, these days, but when I was
| designing electronic stuff, we were always told to spec the
| power supply at twice the maximum draw.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Gigabyte and strix 3090 are routinely in stock at Newegg.
| Msrp. The shortage is over
| kayoone wrote:
| 3090 is still 2400 EUR in Germany, pretty sure that's not
| MSRP
| Tagbert wrote:
| You are comparing the power source (370W) to the CPU/SOC
| (120W). The power supply provides power for USB-C/Thunderbolt
| ports and it's never a good idea to spec a power supply too
| low and run it too close to capacity.
| Sosh101 wrote:
| > look suspicious since the GPU graph tops out at ~120W & the
| CPU graph tops out at ~60W yet the M1 Studio is rated for
| 370W continuous power draw.
|
| Interested to know what you think a reasonable PSU would be
| for A machine that was consuming close to 200W for
| processing...
| brigade wrote:
| 100W of that is probably for the USB ports; afaik TB4 ports
| are required to support 15W, and I don't think there's been a
| Mac didn't support full power simultaneously across all
| ports. (if that's even allowed?)
| dingle_thunk wrote:
| I suppose given that this is two M1 Max glued together,
| assuming cooling is a solved problem, the max SOC power
| consumption just twice as high as usual, plus interconnect
| overhead. Right? Based on the thermal and power consumption
| characteristics of previous chips I would not be surprised
| if say ~120W is the max power draw of this thing.
|
| edit: Of course the M1 max only shipped in laptops, so...
| who knows.
| masklinn wrote:
| > assuming cooling is a solved problem
|
| I'd assume that's what most of the chonk is about, no?
|
| > Based on the thermal and power consumption
| characteristics of previous chips I would not be
| surprised if say ~120W is the max power draw of this
| thing.
|
| The Max could be brought up to 90W or so.
| fnord123 wrote:
| I wouldn't assume heat is solved as it's been Apples weak
| point in the past. The cube would crack, g5 iMac's would
| melt capacitors, MacBooks would burn users' laps.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| Two thirds of the volume seems to be dedicated to
| cooling. Assuming they're not complete idiots, they must
| be doing something!
| fnord123 wrote:
| > Assuming they're not complete idiots
|
| https://www.theverge.com/22967776/apple-magic-mouse-
| charging...
| Bud wrote:
| Those issues were all almost 20 years ago.
|
| If you think this is still a problem, you haven't used
| any recent Macs. The current MB Air and MB Pro both run
| _very_ cool even under prolonged heavy loads.
|
| Apple's management of any and all heat issues has been
| far better than any competitors for a while now.
| fnord123 wrote:
| The last intel macs run way too hot still. They get up
| over 80dC. The 2014 ones would hard reboot when building
| large Java projects.
| hughrr wrote:
| To be fair the current Dells do the same.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > Apple's management of any and all heat issues has been
| far better than any competitors for a while now.
|
| Only if you define "for a while" as "since a year ago
| with the introduction of the M1".
|
| Apple refused to make a thicker laptop or one with better
| ventilation to adequately cool the CPUs & GPUs they were
| sticking in them. They were among if not the worst of
| them all at handling the heat of the components they were
| using. Until the M1 Pro & Max rolled around, anyway, and
| suddenly they got thicker, with feet that raise it
| farther off the desk, and absolutely massive amount of
| vents all over 3 sides of the machine. Curious timing on
| that...
| kllrnohj wrote:
| The M1 Max hits 100w in a laptop form factor with 'real'
| workloads when hitting CPU and GPU simultaneously (or at
| least not parasitic ones like prime95 & furmark). So this
| is probably >200w, unless it's been power limited and
| thus performs worse than 2x M1 Max's do anyway.
| anaisbetts wrote:
| At some point can we finally admit that Apple's GPU claims
| just aren't....true? Like, every Apple keynote they put up
| incredible performance claims, and every time people actually
| get their hands on the product, it doesn't even come close to
| holding water in any domain where GPU performance matters
| (Game performance, ML training perf)
| hirako2000 wrote:
| even their graphs don't look legit. they look like what you
| see in boxes of vitamins found on ransom websites. Got to
| wait for independent benchmarks with well explained
| scenarios. anything can run twice faster than anything with
| some specific tweaks to the program that runs.
| jaimex2 wrote:
| I thought that would be a given by now.
|
| Won't even get into that it can't run most things you'd
| want that kind of hardware for.
| threeseed wrote:
| > GPU performance matters (Game performance, ML training
| perf)
|
| No one plays games on a Mac.
|
| And it has nothing to do with GPU performance but rather
| the fact that the audience simply isn't interested in
| gaming on it and so there is no economic incentive to
| target them.
|
| So the GPU performance that matters to Mac users and is
| relevant to Apple is not games but rather content creation,
| production etc.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| M1's blender rendering performance also wasn't very good,
| though. Assuming the scene was small enough to fit in the
| smaller VRAM of competitive consumer GPUs anyway.
|
| Video content creation specifically is where it mostly
| achieves what the graphs indicate, and that's mostly a
| "well yeah, video decoder ASICs are really efficient.
| I'll take things we already knew for $100, Alex"
| bsenftner wrote:
| Unless you specifically configure Blender for GPU
| rendering, it renders on the CPU(s).
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Blender didn't even run on metal until a few months ago.
| It's on beta now and the performance has increased
| substantially.
|
| If the software is optimized, the graphics hold up fine.
| zamalek wrote:
| The other elephant in the room is OptiX. Are Apple
| _seriously_ indicating that they can outperform that with
| a iGPU?
| the_af wrote:
| > _No one plays games on a Mac._
|
| My wife does (I play games on Linux).
|
| I have friends who own Macs who reluctantly dual boot to
| Windows just to play some games -- they would completely
| ditch Windows if they could just play every game on Mac.
|
| I see there are Mac games on Steam.
|
| All of this points to the situation being more nuanced
| than "no one plays games on Mac".
| kingaillas wrote:
| I interpret these sorts of statements to be short for "a
| statistically insignificant number of people play games
| on macos (or linux)" rather than the literal case where
| as long as a single person does, it is false.
|
| According to the steam hardware survey, Windows is 95%,
| Macos is 4%, and Linux is 1%. And to dig deeper you'd
| need to see what games that 5% of the non-Windows is
| playing - are they simpler games that don't need graphics
| acceleration (e.g. puzzle games, roguelikes, etc) or ones
| that do?
|
| My desktop is an Intel NUC running Ubuntu, and yeah I
| play games on it. Slay the Spire, Spacechem, even some
| older MMOs like DDO or LoTRO (which run but at 15-20 fps
| since that system just has Intel Iris). I'm unable to
| even start many others (e.g. Grim Dawn) due to not having
| dedicated graphics.
|
| So yeah it's nuanced but lots of games that need a
| graphics card don't run or even display on that system.
|
| That's why I have a windows gaming system too. I'm
| realistic, the market just isn't there. I used to have a
| Mac (dropped it in 2018) and if I still did I'd subscribe
| to Geforce Now or just do console gaming.
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| Grim Dawn is just poorly implemented. I have a Ryzen
| 3700x with a 2070 super and Grim Dawn runs like crap.
| crmd wrote:
| You're right but i think there's an immensely valuable
| lesson here for people who communicate with engineers as
| part of their job: be mindful of casual precision
| mistakes. "no one" and "a statistically insignificant
| number of" are colloquial synonyms to civilians, but they
| are black and white to engineers, especially software
| people. They are the difference for example between a
| safe code path and a edge case bug. In my experience,
| people who use casual imprecision in technical
| conversations are sometimes seen as inexperienced or not
| fully understanding a problem, which may actually not be
| the case. Learning to speak with precision without being
| pedantic is an excellent soft skill that can be developed
| over time.
| airza wrote:
| Huh? I know lots of people who play games on a mac.
| joshspankit wrote:
| Watching the keynote I was almost thinking that Nvidia missed
| the boat when they chose not to sign whatever they had to to
| make OSX drivers.
|
| Thank you for recalibrating me to actual reality and not
| Apple Reality (tm)
| zdw wrote:
| nVidia missed the boat in releasing a bunch of "replace the
| whole laptop logic board" chips that died in the 2008-2012
| timeframe and annoyed a whole host of OEMs:
|
| https://www.techpowerup.com/64683/nvidia-admits-to-
| selling-f...
|
| Apple specifically: https://support.apple.com/en-
| us/HT203254
| wil421 wrote:
| My 2011 MPB 15" suffered from the Nvidia GPU issue. It
| was so bad my computer wouldn't boot properly and the
| Apple Geniuses kept denying the claim because it couldn't
| finish a test.
|
| Anyway, it was still my longest lived Laptop. My Sony
| VAIOs were great but I liked that Mac better.
| fouc wrote:
| I pulled the logic board out and baked it in the oven and
| it lasted another 7 months before needing another bake.
| By then I moved onto a newer macbook.
| ja27 wrote:
| By 2011 it was AMD(ATI) not Nvidia. I had one that failed
| but Apple did the replacement for free.
| JiNCMG wrote:
| I am certain AMD like most responsible vendors (Seagate)
| also worked with Apple to correct the issue. Nvidia's
| issue was that it told all of the laptop vendors to just
| deal with it. It's why they are hated by other vendors
| and AMD/Intel worked hard to keep them from creating x86
| cpus.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Nvidia switched to lead free solder while retaining the
| same potting material. This led to a mismatch in thermal
| expansion coefficients which caused strain with repeated
| thermal cycles and eventually some of the solder bumps
| just broke. You could use a toaster to melt the solder
| again and reconnect them but that didn't fix the
| underlying problem.
| tyrfing wrote:
| I'm confident the marketing oversells it, but it's likely
| very good in comparison. 3090 is about 28B transistors on
| Samsung 8nm, with some budgeted for raytracing. This is on
| TSMC 5nm, a process with 3-4x the density, and the 114B
| transistor count could potentially allow for similar GPU size
| - although I'd wait for Locuza or someone to analyze it. It
| should be very competitive in performance, and the winner by
| far in perf/watt, at least until RDNA3 and Lovelace GPUs
| release towards the end of the year.
| hajile wrote:
| A 16" macbook with an M1 only uses around 100w and that's
| when maxing all the things. It runs at about 40w for CPU and
| 60w for GPU. Based on those numbers, 120w seems totally
| expected for two chips at the same frequency.
| lmilcin wrote:
| > The M1 Ultra claims already look suspicious since the GPU
| graph tops out at ~120W & the CPU graph tops out at ~60W yet
| the M1 Studio is rated for 370W continuous power draw.
|
| And that is expected, a lot has to be reserved for USB
| devices.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Yeah can't say I've ever seen a computer rated for the
| exact amount it'll be drawn at. They have to leave room.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| SSD and those two large fans also use a fair amount of
| power too.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Those fans are unlikely to break 5w combined.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| Guess we will see once one is available to be tested, but
| I doubt that's the case. I was guessing 5-8W each, but I
| could be wrong of course.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Most PC fans are 1-2w. Given the claims of "near silent",
| I think it's plenty safe to say these are not 5,000+ RPM
| rippers that are going to be in the 5-8W each range.
| Macha wrote:
| An M1 Ultra is $2000 incrementally over a M1 Max, so there is
| no price gap, even with the inflated prices 3090s actually go
| for today.
| cpuguy83 wrote:
| Wait, you can _get_ a 3090?
| Macha wrote:
| Yeah. They've been in stock for months here (though the
| retailers are charging the inflated prices too), e.g.
| https://www.computeruniverse.net/en/c/hardware-
| components/nv...
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I mean at that price...yeah it's "in stock" but it sure
| as hell ain't available
| jsjohnst wrote:
| All of those listed are WAY above MSRP! MSRP is $1,499 in
| the U.S. and PS1,399 in the U.K.
| Macha wrote:
| The question was if they were available, not if they were
| available at MSRP (thanks downvoters, the comment even
| called out the price was inflated...). My understanding
| is that until recently in the US you basically had to buy
| from scalpers as the stocks had none at any price unless
| you stalked for restocks.
|
| They're overpriced for sure, and that's the only reason
| the M1U pricing looks equivalent rather than exorbitant
| [deleted]
| gambiting wrote:
| 3090 is literally the easiest card to get at RRP, at
| least here in UK. Set up discord alerts, the FE cards
| stay in stock for hours, the last one in February was in
| stock for the entire day so anyone who wanted to buy one
| at RRP(PS1399) could do so without any issue at all.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| This.. The FE is in stock every month for RRP. The 3080Ti
| too, I got mine that way.
| kayoone wrote:
| its still 2400 EUR in Germany for example.
| gambiting wrote:
| I'm not sure who sells the FE cards in Germany actually.
| I know it's LDLC in Netherlands, France and Spain.
|
| edit: just found out - it's NBB:
|
| https://www.notebooksbilliger.de/
|
| There's probably a German discord somewhere to have alert
| for drops.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| To be fair that $2000 also gets you +32GB RAM, +512GB
| storage, and +10 CPU cores. It's not _just_ the GPU.
| Although yeah you can definitely fit a 3090-equipped PC
| into a $4k budget even with ebay pricing if pure GPU
| performance is all you really want.
| fivea wrote:
| > To be fair that $2000 also gets you +32GB RAM, +512GB
| storage, and +10 CPU cores.
|
| Even though it's not an apples to apples comparison, keep
| in mind that a 1x32GB DIMM sells for less than 150$, and
| you can buy 1TB SSDs for less than 100$.
| freemint wrote:
| HBM2 is a tad more expensive, but yes.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Apple doesn't use HBM2, so not really relevant
| freemint wrote:
| Correct my bad. GDDR6x is still more expensive then GDDR4
| you get with Thread ripper.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Apple isn't using GDDR6X, either, nor does threadripper
| use GDDR4.
| inkyoto wrote:
| M1 Ultra is 64Gb extra, not 32.
|
| > keep in mind that a 1x32GB DIMM sells for less than
| 150$
|
| Keep in mind that M1 Pro/Max/Ultra is LPDDR5 _6400_
| (https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-
| performanc...) connected by a 512 bit memory controller.
|
| Whereas is a kit of 2x 32 GB LPDDR5 _4800_ (I could not
| easily locate a quote for 1x 64Gb LPDDR5 4800 DIMM, leave
| alone 6400) retails for USD 548
| (https://www.newegg.com/crucial-64gb-288-pin-
| ddr5-sdram/p/N82...).
|
| I could not locate a reliable source on the type of the
| SSD employed in M1 Pro/Max/Ultra, so I will refrain from
| remarking on the comparison.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| I remember a slide mentioning I think "up to 7.4gb/sec
| SSD read/write speed" or similar, which drastically
| reduces the pool of comparison SSDs. Intel Optane meets
| those specs, as do a few other brands I hadn't heard of
| previously. In the later case, a 2TB version seemed to be
| $350-400. Take this for what it's worth, but SSD is going
| to be more than $100 extra cost imho.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| That's pretty much the speed that Samsung advertises for
| the 980 Pro: https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-
| storage/solid-st...
|
| And what WD advertises for the Black SN850:
| https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-
| drives/wd-b...
|
| And what Seagate advertises for the FireCuda 530:
| https://www.seagate.com/products/gaming-drives/pc-
| gaming/fir...
|
| And what Gigabyte advertises for the Gen4 7000s:
| https://www.gigabyte.com/Solid-State-Drive/AORUS-
| Gen4-7000s-...
|
| etc...
|
| They aren't $100 for 1TB, no, but a lot of them are
| around $150. Which would be a lot less than +$100 to go
| from 512GB to 1TB, too. It's $40 to go from the 500GB
| SN850 to the 1TB SN850, for example.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| I checked the first two and it's 7,000 read / 5,000
| write. Pretty sure Apple said read AND write, which would
| be a lot faster than those. I might go back and rewatch
| the keynote, but I still thinking we are arguing
| pointlessly as Apple has always overcharged for SSD and
| RAM upgrades vs the price you'd pay elsewhere. Thanks for
| the DV though even when what I stated was right! ;)
| Macha wrote:
| It achieves this speed by not insisting on flushing to
| disk when requested:
| https://nitter.net/marcan42/status/1494213855387734019
|
| When configured to ensure data integrity in the case of
| power loss (more important in this new M1 Studio machine
| unless it comes with integrated battery), then it's a lot
| worse.
| apohn wrote:
| The 3090 also can do fp16 and the M1 series only supports
| fp32, so the M1 series of chips basically needs more RAM for
| the same batch sizes. So it isn't an Oranges to Oranges
| comparison.
|
| Back when that M1 MAX vs 3090 blog post was released, I ran
| those same tests on the M1 Pro (16GB), Google Colab Pro, and
| free GPUs (RTX4000, RTX5000) on the Paperspace Pro plan.
|
| To make a long story short, I don't think buying any M1 chip
| make senses if your primary purpose is Deep Learning. If you
| are just learning or playing around with DL, Colab Pro and
| the M1 Max provide similar performance. But Colab Pro is
| ~$10/month, and upgrading any laptop to M1-Max is at least
| $600.
|
| The "free" RTX5000 on Paperspace Pro (~$8 month) is much
| faster (especially with fp16 and XLA) than M1 Max and Colab
| Pro, albeit the RTX5000 isn't always available. The free
| RTX4000 is also a faster than M1 Max, albeit you need to use
| smaller batch sizes due to 8GB of VRAM.
|
| If you assume that M1-Ultra doubles the performance of M1-Max
| in similar fashion to how the M1-Max seems to double the gpu
| performance of the M1-Pro, it still doesn't make sense from a
| cost perspective. If you are a serious DL practitioner,
| putting that money towards cloud resources or a 3090 makes a
| lot more sense than buying the M1-Ultra.
| mehmetoguzderin wrote:
| > The 3090 also can do fp16 and the M1 series only supports
| fp32
|
| Apple Silicon (including base M1) actually has great FP16
| support at the hardware level, including conversions. So it
| is wrong to say it only supports FP32.
| oneplane wrote:
| I'm not sure if he was talking about the ML engine, the
| ARM cores, the microcode, the library or the OS. But it
| does indeed have FP16 in the Arm cores.
| inkyoto wrote:
| FP16 is supported in M1 GPU's and Neural Engines through
| the CoreML framework. From
| https://coremltools.readme.io/docs/typed-execution :
|
| > The Core ML runtime dynamically partitions the network
| graph into sections for the Apple Neural Engine (ANE),
| GPU, and CPU, and each unit executes its section of the
| network using its native type to maximize its performance
| and the model's overall performance. _The GPU and ANE use
| float 16 precision, and the CPU uses float 32_.
|
| Also, this exploration (https://tlkh.dev/benchmarking-
| the-apple-m1-max#heading-neura...) reports the 5.1-5.3
| TFLOPS FP16 ballpark performance.
| apohn wrote:
| I should have been more clear. I didn't mean the
| hardware, but the speedup you get from using mixed
| precision in something like Tensorflow with an NVIDIA
| GPU.
| apohn wrote:
| Thanks. At least when I ran the benchmarks with
| Tensorflow, using mixed precision resulted in the CPU
| being used for training instead of the GPU on the M1 Pro.
| So if the hardware is there for fp16 and they will
| implement the software support for DL frameworks, that
| will be great.
| mehmetoguzderin wrote:
| Yes, unfortunately, the software is to blame for the time
| being, and I also ran into issues myself. :\ Hope they
| catch up to what the hardware delivers well, including
| both the GPU and the Neural Engine.
| Koshkin wrote:
| For some definitions of "affordable."
| forgotmyoldacc wrote:
| Neural Engine cores are not accessible for third party
| developers, so it'll be severely constrained for practical
| purposes. Currently the M1 Max is no match for even last
| generation mid-tier Nvidia GPU.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| Huh? Neural engine is certainly usable by developers. You
| just use the CoreML framework.
| viktorcode wrote:
| They are accessible to third party developers, only they have
| to use CoreML.
| komuher wrote:
| xD
| izacus wrote:
| The GPU claims for M1 Pro and M1 Max were wildly above their
| actual performance in real life (as opposed to CPU performance)
| so maybe don't put all that much faith in Apple marketing here
| either.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| Doesn't "electricity bill" dominate server/DL/nining datacenter
| workload costs these days - so perf/W is what really counts?
| The long-prophecised ARM apocalypse may finally be at hand.
| LegitShady wrote:
| I always take such claims with a grain of salt anyways. It
| usualy on one specific benchmark. I wait for better benchmarks
| always instead of trusting the marketing
| pathartl wrote:
| Even if their claims are accurate, it usually has the
| asterisk of *Only with Apple Metal 2. I honestly cannot
| understand why Apple decided they needed to write their own
| graphics API when the rest of the world is working hard to
| get away from the biggest proprietary graphics API.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Because when they wrote the API no real standard existed to
| suit their needs.
| pathartl wrote:
| Yes, and instead of writing an open standard or adapting
| Vulkan when it came around, they instead decided to
| double down on proprietary and moved to Metal 2.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Because vendor lock-in and full control over their APIs
| which has always been an apple staple but especially now.
|
| 5-10 years ago they were still serious about open
| standards, like OpenCL.. Now it's all locked in.
| sytelus wrote:
| The most important detail here is 128GB ram for GPU
| computation! This allows to train monster models, ex 1B params
| GPT series, on single M1 Ultra. This is quite unprecedented.
| Unfortunately, it is also about 3.5x _slower_ than 3090.
| moralestapia wrote:
| RIP Intel
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| not yet. Intel Alder lake have mostly positive reviews.
| cube2222 wrote:
| Looks like all the people saying "just start fusing those M1
| CPU's into bigger ones" were right, that's basically what they
| did here (fused two M1 Max'es together).
|
| And since the presenter mentioned the Mac Pro would come on
| another day, I wonder if they'll just do 4x M1 Max for that.
| iSnow wrote:
| >I wonder if they'll just do 4x M1 Max for that.
|
| They'll be running out of names for that thing. M1 Ultra II
| would be lame, so M1 Extreme? M1 Steve?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| "M1 More", would show Apple is fun again!
| tiernano wrote:
| M1 Max Pro... :P
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "iPhone 14 Pro Max, powered by the M1 Max Pro".
| bee_rider wrote:
| It seems kind of strange to have the "A" line go from
| smartphones to... iPads, and then have the "M" line go all
| the way from thin-and-lights proper workstations. Maybe they
| need a new letter. Call it the C1 -- "C" for compute, but
| also for Cupertino.
| gordon_freeman wrote:
| M1 Hyper or M1 Ludicrous:)
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| M1 Houndstooth
| bacro wrote:
| M1 God
| dehrmann wrote:
| Plus Ultra would at have historical precedent.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > M1 Steve
|
| That would be the funniest thing Apple has done in years. I
| totally support the idea.
| Isamu wrote:
| Pro < Max < Ultra < Ne Plus Ultra < Steve
| jhgb wrote:
| And Steve < Woz, perhaps?
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Just need to increment the 1 instead... Eventually moving
| into using letters instead of numbers, until we end up with
| the MK-ULTRA chip.
| Roboprog wrote:
| I suspect they will have a different naming convention
| after they get to M4.
|
| There might be some hesitance installing an M5. You should
| stay out of the way if the machine learning core needs more
| power.
|
| I guess by the time they get to M5, anyone old enough to
| get the reference will have retired.
| jckahn wrote:
| That would really be a trip!
| NoSorryCannot wrote:
| M1 Magnum XL
| ceva wrote:
| Epic M1 fit good
| concinds wrote:
| I like "X1" way more than "M2 Extreme".
| stretchwithme wrote:
| I like M1 Steve, as it can honor two people.
| rpmisms wrote:
| Steve would be awesome, but a deal with Tesla to use "Plaid"
| would be perfection.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| I would think they could just go to Mel Brooks instead of
| dealing with Tesla.
| TylerE wrote:
| Never happen.
|
| Elon is somewhat toxic these days...
| bobsil1 wrote:
| M1 Plaid
| stdohm wrote:
| lol, good one! I hope marketing sees this.
| bacro wrote:
| M1 Greta in 2030 (when it is "carbon neutral")
| randomdata wrote:
| iM1 Pro.
| tsuru wrote:
| I'm pretty sure all their messaging is preparing us for "M1
| Outrageous"
| chaosharmonic wrote:
| Super M1 Turbo HD Remix
| theyeenzbeanz wrote:
| M1 Ludicrous the IV
| gonzo wrote:
| Maximum Plaid
| mhb wrote:
| Just get the guys who came up with the new name for the
| iPhone SE working on it. Oh, wait.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| its a chiplet design. whenever people ask what we going to do
| after 1nm...well, we can combine two chips into one
| ksec wrote:
| >Looks like all the people saying "just start fusing those M1
| CPU's into bigger ones" were right,
|
| Well they were only correct that Apple managed to hide a whole
| section of Die Image. ( Which is actually genius ) Otherwise it
| wouldn't have made any sense.
|
| Likely to be using CoWoS from TSMC [1] since the bandwidth
| numbers fits. But needs further confirmation.
|
| [1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/tsmc/cowos
| kodah wrote:
| I've been using a Vega-M for some time which I think follows
| this model. It's really great.
| kalleboo wrote:
| The interconnect area was already known from third-party die
| photos of the M1 Max
| https://twitter.com/vadimyuryev/status/1466526403331952644
| ksec wrote:
| They were not known when people keep rampling about the the
| Mark Gurman report on "just start fusing those M1 CPU's
| into bigger ones".
|
| I wrote about it three months ago.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29430817
| kzrdude wrote:
| Throwing more silicon at it, like this, sounds extremely
| expensive or price-inefficient.
|
| It's at least two separate chips combined together. That makes
| more sense, mitigates the problem.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Right. Still riding gains from the node shrink and on package
| memory.
|
| Could AMD/Intel follow suit and package memory as an additional
| layer of cache? I worry that we are being dazzled by the
| performance at the cost of more integration and less freedom.
| scns wrote:
| The next CPU coming from AMD will be the 5800X3D with 96MB
| cache. They stack 64MB L3 on top. Rumours say it comes out
| 20th of April.
|
| edit: typo + stacking + rumoured date
| truculent wrote:
| My guess would be an M1 Ultra with additional modular
| expansions for specific purposes. I.e. instead of having a GPU,
| you could add a tensor processing module if you need to do
| machine learning, or a graphics processing chip for video
| production, and so on.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| They might have to have the unified memory more dense to get to
| 1.5 TB max of RAM on the machine (also since this would be
| originally shared with a GPU). Maybe they could stack the RAM
| on the SoC or just get the RAM at a lower process node.
| paulmd wrote:
| The M1 Max/Ultra is already extremely dense design for that
| approach, it's really almost as dense as you can make it.
| There's packages stacked on top, and around, etc. I guess you
| could put more memory on the backside but that's not going to
| do more than double it, assuming it even has the pinout for
| that (let's say you could run it in clamshell mode like GDDR,
| no idea if that's actually possible, but just
| hypothetically).
|
| The thing is they're at 128GB which is way way far from
| 1.5TB. You're not going to find a way to get 12x the memory
| while still doing the embedded memory packages.
|
| Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised but it seems like they're
| either going to switch to (R/LR)DIMMs for the Mac Pro or else
| it's going to be a "down" generation. And to be fair that's
| fine, they'll be making Intel Mac Pros for a while longer
| (just like with the other product segments), they don't have
| to have _every single_ metric be better, they can put out
| something that only does 256GB or 512GB or whatever and that
| would be fine for a lot of people.
| my123 wrote:
| > You're not going to find a way to get 12x the memory
| while still doing the embedded memory packages.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/17058/samsung-announces-
| lpddr...
|
| > It's also possible to allow for 64GB memory modules of a
| single package, which would correspond to 32 dies.
|
| It is possible, and I guess that NVIDIA's Grace server CPU
| will use those massive capacity LPDDR5X modules too.
|
| The M1 Ultra has 8 memory packages today, and Apple could
| also use 32-bit wide ones (instead of 64-bit) if they want
| more chips.
| MBCook wrote:
| Do people really need 1.5 TB of _unified_ memory? If you
| had 128 GB of unified memory and another pool of 1.5 TB or
| whatever of "slower" memory (more like normal speed on the
| Intel /AMD side) would that work?
|
| You (or the OS or the chip) could page things in and out if
| the unified memory. Treat unified memory as a MEGA L3
| cache.
|
| Depending on how it's done it may not be transparent if you
| want the best performance. But would it work?
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| You don't just "fuse" two chips together willnilly. that was
| designed in from the beginning for the architecture for future
| implementation.
| arvinsim wrote:
| The CPU trend nowadays seem to be combining chiplets and having
| performance and efficiency cores.
| wilg wrote:
| https://hypercritical.co/2021/05/21/images/city-of-chiplets....
| kasperni wrote:
| > I wonder if they'll just do 4x M1 Max for that.
|
| Unlikely, M1 Ultra is the last chip in the M1 family according
| to Apple [1].
|
| "M1 Ultra completes the M1 family as the world's most powerful
| and capable chip for a personal computer.""
|
| [1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/03/apple-
| unveils-m1-ultr...
| johnmaguire wrote:
| In a previous Apple press release[1] they said:
|
| > The Mac is now one year into its two-year transition to
| Apple silicon, and M1 Pro and M1 Max represent another huge
| step forward. These are the most powerful and capable chips
| Apple has ever created, and together with M1, they form a
| family of chips that lead the industry in performance, custom
| technologies, and power efficiency.
|
| I think it is just as likely that they mean "completes the
| family [as it stands today]" as they do "completes the family
| [permanently]."
|
| [1]
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/10/introducing-m1-pro-
| an...
|
| edit: This comment around SoC code names is worth a look too:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30605713
| paulmd wrote:
| That doesn't necessarily rule out more powerful iterations
| that also launch under the M1 Ultra branding though.
|
| (edit: per a sibling comment, if the internals like IRQ only
| really scale to 2 chiplets that pretty much would rule it out
| though.)
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| Probably not on the same design as the current M1 series,
| at least not for the Mac Pro. The current x86 pro supports
| up to 1.5TB of RAM. I don't think they will be able to
| match that using a SoC with integrated RAM. There will
| probably be a different CPU design for the Pro with an
| external memory bus.
| nicoburns wrote:
| They also said that the Mac Pro is still yet to transition.
| So they'll have to come up with something for that. My
| suspicion is that it won't be M branded. Perhaps P1 for pro?
| tiernano wrote:
| I have been thinking about this, and one theory I came up
| with was a switch chip between M1 Max chiplets... you have
| 4 (or more?) M1 Maxes connected to the same switch chip...
| it might add latency for some tasks but it would be one way
| to scale without going to a new M2 processor... Then again,
| M2 could come out in June at the WWDC, doubling everything
| and adding 3 more ultra connect things to each M2 Max,
| allowing unlimited (ish) upgradability... but, probably
| not...
| MBCook wrote:
| It may be M branded, just not M1. It could be based on an
| M2 Ultra or M2 Mega or whatever and what they said would
| still hold true.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| What is M2 really going to be difference wise?
| 1123581321 wrote:
| ~15-20% faster if releases start this year, plus whatever
| optimizations learned from M1 in wide release such as
| perhaps tuning the silicon allocation given the various
| system. If next year, M2 or M3 (get it) will use Taiwan
| Semi's so-called 3nm, which should be a significant jump
| just like 7-5nm several years ago for the phones and iPads.
| masklinn wrote:
| Hopefully one of the changes of the M2 design will be a
| better decorrelation of RAM and cores count.
|
| They'd need that anyway for a Mac Pro replacement (128GB
| wouldn't cut it for everyone), but even for smaller
| config it's frustrating being limited to 16G on the M1
| and 32 on the Pro. Just because I need more RAM doesn't
| mean I want the extra size and heat or whatever.
| bouncing wrote:
| For my purposes, the biggest drawback of using an SoC is
| being constrained to just the unified memory.
|
| Since I run a lot of memory intensive tasks but few CPU
| or GPU bound tasks, a regular m1 with way more memory
| would be ideal.
| bpye wrote:
| I doubt there will be much learned after actually
| shipping M1. Developing silicon takes a long time. I
| wouldn't be surprised if the design was more or less
| fixed by the time the M1 released.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I think M2 is going to improve on single thread
| performance.
|
| Judging from the geekbench scores[0], M1, M1 Pro, and M1
| Max perform identically in single threaded tasks. And the
| newly leaked Mac Studio benchmark[1] shows essentially
| identical single thread performance.
|
| [0]: https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks [1]:
| https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/13330272
| MaysonL wrote:
| M2 family Mac Pro upcoming...
| marcan_42 wrote:
| I've been saying 4x M1 Max is not a thing and never will be a
| thing ever since the week I got my M1 Max and saw that the
| IRQ controller was only instantiated to support 2 dies, but
| everyone kept parroting that nonsense the Bloomberg reporter
| said about a 4-die version regardless...
|
| Turns out I was right.
|
| The Mac Pro chip will be a different thing/die.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Could they do a multi-socket board for the Mac Pro?
| fomine3 wrote:
| I expect this for CPU side. Multiple SoC introduces NUMA
| but it's already done on Dual Xeon based Mac. I wonder
| how their GPU work for the configuration.
| bee_rider wrote:
| In a world where latency:storage size tradeoffs need to
| be made for practical reasons (and will, at some point,
| be required for fundamental physical reasons), we should
| just embrace NUMA anyway. Death to the lie of uniform
| access! NUMA is the future!
|
| Ehrm, anyway.
|
| It actually isn't clear to me whether designing a two
| socket motherboard is fundamentally an easier task than
| jamming more of the things into a single package (given
| that they have already embraced some sort of chiplette
| paradigm).
| fomine3 wrote:
| I believe designing/manufacturing a 5nm chip only used
| for Mac Pro can't be profitable. That's why they designed
| M1 Ultra as MCM of M1 Max.
| pathartl wrote:
| They would never do that
| rsynnott wrote:
| The Mac Pro (and the high-end Powermacs that preceded it)
| were always available in a dual socket incarnation, right
| up to the trashcan Mac.
| pathartl wrote:
| The trashcan Mac Pro was announced almost 9 years ago.
| Apple today is a very different company. They've moved
| onto chiplet designed SoC's with little to no care about
| upgradability.
| restlake wrote:
| They have done this previously for dual socket Xeons.
| Historical precedence doesn't necessarily hold here, but
| in fact, it's been done on the "cheese graters"
| previously
| pathartl wrote:
| They've moved on to chiplet design. Don't disregard their
| clear direction to SoC's with non-upgradeable RAM, GPU,
| CPU.
| MBCook wrote:
| They also water-cooled them but I'd bet a lot of money we
| never see that again either.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Plus they are running out of M1 superlatives. They'll have
| to go to M2 to avoid launching M1 Plaid.
| rubslopes wrote:
| M1 Series One
| asddubs wrote:
| m1 hyper turbo deluxe
|
| or they could take a page out of microsofts book and just
| call the next one "m one"
| xattt wrote:
| M1 One: The Second One!
| noisy_boy wrote:
| M1 Mark II ala Sony
| ksec wrote:
| They could do M1 More Thing.
| aneutron wrote:
| Bloomberg brought the Supermicro hit pieces. I personally
| can't take them seriously anymore. Not after the second
| article with 0 fact checking and sad attempt at an
| irrelevant die shot. And their word is certainly irrelevant
| against one of people who are working (and succeeding) at
| running linux on M1.
| faichai wrote:
| The Mac Pro chip will be a 4x M2 Max
| wdurden wrote:
| Ahhh, reminiscent of the G4 Desktop Supercomputer ..
|
| https://www.deseret.com/1999/9/1/19463524/apple-unveils-g4-d...
|
| I kinda believe em this time, but time will tell.
| ur-whale wrote:
| Where be the Linux distro that can run on an M1 (ultra or
| otherwise)?
|
| Without having to be a kernel hacker, that is.
| neogodless wrote:
| This is the one that has that as a core goal:
|
| https://asahilinux.org/
| jedberg wrote:
| Given how low the power consumption is for the power you get, I
| wonder if we'll see a new push for Mac servers. In an age where
| reducing power consumption in the datacenter is an advantage, it
| seems like it would make a lot of sense.
| MaxLeiter wrote:
| I don't think this will be the case until they're more right to
| repair friendly
| Flankk wrote:
| Most people don't want to repair, they want to replace. What
| people really want is a modular computer, the way things used
| to be. Right to repair is going to force legislation for
| schematics, at best. Even then I don't think it's going to
| happen. Like it or not, Apple builds integrated products now.
| You are the old man grumbling about the iMac not including a
| floppy drive.
| MaxLeiter wrote:
| I'm not complaining; I generally agree with you. But (I
| believe) for people to invest in Macs for servers they need
| to be able to fix and replace them faster than dealing with
| Apple would allow.
| MBCook wrote:
| Honestly CPUs and memory fail very rarely. If the storage
| was on standard m.2 sticks and maybe the I/O was on a
| replaceable module in case Ethernet fails... would that
| be enough to assuage most server concerns?
|
| I don't see Apple getting back into that business. But I
| think they have the ability to make a good option _if_
| they want.
| mst wrote:
| Given the hyperscalers' tendency to just leave failed
| machines in place in the rack because it's not worth the
| money to even swap it out, for specifically cloud type
| stuff the price point and density may be more relevant
| than the repairability.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| > M1 Ultra features an extraordinarily powerful 20-core CPU with
| 16 high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores. It
| delivers 90 percent higher multi-threaded performance than the
| fastest available 16-core PC desktop chip in the same power
| envelope.
|
| Maybe not a _huge_ caveat, as 16-core chips in the same power
| envelope probably covers most of what an average PC user is going
| to have, but there are 64-core Threadrippers out there available
| for a PC (putting aside that it 's entirely possible to put a
| server motherboard and thus a server chip in a desktop PC case).
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| Is that Threadripper in anything like the "same power
| envelope"?
| ollien wrote:
| If I'm reading the graph in the press release right, M1 Ultra
| will have a TDP of 60W, right? A 3990X has a TDP of 280W. I
| know TDP != power draw, and that everyone calculates TDP
| differently, but looking purely at orders of magnitude, no,
| it's not even close.
| [deleted]
| eloff wrote:
| "in the same power envelope" is a pretty big caveat. Desktop
| chips aren't very optimized for power consumption.
|
| I'd like to see the actual performance comparison.
| adfgadfgaery wrote:
| That line is blatantly dishonest, but not for the reasons you
| pointed out. While the i9-12900K is a 16-core processor, it
| uses Intel's version of big.LITTLE. Eight of its 16 cores are
| relatively low performance 'E' cores. This means it has only
| half the performance cores of the M1 Ultra, yet it achieves 3/4
| of the performance by Apple's own graphic.
|
| Alder Lake has been repeatedly shown to outperform M1 core-per-
| core. The M1 Ultra is just way bigger. (And way more power
| efficient, which is a tremendous achievement for laptops but
| irrelevant for desktops.)
| raverbashing wrote:
| I'm reading the Ultrafusion description and besides all the talk
| what I can think of is: NUMA?
| j_d_b wrote:
| M1 has the most powerful chip ever yet it still can't handle two
| monitors.
| neogodless wrote:
| This is not relevant to the Apple M1 Ultra.
|
| From the Mac Studio technical specifications
|
| > Simultaneously supports up to five displays:
|
| > Support for up to four Pro Display XDRs (6K resolution at
| 60Hz and over a billion colors) over USB-C and one 4K display
| (4K resolution at 60Hz and over a billion colors) over HDMI
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