[HN Gopher] Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn't faster than AMD and Intel l...
___________________________________________________________________
Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn't faster than AMD and Intel last year
desktop CPUs
Author : jacooper
Score : 167 points
Date : 2023-06-10 16:16 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wccftech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (wccftech.com)
| dehrmann wrote:
| All all the M2 variants just Apple going down the binning path
| because of yields?
| wmf wrote:
| M2, M2 Pro, and M2 Max are different dies; they aren't binned
| versions of the same die. Apple showed "photos" of the dies and
| you can see they are different sizes with different stuff on
| them.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Are their yields actually that good, then? Are some of these
| chips massively underclocked? Do they add extra cores and
| cache for redundancy? Or maybe they have no idea, and TSMC
| delivers only chips that pass QA. For as big as Apple is,
| TSMC is in the stronger negotiating position.
| pavelevst wrote:
| I've used core i9 mbp16 for almost 3 years and this week I've
| used M1 Pro mbp, seeing hide differences in performance and
| knowing the actual difference in tests of these 2, it make me
| think that apple international slowdown and heat up intel macs,
| like they did (and may be still do) with iPhones
|
| I also remember my macbook unibody 2008 and mbp 2012, with them I
| could do a lot with 4gb ram, even on hdd, nowadays 8gb is kinda
| too small for most of programming jobs, it look like macs keep
| getting better hardware every year and macOS using it more and
| more aggressively
| pram wrote:
| I've had the i9 MBP with the 5500m from launch and it was
| always hot and noisy fwiw. For most people just having a second
| monitor plugged in made the fans always run because of a
| voltage issue. I sincerely doubt Apple needs to intentionally
| make it any worse. I hate that laptop!
| cubefox wrote:
| I assume the high price makes the advantage in power consumption
| (lower energy cost) not that relevant.
| mrangle wrote:
| Definitely have to adjust for TDP. The new gen Intel processors
| match the M2 performance for $100-150. TDP is triple but still
| relatively low. There isn't really anything available from non-
| niche retailers that approaches the TDP of Apple chips. And what
| does tends to be a binned just to be sold as mobile. Better to
| buy the standard chip and limit clock speed. What also shocks me
| is more expensive chips that offer inconsequential gains in
| processing for double TDP. I'm more likely to invest in a slight
| performance hit for much lower TDP.
| znpy wrote:
| Just wondering, what is the cpu that you picked?
|
| But I agree, tdp should really be kept in consideration.
| mrangle wrote:
| Look at the i3. Though it isn't much different than last gen,
| and that buying decision should be mostly determined by price
| (for the same price, go later). Unless there are significant
| enough non-speed related architecture differences that I am
| not aware of and that are important to you (possible). Try to
| catch a sale. Going upline will double the TDP for little
| gain, especially if dollars spent is important as well.
| People that have a specific interest in more L2 and L3 cache
| may see the logic in going upline. The TDP and price
| equivalent Ryzen will equate to about 10% better gaming
| performance, and better multi-thread performance, but lesser
| single thread performance.
| wtallis wrote:
| > Look at the i3. Though it isn't much different than last
| gen
|
| IIRC, the desktop i3 and i5 processors are in many cases
| _literally_ last-gen, since Intel is using a mix of Alder
| Lake and Raptor Lake dies on most of the "13th gen"
| desktop products that do not have more cores or cache than
| Alder Lake did.
| mrangle wrote:
| Right. Price should determine what one buys. There is a
| marginal performance bump between them for the same
| advertised TDP, and so suppose if price is the same then
| next gen it is. Otherwise buy what is cheapest.
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| Yes, there is. AMD has desktop chips with the same TDP as Mac
| laptops. The latest series of AMD chips are more powerful and
| more power-efficient.
|
| I think power efficiency by itself is a laudable goal, but the
| idea that other chipmakers don't optimize this doesn't make
| sense...you have to if you are building a laptop. A lot of the
| desktop chips are ludicrously overtuned, even AMD's chips, but
| the laptop chips have to be power-efficient due to the
| limitations on cooling.
|
| I would look in particular at the AMD APUs that are being used
| in handheld devices. Unlike Mac's chips, which promised much
| but delivered little, they are actually delivering desktop GPU-
| tier (in the range of 1050/1060) performance in a 20W package
| and under.
| Havoc wrote:
| >Definitely have to adjust for TDP
|
| Considered certainly, adjust less so.
|
| If you want to adjust for something price makes more sense than
| TDP
| mrangle wrote:
| I consider price and TDP as the two important variables, for
| performance, that aren't completely reconcilable. They should
| be considered separately, and then together for a buying
| decision for example.
|
| To illustrate and acknowledging that this calculation is more
| practical than satisfying to mathematicians:
|
| I wouldn't say that a chip that takes half of the power and
| costs half as much, while performing three times better, than
| a decade old chip is twelve times better all around. Even
| though the gains exceed both those indicated by price and
| watts, taken on their own. It performs roughly six times
| better per dollar spent and watt consumed, respectively.
| These performance differences are not reconcilable into a
| single number that most would quickly understand, but they
| should be considered together. And this in fact was the
| specific situation for the processor that I replaced. Not
| accounting for processing improvements that aren't included
| in thread processing speed. Try playing 4k video with a
| decade old processor while monitoring its utilization.
|
| Not to be argumentative as everyone is certainly entitled to
| their own weighting. I value TDP more than I do dollars
| spent. Though, both will always be unavoidably important.
| tiffanyg wrote:
| As usual, hard to evaluate claims of A better/worse than B, and
| fanboyas and fanchicas massively boosting the noise:signal ratio.
|
| https://youtu.be/u7ocWDNrfRs
|
| Or, of course, there's the classic Twain / Disraeli quote ...
| take your pick.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| The M2 has been a bit underwhelming in general through all of its
| iterations: Apple jumped into such a lead with the M1 [1], so it
| was disappointing when they slowly iterated while Intel and AMD
| have made enormous strides catching up. Everyone keeps citing
| TDP, but given that we're talking about desktops that just isn't
| a huge factor.
|
| Having said that, the 7950X was released late February, and the
| 13900KS was released in mid January. Both of this year. Both are
| their _premiere_ available chips right now in the segment.
| Referring to them like they 're last year's junk is rather silly.
|
| [1] Though fun fact with the M1, I remember super disappointing
| Geekbench results leaking before its release. People do know how
| low trust the site is, right? The computer identifiers on the
| claimed "M2 Ultra" devices claim to be Macbook Pro 14"
| devices....which aren't getting M2 Ultras for obvious reasons. In
| all likelihood someone is making guesses and posting nonsense.
| wmf wrote:
| _The computer identifiers on the claimed "M2 Ultra" devices
| claim to be Macbook Pro 14" devices_
|
| I think you're confusing Mac14,14 which is the internal
| designation for the Mac Studio with a MacBook Pro 14". The leak
| if anyone's interested:
| https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/21305974?baseli...
| birdyrooster wrote:
| With power in city downtowns (eg San Jose) at $0.50+/kWh it's
| definitely becoming a huge factor. My Mac uses almost an order
| of magnitude less power than the PC and I keep the PC powered
| off.
| yyyk wrote:
| Very likely any difference was already paid for with the
| Apple premium.
| theevilsharpie wrote:
| > My Mac uses almost an order of magnitude less power than
| the PC and I keep the PC powered off.
|
| Either you are not measuring power consumption correctly, or
| there is something very wrong with your PC.
| wtallis wrote:
| Or it's an AMD desktop. Their chiplet design really isn't
| good for idle power.
| ilyt wrote:
| Seriously, even when doing nothing whatsoever (and cores
| themselves idling at 1.3W) the package is taking 20W.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| I believe they're saying they keep it powered off because
| it uses a magnitude more power.
|
| And it's an entirely believable statement. A Mac Mini uses
| between 5w - 20w. Many PCs idle at >50W, and under use hit
| 500W+.
| betaby wrote:
| Perhaps, but those would be the very different PCs. Also
| while exist, 500W+ desktops are rare, and their
| performance are not comparable to Mac Minis.
| yyyk wrote:
| That's not a fair comparison. We should be comparing Mac
| Mini to NUCs if power consumption is the relevant factor.
| Plenty of NUCs are rated for 15w.
| Demmme wrote:
| How does that not matter on a fair comparison?
|
| It's a no brainer anyway to get more performance from desktop
| and non apple much cheaper due to apples pricing.
|
| Apple has a huge advantage price / performance wise with the
| cheap m based Mac book air.
|
| The comparison with a Mac book pro which costs 2-3k is slightly
| less so.
| zamalek wrote:
| > Apple has a huge advantage price / performance wise
|
| My 7950x machine cost, excluding the enthusiast GPU, $3000.
| That's less than half the cost of the M2 Ultra.
| masswerk wrote:
| Mind the second part of the quote,
|
| > Apple has a huge advantage price / performance wise _with
| the cheap m based Mac book air._
|
| The MBA is in the US $999 with M1 and $1099 with M2. (You
| can get them even at about $800 in sales.) This is an
| entirely different segment.
| rched wrote:
| This article strangely cites the cost of the Mac Pro with
| M2 Ultra. You can get the same M2 Ultra in a Mac Studio
| starting at $4000.
| brailsafe wrote:
| You spent $3000 before gpu on a custom PC!?
| zamalek wrote:
| It was the height of the pandemic and shortages. I guess
| it could be a lot cheaper today.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| $350 motherboard, $800 CPU, $200 RAM, $150 NVME, $100
| cooler, $150 PSU, $200 case. $1750 + CA tax is about
| $1900.
|
| You could easily add another $1K by going crazy with RAM
| and NVME storage.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| IMO driving down power consumption should still be a goal even
| for desktop machines. It means that the overwhelming majority
| of users get cooler, quieter, less bulky machines, while the
| fringe who need raw power at all costs can overclock to the
| moon if they really want to.
|
| This also pushes more "desktop like" performance to both
| ultraportable and reasonably portable laptops, allowing these
| machines to fully replace desktops for the overwhelming
| majority without all of the caveats that come with "desktop
| replacement" laptops (workstation laptops, heavy duty gaming
| laptops, etc). A lot of people who previously wouldn't have
| seen laptops as capable of being their primary machines are
| doing exactly that with M1/M2 Pro MBPs.
| ilyt wrote:
| > IMO driving down power consumption should still be a goal
| even for desktop machines. It means that the overwhelming
| majority of users get cooler, quieter, less bulky machines,
| while the fringe who need raw power at all costs can
| overclock to the moon if they really want to.
|
| It is the goal (after all more efficiency also means fitting
| more powerful cores into the thermal envelope) but given the
| choice most desktop users would be fine with "just a bit
| bigger box" rather than sacrifice performance for the price.
| automatic6131 wrote:
| >while the fringe who need raw power at all costs can
| overclock to the moon if they really want to.
|
| This is actually the case! The 7950X and 13900K come in non-X
| and non-K variants, which have vastly reduced power
| footprints and overall consumption, and you can even take
| your X or K variant and... Enforce that exact same power
| envelope in BIOS, for minimal loss in performance. But the
| purchasers of desktop X and K SKUs are the overclocking
| fringe (by and large). I will admit though, a lot of laptops
| are sold with with i|r7|9 +HX variants that shouldn't be
| purchased because big number means easier upsell.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| Desktop pcs requiring a ludicrous amount of power and cooling
| is absolutely problematic. The amount of people willing to put
| up with big honking machines is dwindling.
| zamalek wrote:
| > honking
|
| May I assume that you haven't used a desktop from some year
| equivalent to whatever Mac you use? Because modern desktops
| are far from "honking."
|
| I have a 7950x (the high core count desktop offering). AMD
| require (sans one brand) water-cooling for it. That means you
| get big quiet fans, which are far less "honking" than the
| tiny loud ones that are in laptops by necessity. In fact, due
| to the nice large radiators that liquid coolers have the fans
| don't spin at all the majority of the time.
|
| When I do need power, it's on-tap.
|
| My 6900xt is big honking during gaming, but you can get real
| quiet $300 GPUs. Or just use the integrated graphics and
| enjoy the quiet liquid cooling.
|
| > big
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-ITX
| tehnub wrote:
| >ludicrous amount of power and cooling
|
| >big honking machines
|
| Buy an all-in-one water cooler for the CPU
| https://pcpartpicker.com/product/2PFKHx/arctic-liquid-
| freeze...
|
| It's easy to install and you have a quiet, well-cooled CPU.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| AIOs aren't a great option for users who want to set it and
| forget it. Even the best ones lose fluid to sublimation
| and/or start leaking after a few years, which is why
| there's still a market for coolers like the NH-D15.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| Citation needed. "The best" AIO coolers shouldn't have
| issues with fluid lose in a meaningful way that impacts
| performance.
|
| Likewise, I'm not aware of any widescale issues with AIOs
| leaking. This seems like just as much of a problem as
| regular CPU coolers that need to have dust removed (i.e.,
| not a problem).
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I went with the NH-D15 when I built my 5950x desktop.
| I've never fiddled with liquid cooling, and having to
| locate a radiator seemed like a pain. I very much hope
| not to need to touch it again for a decade. After
| tweaking the fan profile, it's silent most of the time.
| Of course, it does make it kind of a pain to remove my
| GPU because it's so bulky; I need to use a shim to reach
| the PCI-E latch.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > I need to use a shim to reach the PCI-E latch.
|
| Similar here, there's not much room left when you've got
| a NH-D15 and EVGA 3080 Ti FTW3 installed.
|
| This is more of an inadequacy on the part of motherboard
| manufacturers, though. PCI-E latches don't have to be
| terrible... look at the system Apple uses in their 2019
| and 2023 Mac Pro towers for example which remain
| accessible regardless of what you have installed.
| ilyt wrote:
| My 120W 7800X3D only managed to heat that monster to 70C.
| I should probably bump the thermal profile to spin to max
| only around 80C...
| wtallis wrote:
| How much did you have to crank up the voltages on the
| 7800X3D to get it to 120W? I can't get mine much past 85W
| at stock voltage and clocks, even with the memory running
| at DDR5-6000.
| tehnub wrote:
| They won't last forever but Arctic does have a six year
| warranty https://www.arctic.de/us/blog/extended-warranty-
| period-for-a...
| burmanm wrote:
| Is it? Why?
|
| My machine is entirely silent on normal operations (Zen 3
| 5600X and RX 6700). All the fans, on both GPU and CPU are
| stopped in desktop usage. And it doesn't obviously eat that
| much power (my monitor probably eats more).
|
| The only moment I could hear them is if I play games. And
| then I have headset on, so I can't hear them.
|
| I really couldn't care less if it ate twice the amount of
| power when playing games.
| waboremo wrote:
| You should care because you're paying for that energy use
| lol
| burmanm wrote:
| In the end that sum it takes energy during gaming is
| meaningless. I spend more on coffee while playing than to
| electricity.
| waboremo wrote:
| Right, and you could have afforded better/more coffee
| with the savings costs to consuming less power. Which is
| the point: energy costs are not 0. These costs vary
| depending on which devices you play on, regardless of
| games. Someone playing the same games as you on PS5
| rather than a gaming PC, is going to save enough money to
| then buy another indie game per month or more coffees in
| that month than you.
|
| Note: this isn't about debating which platform is best,
| rather understanding power consumption impact and the
| cost to your budget.
|
| Are these costs major? Life changing? Absolutely not. But
| you should care about them and make decisions
| incorporating them, not ignoring it as if power
| consumption is irrelevant even if doubled!
| pdpi wrote:
| > Is it? Why?
|
| Because, while gaming, the vents in my case blow air at
| over 40 degrees Celsius, and that heat has to go somewhere.
| Absent a setup that can put the case several meters away
| from me, that "somewhere" is on top of me.
| ilyt wrote:
| Flip it 180 degrees ? Cases are designed to blow the air
| into the back, not to have back facing the user...
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| AMD and Intel are jacking up the default power settings to
| absurd levels because it gives marketing bigger numbers to to
| throw around.
|
| You can drastically reduce the power you supply to desktop
| chips with BIOS settings. You'll generate far less heat, can
| use a smaller power supply and form factor, while still
| getting great performance.
|
| If Intel/AMD get to a level where their chips rival M1/M2
| while power throttled, things get interesting.
| jerrygenser wrote:
| In general both on my own benchmarks and from what I've
| read/seen youtube videos, it's about a 5% performance loss
| multithreaded with full core saturation and 0-1%
| performance haircut on single threaded -- since on single
| threaded you are generating lower enough heat not to go
| near the high end.
|
| For me this was going from 105W to 65W on my 7700X and my
| results were similar.
|
| Not sure how it would look or work with Intel though.
| ilyt wrote:
| I have 120W TDP chip on default settings and it only ramps
| up to the max in rare cases like compiling shaders for
| RPCSX3
|
| > If Intel/AMD get to a level where their chips rival M1/M2
| while power throttled, things get interesting.
|
| For laptop users, maybe. For desktop extra 40W literally
| doesn't matter.
| Lapha wrote:
| Both companies are juicing up the default power limits
| which absolutely matters if you're concerned about total Wh
| for sustained loads, thermal considerations, PSU rating,
| noise, etc, as you mentioned, but to be fair to AMD here
| they've released an eco mode on the 7000 series which does
| lower the default power limit quite substantially. You
| could do this before with manual adjustments to voltage and
| clock speeds, but now it's a simple toggle.
|
| Another point is that in terms of power efficiency AMD are
| absolutely mopping the floor with Intel, where even older
| high power R9s are consistently outperforming Intel's lower
| power i5 and i7s by a wide margin. This sort of discussion
| is often left out of reviews which only look at TDP or peak
| wall power. It's still not ARM levels of efficiency, but
| x86 vs ARM or even desktop vs laptop efficiency is an
| entirely separate conversation.
| pdpi wrote:
| > Desktop pcs requiring a ludicrous amount of power and
| cooling is absolutely problematic.
|
| High-end PSUs now overlap with smaller space heaters on power
| output. My living room is usually 3-4 degrees hotter around
| my desk than it is by the dining table.I'm looking to upgrade
| my gaming PC, and getting the power budget under control is
| surprisingly challenging.
| jerrygenser wrote:
| For your gaming PC you likely don't even need a current gen
| chip. You are probably fine with a 5600 for most games
| unless you NEED high FPS on certain games and have a
| monitor with 244hz refresh rate (or you won't even get the
| frames) Gaming is mostly about GPU (if you're casual gamer
| and want to run 1440p) but if you do need cpu and high
| refresh rate then you're likely hardcore FPS or RTS games
| and you're running at 1080P anyway and then in that
| situation don't need a high end GPU.
|
| I have a AMD 7700X and I run it on Eco Mode which is approx
| 65W TDP instead of the 105W TDP it wants to run at.
|
| For my general use (including cpu intensive operations)
| this makes absolutely no perceivable difference. I ran some
| benchmarks out of curiosity and I take about a 5% haircut
| for a massive power and heat savings.
|
| What Intel and AMD did with the chips was essentially sell
| consumers a default overclocked chip that will run to the
| max of the thermal headroom that your fan will allow and
| sit there. They did this to be competitive with each other
| in benchmarks for marketing.
|
| Most consumers should run these chips in some sort of eco
| mode since the performance per watt has severe diminishing
| returns and they are actually quite power efficient as long
| as you don't run it on the default factory overclocked
| settings.
| eikenberry wrote:
| > For your gaming PC you likely don't even need a current
| gen chip.
|
| Many gamers, like me, probably also use their display for
| things aside from gaming. For non-gaming computer work I
| like 4K w/ a high (120hz ideally) refresh rate for well
| rendered text and smoother movement. But as I also then
| want to use this monitor for gaming, I need a gaming
| system that supports this.
|
| TLDR; you might need a current gen chip for reasons other
| than gaming.
| jerrygenser wrote:
| My 49 inch 144hz monitor ran fine for this exact use case
| when I had an amd 3600 and Nvidia 1660. Is your work use
| case somehow more demanding than gaming?
| nunodonato wrote:
| except if you are playing Flight Simulator... in VR. Then
| even a current-gen build will struggle a bit :)
| tiberious726 wrote:
| > High-end PSUs now overlap with smaller space heaters on
| power output
|
| Technically true, but vacuously. The limit of a standard US
| circuit is 1500w, which is why you see all space heaters
| and the good PSUs hitting the figure
| BirAdam wrote:
| From what I understand, the M2 was released due to TSMC
| struggling with yields on their N3 process. Apple had to do
| something with the N5 node to keep hardware available to
| consumers, and M2 was the result.
| jerrygenser wrote:
| > Having said that, the 7950X was released late February, and
| the 13900KS was released in mid January. Both of this year.
| Both are their premiere available chips right now in the
| segment. Referring to them like they're last year's junk is
| rather silly.
|
| 7950X was released September, 2022. It's quite literally last
| year's chip and given that AMD release cycle is typically about
| 2 years, we're roughly halfway between last release and 9000
| series release.
|
| You might be getting it confused with the Non-X versions that
| were released earlier in 2023 -- those are basically the same
| chip but power limited and maybe slightly worse selections of
| silicon. Of those Non-X versions it was 7600, 7700, 7900 but
| non-X of 7950 was released. [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Ryzen_processors
| wtallis wrote:
| I think he was getting the 7950X confused with the 7950X3D,
| the latter of which was released in late February.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| One of my biggest gripes about Macs is that their thermal
| engineers refuse to get off their high horses and build _real_
| cooling solutions that don 't artifically limit the capabilities
| of an objectively performance-competitive CPU.
|
| I don't care if it consumes 200 W of power. I don't care if the
| chassis needs to be thicker to accommodate a larger heatsink. I
| don't care if you need to run the fans at 100%. Just let me use
| the full power of the CPU created by the chip designers god
| dammit!
| florakel wrote:
| It's a fair point. Especially for the new Mac Pro they could
| have implemented a more robust thermal solution and clock the
| whole thing higher. That's one advantage of a bigger chasis,
| isn't it?
| MBCook wrote:
| The took the giant overkill design meant to hold a hot Intel
| chip and possibly multiple big GPUs, and put a M2 Ultra in
| it.
|
| It's _overcooled_. There is no way it's thermally limited.
| It's got to have headroom for days.
|
| I'm very curious where this idea I keep seeing in the
| comments that Apple refuses to run chips at full speed for
| cooling reasons comes from.
| etempleton wrote:
| That is kind of the thing. The whole Mac Studio only consumes
| ~200 watts.
|
| It is what I find about this article to be disingenuous. Sure,
| by all means compare the M2 Ultra to the Intel 13900K and the
| Nvidia 4080, but at least mention that it is consuming a third
| of the power.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| I was expecting the MacPro (M-series) to be exactly that.
|
| A high wattage, highly cooled proc.
|
| But nope, they did what you described.
| gumby wrote:
| Yeah, I did too. The use case for the Mac Pro is even more
| limited than what you would expect (it's not like there are a
| lot of supported PCI boards). It's hard to think of many
| users who would choose it over a Studio. I doubt Apple will
| make any money on the Pro.
|
| They _could_ use this version as a stepping stone to a future
| faster device. But I suspect this form factor is a dead end
| for the Apple customer base. Maybe it exists for bragging
| (i.e. marketing) rights, the same reason Honda funds a
| Formula 1 team.
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _I was expecting the MacPro (M-series) to be exactly that._
|
| MKBHD put forward an interesting hypothesis in his last
| podcast: this generation Mac Pro has simply to get the
| refresh out the door. They took their existing designs
| (SoC/chips, cases) and simply mashed them together. Similarly
| to how they simply mashed the M-chips into existing laptop
| case designs first, and then optimized with Gen2.
|
| Now that they have _something_ , they can iterate on a more
| harmonious solution that allows for the advantages of each.
| oneplane wrote:
| > I don't care if
|
| That's the thing: they aren't building it just for you. We can
| speculate about their internal requirements documents, but
| what's for sure is that they calculate a projected market
| adoption based on various factors like cost, market
| segmentation, power draw, heat transfer, noise etc. If it turns
| out that they project a bigger profit with a lower power limit
| than technically possible, that's what they'll do.
|
| Personally, it would be nice of this were to apply to any CPU,
| GPU, SoC and even VRM and DC-DC regulators; let me worry about
| the dissipation, just pump out as many cycles as possible. But
| that's not really something that covers any significant market
| that Apple (or most multinationals) is targeting.
|
| What I find much more surprising is that all of their M1/M2
| deployments seem to be far fewer bin-limited; normally you'd
| get a crapton of SKUs for a SoC because they are so hard to
| manufacture, but Apple seems to get away with only 15 to 20.
| Perhaps this is also why there are much clearer power limits on
| most of their devices.
| wmf wrote:
| AFAIK none of the desktop Macs are thermally limited.
| mnd999 wrote:
| They used to, the G5 Macs had impressive cooling.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| I wasnt a G5 owner, waited for the Intel switch, but I gather
| the G5 water cooling had a very high failure rate and this
| was at least a large part of why Jobs dropped IBM/MOT/PPC int
| he end. They promised him a high clock, air cooled G5 but
| couldn't deliver.
| hulitu wrote:
| > They promised him a high clock, air cooled G5 but
| couldn't deliver.
|
| Then how were IBM processors cooled ? IBM used also PowerPC
| pram wrote:
| If you've never been around an AIX Power server: they're
| extraordinarily loud. Usually these 3/4U rack servers
| that sound like a plane taking off.
| peppermint_gum wrote:
| IBM version of G5, POWER4 and POWER5, was clocked a bit
| lower than G5, and their servers and workstations had
| extremely loud fans.
| etempleton wrote:
| The bigger issue was that they couldn't get the G5 to work
| in a laptop and this was killing Apple. Apple's laptops
| have always been a cut above their PC counterparts in terms
| of design, but in those days it felt like Apple Laptops
| were from a different planet, except they were unreasonably
| slow in large part because they were stuck on the G4
| processor for years. Switching to intel was a necessity for
| survival. IBM just couldn't deliver or keep up with what
| Intel was doing.
| pram wrote:
| The G5s _had_ to have impressive cooling lol
| cjbprime wrote:
| Reasons to still prefer an M2 for a HEDT situation, despite the
| article claims:
|
| * The latest Intel/AMD desktops only have two channels of DDR5,
| and if you put as little as 64GB RAM in them they can drop to
| DDR4 speeds (2DPC, dual-rank), less than 10% of M2 memory
| bandwidth.
|
| * You can (surprisingly cheaply) buy an M2 with 192GB GPU VRAM,
| but you can't buy a DDR5 PC with the same amount. If we all start
| wanting to run LLMs locally that'll be a pretty big deal.
| phonon wrote:
| > can't buy a DDR5 PC with the same amount.
|
| Should be available soon.
|
| https://www.techpowerup.com/306005/asus-teases-192-gb-ddr5-m...
| murmansk wrote:
| Ahhaha, Intel's TDP is 2-4 times bigger under full load (and I
| guess ~10-15x under moderate load) while having negligible perf
| advantage over M2. The author can not be serious.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Is that like 5 acre feet per fathom? TDP makes no sense here.
| jacooper wrote:
| Since when was TDP a deciding factor in desktop purchasing
| decisions? Sure M SOCs are great on laptops, but there are no
| reasons to get them on the desktop, slower, more expensive and
| with less compatibility.
| daneel_w wrote:
| I considered it an important factor even 15 years ago, long
| before the reality of the environmental and energy crises
| really dawned on us. Surely I can't be alone.
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| Lower power consumption means less heat, which means you
| might see more _reliable_ performance (less likelihood of
| throttling in the middle of intensive workloads)
|
| This doesn't matter for everyone's use case, but it is a
| factor some people might consider.
| mrangle wrote:
| TDP reduction = heat management = reliability management but
| mostly noise management.
|
| I've never tried to water cool a 125 watt processor and so I
| can't speak to that. But especially if one uses air cooling
| or ideally passive cooling, one's ability to reduce noise is
| proportional to the chip's TDP. Noise reduction is important
| to many.
| zbrozek wrote:
| Where and when electric energy is $0.51/kWh, one might care
| quite a bit.
| jacooper wrote:
| I doubt the target customers of the M2 ultra aren't going
| to be able to cover extra energy costs for a cheaper and
| more performant device.
| zbrozek wrote:
| Oh sure, but I was responding to the comment above saying
| that desktop users in general shouldn't care about power
| consumption. That's too broad.
| ianai wrote:
| It's such a strawman point. But this comparison is totally
| bonkers. If you're doing a workload meant for a 4080/4090
| then you really have no business pointing at the M2 Ultra
| as a competitor.
|
| Then there's comparing like technology to like technology.
| Something like the 5700G AMD line, and that's not even
| nvidia. But that probably isn't as interesting to the
| authors.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Whoever is doing the caring should reconsider their life
| choices at that price. At 51 cents per kilowatt hour,
| personal solar + batteries are a vailable alternative. If
| you cared about the planet, you'd move
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > Intel's TDP is 2-4 times bigger under full load
|
| Never been a problem, even when Intel TDP was 20x worse than
| today.
|
| EDIT: the author forgot that the tested system is an M2 Ultra a
| desktop class system with a TDP of 90 watts
|
| _The i9-13900T and i7-13700T come in at a max turbo power of
| just 106W_
|
| which is just 1.2x
| MBCook wrote:
| > The i9-13900T and i7-13700T come in at a max turbo power of
| just 106W
|
| Now add in the GPU. Because the Apple number combined both.
| wtallis wrote:
| > even when Intel TDP was 20x worse than today.
|
| When has Intel's real, advertised, or specified CPU power
| consumption or TDP ever been 20x that of the i9-13900KS?
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| Core i9-13900KS consumes 150W with 24 cores (8P+16E)
|
| so an average of 6.25 watts per core
|
| which is less than a Pentium 90, a 1994 CPU running at
| 90Mhz
|
| in absolute is not a 20x worse TDP, but it is relatively to
| the gain in frequency and performances (more than 20x
| actually)
| wtallis wrote:
| > Core i9-13900KS consumes 150W with 24 cores (8P+16E)
|
| No, the 13900KS has a nominal "TDP" of 150W. That's a
| marketing number, not a measurement and not even a
| control target parameter for the default boost management
| settings. Out of the box, a 13900KS in a typical desktop
| motherboard will happily draw more than twice that,
| indefinitely, if you can cool it and have a workload that
| can actually keep all of those cores busy: https://images
| .anandtech.com/doci/18728/13900KS%20Power%20Gr...
|
| If you want to compare per-core power, you either have to
| use a power number for a workload that's actually loading
| all the cores, or divide the measured power by the number
| of cores actually in use.
| daneel_w wrote:
| _> "Never been a problem, even when Intel TDP was 20x worse
| than today."_
|
| Economically and environmentally it's absolutely a problem.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > Economically and environmentally it's absolutely a
| problem.
|
| [citation needed]
|
| Economically the Intel CPU of the 90s that had a very bad
| perf/watt compared to today's standards have been awesomely
| worth it
|
| Environmentally, CPU have been getting better and better,
| the difference of a few 10s of watts doesn't really make
| any difference, unless you have numbers to back up your
| very strong claim.
| daneel_w wrote:
| Citation needed? Do you live in some alternate reality?
|
| _> "... the difference of a few 10s of watts doesn't
| really make any difference, unless you have numbers to
| back up your very strong claim."_
|
| We have a billion power-hungry PCs running on the planet.
| Power-efficiency matters for economy and for environment,
| because power isn't free and only a tiny speck of the
| world runs on clean energy. It always mattered.
| locustous wrote:
| Most of those systems sit at idle, when they are on at
| all. Idle power is not the same as TDP. The idle
| difference is not so great that it's a big deal.
| daneel_w wrote:
| Whataboutism.
| MBCook wrote:
| Do you have a source showing idle numbers? I've never
| seen a comparison. The ones I've seen are always about
| max power.
| [deleted]
| scarface_74 wrote:
| This and the introduction of the new slower less expandable - at
| least with respect to GPUs and memory - is indicative that it was
| a mistake for Apple to completely transition to ARM and should
| have kept high end options on Intel until they had a better GPU
| story to tell.
|
| They already had the Mac Studio, they could have kept the Mac Pro
| on Intel.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| The new M2 Ultra can process 24 4K streams at once. How much
| more processing power do people with the Mac use case in mind
| need?
| smoldesu wrote:
| Many need things that aren't media encoders. The 24 4K
| streams are impressive, but it's less impressive when you
| realize it comes from having overly redundant video encoders
| from gluing two M2 Maxes together. For raster graphics
| performance, BVH traversal, ray tracing and machine learning
| purposes, it's entirely understandable why someone might
| prefer an older Intel Mac for performance purposes.
| jitl wrote:
| 3rd party GPUs don't mesh with the Metal strategy. Apple
| dropped and deprecated OpenGL a long time ago - and they're the
| only one building metal GPUs
| scarface_74 wrote:
| The Intel Mac Pro supported third party GPUs and there were
| Thunderbolt based officially supported GPUs for later Intel
| Macs. Apple made a big deal about them. This was after their
| transition to Metal
| lxgr wrote:
| Doesn't Metal support multiple GPU architectures just like
| OpenGL?
| jitl wrote:
| You're right, there is some support -
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202239
| jacooper wrote:
| The Intel Mac pro was too slow, unless you mean refreshing it,
| which I doubt is possible, because apple doesn't want to do
| anything related to X86 anymore.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| You could add GPUs to it at least. For many high end
| workloads, you need GPU horsepower.
|
| How is not wanting to do x86 on the high end? The article
| says just as much.
| olyjohn wrote:
| Queue the "But power consumption..." as though it makes fuckall
| difference on a workstation.
| satysin wrote:
| Perhaps not to you but to me it matters a lot.
|
| I live in a country where it gets very hot in the summer. I
| prefer to keep my environment cool without needing AC.
| Unfortunately I have found that is not possible to do with my
| beefy Dell workstation that consumes in the 1kW range thanks to
| the Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU.
|
| It isn't just a _feeling_ but a hard fact that my thermostat
| can confirm that running my Intel workstation puts my office up
| to uncomfortable temps. No such thing happens with my M1 Ultra
| Mac Studio running with a third to a quarter less power
| consumption.
|
| Perhaps I am alone in this but I dislike having to use AC to
| cool my office when I can just not make it so damn hot in the
| first place. It is all just a waste of energy and energy isn't
| free.
|
| If it's not an issue for you then fair enough buy a 1kW+
| Intel/Nvidia system but to say "it makes fuckall difference on
| a workstation" is disingenuous.
| unusualmonkey wrote:
| Have you tuned your workstation for power efficiency?
|
| Dropping cpu and GPU frequencies even a few % might have a
| significant impact.
| peepeepoopoo9 wrote:
| *cue
| anthonyryan1 wrote:
| Where are the performance per watt numbers?
|
| Anyone can get the performance crown by having an unlimited
| energy budget. Performance per watt is much more valuable in data
| centers (TCO) and consumer devices (battery life).
| jacooper wrote:
| Well, the article is speaking about the M2 ultra, which only
| going to be used in the Mac pro under Mac studio, both desktop
| computers.
| kemayo wrote:
| The Mac Pro _does_ have a rack-mounted configuration for the
| non-desktop data centers case. (I have no idea whether people
| will actually use it that way, but it exists.)
|
| https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/rack
| charrondev wrote:
| I can see those being bought up for Datcenters and CI use.
| There have been companies hosting huge racks of Mac minis
| for ages to do CI for MacOS and iOS software.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > Anyone can get the performance crown by having an unlimited
| energy budget
|
| Not really. No.
|
| > Performance per watt is much more valuable in data centers
|
| Assuming performance can be combined.
|
| You can't get the same performances of an Nvidia RTX 4080 using
| 2 M2
| solomatov wrote:
| Not always, if you are connected to a source of electricity and
| doing something limited by speed performance is critical.
|
| For me, Desktop use is almost perfect on Apple due to battery
| life and perf but professional use is much better on
| Intel/AMD+NVidia. Also you could get much more perf for $ on
| such machines
| sosborn wrote:
| > professional use
|
| I hate this terminology. How would anyone define
| "professional use"
| solomatov wrote:
| Something with intention to make you money and directly
| related to powerful machine, i.e. writing code, editing
| videos, images, etc. As opposed to casual use where you
| plan simple games, browse internet, etc.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I don't feel comfortable with these comparisons because I think
| Apple designs their SoCs specifically for the software they
| expect to be most used on their devices. I noticed, for example,
| that an older iPadPro with an A series SoC compiled Swift code in
| Playground twice as fast as my then current beefy Intel MacBook
| Pro. Similar design for running specific neural network
| architectures, handling their displays, etc.
|
| A few days ago I was thinking of getting a beefy Mac Studio for
| deep learning since M1 and M2 are now fairly well supported. I
| didn't because this felt like swimming up river, using something
| not as it was designed to be used. (I decided to use $10 or
| $50/month Google Colab instead).
| jitl wrote:
| I think the most interesting benchmark of the M2's potential
| advantage conventional Intel/Nvidia machines would be a memory-
| heavy ML training or inference workload. Apple made some noises
| about having 190GB of unified memory as an advantage for that
| scenario, since the system wouldn't need to wait for copying from
| COU RAM to GPU RAM but I'd like to see that put to the test.
|
| I'm also disappointed that Apple didn't go for a 2-socket Mac Pro
| so they could offer a compute advantage over Mac Studio in
| addition to the PCI Express slots. Other than the IO, I can't
| think of a reason to pick the Mac Pro.
| veselin wrote:
| I find the article quite informative. Yes, M2 and the other chips
| are completely different products with different goals. If one
| wants to say that something completely trumps the other, it will
| be wrong.
|
| But here is what is visible:
|
| The M2 core is probably in the same ballpark as Zen 4 core,
| likely a tiny bit below. That may become very tiny if Zen 4 core
| runs at lower frequency to equalize the power. This doesn't
| account for the AVX512 of Zen4.
|
| 24 M2 cores manage to beat 16 Zen 4 cores also at lower power,
| but these are different products. Zen 4 does scale to far more
| cores, 96 in an EPYC chip. AMD and Intel have far more
| investments in interconnects and multi-die chips to do these
| things.
|
| The M2 GPU is in the same league as a 300$ mid-range nVidia card.
| It is not competitive at all - Apple produces the largest chip it
| can manufacture to go against a high margin smaller chip that
| nVidia orders.
|
| Again all of this doesn't mean each product is not good on its
| own.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > The M2 GPU is in the same league as a 300$ mid-range nVidia
| card
|
| It still has the advantage of a much larger memory pool.
|
| I did a quick comparison exercise - I priced two workstations
| with similar configurations, one from Dell, the other from
| Apple. While there are x86 (and ARM) machines that'll blow the
| biggest M2 out of the water, the prices, as far as Apple can
| go, aren't much different.
|
| https://twitter.com/0xDEADBEEFCAFE/status/166747612998729728...
| jeroenhd wrote:
| If you buy anything labeled as "workstation", you're paying
| twice the price already.
|
| The article describes the M2 being blown out of the water by
| a 4080 and a 13900KS. That's about $2000 + RAM, motherboard,
| and power supply. Plus you can use the built in GPU in your
| CPU for acceleration things like transcodes.
|
| You can get a pre-built gaming PC with a 4090 for about
| $4000, that'll crush the M2 in compute if you use any kind of
| GPU acceleration.
|
| Of course the M2 has some other advantages (the unified
| memory and macOS) and some other disadvantages (you're stuck
| with the amount of RAM you pick at checkout, macOS, you have
| to sacrifice system RAM for GPU RAM) so it all depends on
| your use case.
|
| I think the M2 still reigns supreme for mobile devices,
| though AMD is getting closer and closer with their mobile
| chips, but if you've got a machine hooked into the wall
| you'll have to pay some pretty excessive electricity rates
| for the M2 to become competitive.
| selimnairb wrote:
| You're forgetting the benefit of everything just working
| and never having to thinking about effing with drivers
| ever. To me, it's priceless. Anything truly performance
| bound (CPU or GPU) is going to be done on HPC systems, not
| on a fake Windows "workstation".
| xbar wrote:
| I agree with your take. My plugged into the wall machine is
| a 128GB 13900k 4090 system. My mobile machine is an Apple
| Silicon Macbook Pro. There are some tasks that are still
| better on the unified memory of the Macbook, but only a
| handful. There are many tasks that are more pleasant on the
| Macbook because of the absurd power efficiency (DAW, Final
| Cut Pro).
|
| Both machines have a quality that I appreciate: they are
| never, ever slow.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > If you buy anything labeled as "workstation", you're
| paying twice the price already.
|
| The price of workstation-class machines also includes the
| cost of higher build-quality and stability, things like
| same-day support and service - at least the option for a
| long-term (5-6 year) warranty, and FRUs - you don't get
| that with consumer-grade computers - and those things
| matter when a machine is something you depend on
| professionally.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > If you buy anything labeled as "workstation", you're
| paying twice the price already.
|
| We are not comparing MacPros to low-end desktops.
|
| > You can get a pre-built gaming PC with a 4090 for about
| $4000, that'll crush the M2 in compute if you use any kind
| of GPU acceleration.
|
| Yes, but the gaming PC will not as well built as the
| workstation-grade machine. And pretty much any GPU you can
| install on a gaming PC you can install on a MacPro - it's
| just that it won't be there out of the (Apple branded) box.
|
| > you're stuck with the amount of RAM you pick at checkout
|
| Sadly, this has been Apple for some time now - you buy the
| machine as it will be used for its whole intended lifetime.
| With the MacPro you can at least add internal storage and
| one or more GPU cards.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > It still has the advantage of a much larger memory pool.
|
| Why do you think NVIDIA doesn't "just add" "more memory"? To
| its $40,000 H100s, which top out at "just" 80GB?
|
| The answer isn't price segmentation.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| Yes, it's not price segmentation, it's planned
| obsolescence.
|
| The 3080 series would be fine for likely beyond the 50x0
| series gpu-wise, but current games are already starting to
| stutter unless you downgrade textures because of its
| limited VRAM
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| The performance of the chip is matched to the memory
| size.
|
| I think it's a U shaped curve.
|
| Beyond 80GB, today, the larger chip would maybe all of
| these: yield less, scale worse, take too much power, etc.
|
| Like this matching of compute resources to RAM is partly
| the difference between CPUs and GPUs.
|
| Anyway, it's just to say that it isn't a business
| decision. The extra RAM in the M2 doesn't help the GPU
| much for the same tasks the H100 excels at, because it
| isn't performant enough to use that RAM anywhere near the
| same way an H100 would, and if it were, there would have
| to be less RAM. The H100 doesn't even have a graphics
| engine. It's complicated.
| wtallis wrote:
| > The performance of the chip is matched to the memory
| size.
|
| That may be approximately true if you only look at a
| single generation of consumer graphics cards at a time.
| If you compare across generations or include non-gaming
| workloads the correlation falls apart.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > It still has the advantage of a much larger memory pool.
|
| I wonder if given roughly equal power to the GPUs in current
| gen consoles (PS5/XBSX), it'd yield some advantage in porting
| console games since those consoles also have a large shared
| pool of memory (16GB), and neither AMD nor Nvidia want to
| give up using VRAM as an upsell.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| With the M2 Ultra prices, it'd be cheaper to buy a 4090
| than to go the Apple route. With the M2 pro you'll probably
| still be better off with a 4080 unless you really need more
| than 16GB of VRAM.
|
| I don't know the M2's efficiency for things like machine
| learning, but the M1's machine learning performance seemed
| to have been beaten 4-5x by the 3060Ti so I'm pretty sure
| "more VRAM" is all it's got going for it in ML tasks.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Well yeah, the market here would be people who already
| have a reasonably powerful Mac and would rather have that
| fill their gaming needs instead of having to build or buy
| a separate dedicated device for that.
|
| But what I was really getting at is the trouble that game
| studios have been encountering lately when porting PS5
| and Xbox titles to Windows, which is that these games are
| so reliant on those consoles' 16GB shared memory pool
| that they perform terribly on PCs. The impact is double,
| because not only are most GPUs in usage right now anemic
| when it comes to VRAM (even my last-gen high end 3080 Ti
| comes up short at only 12GB), traditional PCs also have
| to copy data between RAM and VRAM. Significant re-
| architecting for the Windows port is required to work
| around this.
|
| M-series Macs are much more similar to current gen
| consoles with their shared memory pool, which in theory
| could make porting from console to Mac (at least when
| targeting Macs with 16GB+ of RAM) more straightforward
| than porting to Windows. While some work would need to be
| done to support Metal, the two most popular engines
| already do much of that legwork and the work that remains
| can be shared across multiple titles.
| selimnairb wrote:
| Cheaper in terms of money, but in terms of time? I have a
| hard time justifying anything that requires configuration
| and dicking around. I'm a grown-up and don't have "free
| time". I need things that just work. For me, that's not
| Intel and Windows or Intel and Linux. It's macOS, which
| is the only true workstation platform left.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Apple's GPU performance is what makes me sceptical about their
| gaming related advertising. Sure, you can do 1080p gaming with
| the highest SKU, but you're paying through the nose if you
| bought an M2 to play games.
|
| It seems strange to me for Apple to advertise something they
| haven't exactly mastered yet on stage.
|
| Maybe they have some kind of optimization up their sleeves that
| will roll out later? I can imagine Apple coming out with their
| own answer to DLSS and FSX2 based on their machine learning
| hardware, for example. On the other hand, I would've expected
| them to demonstrate that in the first place when they shoed off
| their game port toolkit.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > Apple's GPU performance is what makes me sceptical about
| their gaming related advertising.
|
| The issue is that people compare games running under emulated
| x86 and emulated graphics APIs, when making claims about what
| the SOC is capable of.
|
| There's nothing wrong with knowing how well the SOC performs
| when emulating games, but if you claim to be talking about
| what the SOC can do, then include the performance of native
| games as well.
| pornel wrote:
| Apple's x86 emulation is otherwise very impressive, and not
| many games are bottlenecked on the CPU, especially at high
| resolutions.
|
| Bigger overhead for AAA games is likely due to emulation of
| DirectX or Vulkan on Metal, but that's just Apple's
| stubborn choice to have it that way.
|
| In the end, none of that matters. I won't be playing
| Cyberpunk at 14fps, without RTX, and comforting myself that
| the SoC could do maybe 28fps without emulation. Lower-tier
| Nvidia cards perform better, even when paired with slower
| CPUs.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > Bigger overhead for AAA games is likely due to
| emulation of DirectX or Vulkan on Metal, but that's just
| Apple's stubborn choice to have it that way.
|
| This is a weird take. None of he major gaming platforms
| use the same graphics API.
|
| Microsoft has DirectX on Windows and XBox, Apple has
| Metal on iOS and Macs, Sony has Gnmx on Playstation.
|
| It's like saying Android gaming is terrible because they
| didn't use DirectX.
| cmovq wrote:
| The CPU is rarely a bottleneck for AAA games, so unless the
| x86 emulation is particularly terrible (Rosetta isn't) it
| shouldn't be the issue.
|
| WINE on Linux is able to match the performance of games on
| Windows, so the DirectX translation layer shouldn't be a
| problem either.
|
| So it's not unreasonable to assume that the M2 just doesn't
| have a GPU capable of running these games. And it's really
| not that surprising that an integrated GPU doesn't match
| the performance of a dedicated GPU.
| dijit wrote:
| > The CPU is rarely a bottleneck for AAA games
|
| I mean... No?
|
| CPU bottleneck is super common, especially on slightly
| older engine bases like source or unreal.
|
| I think you are assuming big AAA games at 4k, which puts
| an especially big strain on the GPU.
|
| Maybe I've been developing games too long, but we are
| constantly fighting CPU bottlenecks.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > So it's not unreasonable to assume that the M2 just
| doesn't have a GPU capable of running these games
|
| Without including comparison data on native games? It's
| entirely unreasonable.
|
| For instance, The native version of the DirectX 12 game
| "The Medium" was shown running side by side with the
| emulated version at WWDC, and the native version had
| double the frame rate.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Apple consistently advertised gaming performance without any
| substance to it.
| mcny wrote:
| I thought the whole idea of M2 was "exceptional product
| given the power consumption".
|
| I don't mind that it has nothing to show for all the talk
| once you throw out the need to basically sip power (like a
| notebook computer).
|
| Is this something inherent with ARM though? Why can't there
| be ARM based desktop and server computers that need a
| kilowatt of power at peak? Like how much more performance
| can you get for each additional watt of power? (I don't
| know. I'm genuinely asking.)
| numpad0 wrote:
| I was one told that memory and bus bandwidth often
| creates disparity between benchmark and application
| performances in ARM CPUs. That was years ago and
| supposedly don't apply to custom designs like M2, but
| maybe both Intel and AMD are still advantageous in that
| region?
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > I thought the whole idea of M2 was "exceptional product
| given the power consumption".
|
| When running native code.
|
| Look at the performance of Microsoft's ARM Surface Pro
| when running emulated code.
|
| > My frustration with this computer wasn't a workload
| thing. It didn't start out fast and gradually slow down
| as I opened more things and started more processes. It
| was peppered with glitches and freezes from start to
| finish.
|
| I'd have only Slack open, and switching between channels
| would still take almost three seconds (yes, I timed it on
| my phone). Spotify, also with nothing in the background,
| would take 11 seconds to open, then be frozen for another
| four seconds before I could finally press play. When I
| typed in Chrome, I often saw significant lag, which led
| to all kinds of typos (because my words weren't coming
| out until well after I'd written them). I'd try to watch
| YouTube videos, and the video would freeze while the
| audio continued. I'd use the Surface Pen to annotate a
| PDF, and my strokes would either be frustratingly late or
| not show up at all. I'd try to open Lightroom, and it
| would freeze multiple times and then crash.
|
| It quickly became clear that I should try to stick to
| apps that were running natively on Arm.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/23421326/microsoft-surface-
| pro-9-ar...
| saagarjha wrote:
| Why are you bringing up Microsoft's translator here? I
| don't see why it is relevant?
| achandlerwhite wrote:
| They announced MetalFX for their upscaling tech last year and
| by all accounts it works well if developers take advantage of
| it.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Not familiar with DLSS at all, does it requires developers
| to do something in order to take avantage of it too? I had
| imagined it was automatic but then again I know nothing
| about it beyond the marketing pitch to consumers.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > Not familiar with DLSS at all
|
| Here's a video comparing DLSS and MetalFX upscaling.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iXx9lfe62w
| jml78 wrote:
| Yes, games have to do work to support DLSS.
|
| I am not knowledgeable enough to know how much work it is
| but I have played games that didn't initially support it
| but eventually released an updated that added support.
|
| There are also multiple "levels" for DLSS in games that
| support it, eg. Quality, performance, etc
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Thanks
| tstrimple wrote:
| With crossover and Apple's latest release of
| gameportingtoolkit I'm able to maintain over 120FPS on ultra
| settings at native resolution on Diablo 4 with my M2 Max MBP.
| It was fair to be skeptical before that release this week,
| but there's plenty of evidence out there now that Apple
| silicon can handle gaming just fine. Other users are
| reporting 50-60 FPS with ultra settings on their 6k Studio
| displays.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| >The M2 core is probably in the same ballpark as Zen 4 core,
| likely a tiny bit below.
|
| The 7950x is running at _5.7Ghz_ when only a single thread is
| saturated. The M2 Ultra caps its cores at 3.5Ghz. A 62% higher
| clock speed, at a monster power profile, to barely beat it isn
| 't evidence of a core advantage.
|
| >24 M2 cores manage to beat 16 Zen 4 cores also at lower power
|
| The M2 has 16 real cores, with 8 additional efficiency cores
| that are very low performance. And of course the M2 Ultra could
| pretty handily trounce the 7950x because the latter has to
| dramatically scale back the clock speed, as the power profile
| of all 16 cores at 5.7Ghz would melt the chip. And of course
| the 7950x has hyper-threading and hardware for mini-versions of
| 16 more cores, so in a way it has more cores than the Apple
| chip.
|
| >This doesn't account for the AVX512 of Zen4.
|
| AVX512 is used by a tiny, minuscule fraction of computers ever
| in their history of existence. It is the most absolute non-
| factor going.
|
| I mean...in an ideal world Apple would get the GPU off the
| core. It limits their core and power profile, and takes up a
| huge amount of die space. They could then individually mega-
| size the GPU and the CPU. They could investigate mega
| interconnects like nvidia's latest instead of trying to jam
| everything together.
|
| Was Apple correct to call it the most powerful chip? Certainly
| not. And there is a huge price penalty. But they're hugely,
| ridiculously powerful machines that will never leave the user
| wanting.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| > _same league as a 300$ mid-range nVidia card._
|
| $300 midrange Nvidia card? Did you get stuck in 2010?
|
| That's _way_ below entry-level at this point. You 're likely
| comparing it with a 1666 cards or something, which is based on
| a chip from 2012.
|
| I wish Apple silicone was actually competitive on performance.
| Nvidia _needs_ competition or they 'll likely double prices
| again with the next generation.
| visionscaper wrote:
| I'm wondering to what extend these benchmarks, especially the GPU
| benchmarks, are really optimised for the specific Apple M2
| architecture? And to what extent the high GPU-GPU bandwidth is
| benchmarked, this also influences real-world performance.
| gumby wrote:
| Poorly written, resulting in what could look like a bias.
|
| The article mentions that apple has focused on single core
| performance while the x86 processors in question are designed for
| multi core use cases. This reflects two different markets being
| addressed and the sad state (small amount) of multicore code
| today.
|
| Also it's silly to claim that the M2 Ultra is so expensive -- you
| can get the same performance from a 3K "studio" desktop that you
| do from the >7K "Mac Pro".
|
| I use apple for all my "terminals" (macs, iPhone, etc) but really
| want AMD and Intel to keep working on these multithreaded
| powerhouses because I depend on that on the cloud side. I don't
| see this ever being in Apple's markets. Articles that further
| that are needed, but this isn't one of them.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| haven't read the article, but there are no single threaded use
| cases on Apple platforms that Apple cares about, so I'd take
| any claim that Apple is optimizing for single threaded
| performance with an enormous bag of salt
| gumby wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I remember discussion from Srouji and others
| on this specific topic at the "apple silicon" WWDC
| introduction. But I can't find anything useful _from Apple_
| in a web search, so it seems my statement is just a "some
| guy on the Internet" assertion.
|
| It seems pretty clear and unsurprising that Apple optimises
| their design for their use case (e.g. major consideration of
| bandwidth to screen in handheld devices, reminiscent of one
| of the Alto's design criteria) but how that plays out doesn't
| support my claim either. But Apple's intended use cases
| aren't the same as the threadripper's.
| MBCook wrote:
| > but there are no single threaded use cases on Apple
| platforms that Apple cares about
|
| I don't see how that could be true. A huge amount of software
| tasks are basically single threaded.
|
| Remember since Apple does everything soup-to-nuts they have a
| _ton_ of performance data from their computers to know what
| real user workloads look like so they can optimize the
| hardware + the software for them.
| gumby wrote:
| I made this claim (single threaded performance matters) but
| in a parallel comment to yours noted that I was unable to
| find substantiating statements from apple that I believe
| led to my assertion.
|
| So in that spirit I will point out that Apple's support
| code / framworks etc do a bunch of multithreaded UI and
| network stuff even when and app's code is putatively single
| threaded.
|
| Now that stuff IMHO is pretty high latency (e.g. waiting on
| user action) so as a developer I still think my statement,
| and your impression, are correct. But I'd like to see
| something from Apple on the topic.
| kokonoko wrote:
| Thanks for the correct albeit clickbait title, now let's see the
| power usage, performance per watt etc.
|
| Hint: M2 destroys the competition
| [deleted]
| partiallypro wrote:
| Do general consumers care about wattage being used on a
| desktop? I don't think many consider it at all, they just want
| the performance. It matters on a mobile device like a laptop,
| tablet or phone, but that's about where consumers stop caring.
| MikeTheRocker wrote:
| Depends on the use case. I personally undervolt my AMD 7950X
| in my gaming PC to use less power and thus generate less heat
| and fan noise. It makes a big difference.
| LegitShady wrote:
| Getting quieter fans on a better cooler might make a bigger
| difference.
| detrites wrote:
| How is comparing a 16GB GPU to a 64GB - 192GB GPU on the same
| terms useful or informative?
| smoldesu wrote:
| Good question, apparently it seems to matter to Apple as well:
| https://youtu.be/CUwg_JoNHpo?t=1834
| redundantly wrote:
| The comments here are strange.
|
| So many people making claims that power utilization doesn't
| matter. Perhaps not to them, but it does for many.
|
| Energy prices are getting higher and higher in many parts of the
| country, heck in the world.
|
| Devices that consume more power generate more heat. So now one is
| likely using more electricity to keep their home or office cool
| and comfortable.
|
| Noise matters for many people using workstations. Running a
| system at full tilt can be irritating, distracting, because of
| the active cooling.
|
| Some people are just simply conscious of how much electricity
| they use and want to have a lower environmental impact.
|
| And then there's the large scale matter. One workstation might
| not be a big deal in terms of energy usage, but millions of them
| absolutely is.
|
| Saying no one cares how much power a workstation uses is
| disingenuous.
| ksec wrote:
| Because Workstation, by a lot of people's definition, are
| suppose to be the power hungry in exchange for absolute
| performance?
| redundantly wrote:
| You're doing it too. You're assuming how someone would define
| a workstation, you're assuming that definition includes it
| being power hungry.
|
| A workstation can be a single core, 256MB RAM, 1 watt SBC. It
| can be a 96 core, 2TB RAM, 1 kw beast. It can be anything in
| between or even outside of that range.
|
| I'm not saying everyone cares about power consumption, but
| several people here seem to be saying that no one does, and
| that's simply not true.
| ksec wrote:
| -Deleted-, Thx @wtallis
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| > A workstation can be a single core, 256MB RAM, 1 watt
| SBC.
|
| No. Words have meanings. Workstation does not mean that.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| What does "Workstation" mean then? What kind of "work" is
| it meant for?
|
| Accounting? Writing? Programming? Video editing?
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workstation
| wtallis wrote:
| "Workstation" in this context refers to a specific target
| market and product segment that by industry consensus (and
| in some cases codified by regulators) carries specific
| connotations about a machine's capabilities and intended
| use. Your attempts to use the word in the broadest possible
| meaning are not helpful; you're deliberately communicating
| badly.
| pshc wrote:
| When I hear "workstation" what comes to mind is a daily
| driver for business purposes, so rock-solid reliability is
| utmost. Redundant components, ECC ram, rated to run 24/7 with
| ample cooling. Performance per watt is also up there.
|
| Whereas raw performance specs are typically high but
| ultimately dependent on use case.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| >business purposes
|
| I can show you a company of 10,000+ people using
| Chromebooks and Macbooks for 'business purposes' with
| little regard for performance per watt.
| markhahn wrote:
| Task energy is a more reasonable argument than whinging about
| how some people care so much about power.
|
| Everyone cares about power, at a fairly similar level - maybe
| 2-4x differences, but not 10x. And most of the ones who care
| underestimate how rarely their machine is actually fully busy.
|
| Idle power is probably more interesting than even task power,
| for anything other than an unusually busy server or cloud
| hypervisor.
| croes wrote:
| How much electricity can you pay for the price of a computer
| with an M2 Ultra?
| dijit wrote:
| Pedantically, sysadmins always counted the power consumption
| (or, compute density) when upgrading servers, and would even
| do early upgrades as a cost saving measure.
|
| Power costs (in datacenters at least) were high enough that
| buying the EUR10,000 server that sucked 200w more was worth
| less than the EUR15,000 machine that didnt suck that extra
| 200w.
|
| So electricity prices _can_ be more than a negligible amount
| on the total.
|
| Where that line is depends on your personal situation.
|
| I live in southern sweden and they hide the total price of
| power here, but aggregated my cost per watt is 5sek/kWh
| (roughly EUR0.45).
|
| So a worst case for me at 200w with 24hrs of usage is about
| EUR800/y
| unusualmonkey wrote:
| If power utilization matters, then a more 'efficient' device,
| that takes longer might actually use more power overall - esp.
| when you factor in the lighting, Aircon etc that might be
| needed by the human operator who is waiting for the workstation
| to finish computation.
| daviddever23box wrote:
| I watched the first three Mad Max films last night, in one
| sitting...while there is certainly an argument for absolute
| performance over time, it's becoming a lot more difficult to
| justify the power consumption of the current Intel (and, to a
| lesser degree, AMD) offerings, especially for sustained personal
| productivity and burst compilation tasks.
|
| We cannot speak of performance without the per-watt quotient.
| Battery life is a real concern, and current Wintel laptops just
| don't compete.
|
| Energy concerns are real (as depicted in the George Miller-
| directed films mentioned above), and it may be the case that the
| premium paid for Apple Silicon-based devices is actually a
| bargain.
| lost_tourist wrote:
| 99% of the time I'm hooked up to a power source so battery life
| isn't nearly as important to me as the $$/performance ratio of
| the laptop.
| selimnairb wrote:
| Yeah, my reaction the whole time to reading OP is, "now do
| performance per Watt..."
| cbsmith wrote:
| The chips it is being compared to are a year older. If there
| wasn't an advantage somewhere, it'd be an absolute failure.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| The ultra isn't in laptops. The ultra in the Mac Pro starts at
| 7 grand, if you're going to pay a 4 grand premium, is 200$ of
| extra power over its lifetime really that important?
|
| I have a m2 Max, the battery life is awe inspiring. M2 ultra
| doesn't best the competition for its use case.
| ddingus wrote:
| It is not the dollars per watt that matters to many users.
|
| What matters more than people may realize is battery runtime.
| The Apple hardware just spanks x86 hardware, unless that
| hardware is fitted with a big battery, and or a secondary
| one.
|
| I typically run Lenovo hardware, and on my faster machine, I
| got a very large battery and could get 6 solid hours. And
| that is at a nice 3Ghz speed too.
|
| My current machine (i5) is far slower than the M1 and that
| hot running Lenovo. (i7) It has two batteries that can yield
| 5 to 7 hours.
|
| Those machines are heavier, slower, bigger, and just feel
| crappy compared to the M1 Air I have been using.
|
| And that thing is crazy good. Battery life is longer,
| sometimes by a considerable amount. It is great hardware,
| fast, easy to use, light, you name it.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Don't waste your money on the Pro, you can get an M2 Ultra in
| a Mac Studio for $4000. The only reason to buy the Pro is if
| you have a bunch of really weird PCIe cards[0].
|
| As for the desktop use case... sure, you aren't going to care
| about the $200 of saved power draw, but not having a very
| loud and hot machine at your desk has to count for something,
| right?
|
| [0] GPUs won't work, their memory access is locked out in
| hardware and Apple removed the MPX connectors that powered
| the Intel GPU modules.
| torginus wrote:
| GPUs won't work at all? Can't you even use them for
| ML/compute stuff?
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| If the chips are designed to sacrifice performance for power
| usage, then they have no place in a computer without a battery.
|
| Apple should assume that desktop machines have an unlimited
| power source, and that users want a maximum speed. That the
| users time is more expensive than the electricity being fed
| into the computer.
|
| Laptops, sure, sacrifice power to extend the battery. Apple
| does an excellent job here.
|
| The only reason you would buy one of these desktop machines is
| because you want to be in the Apple ecosystem.
| spacemadness wrote:
| "Apple M2 Ultra Is Slow Than Last-Year CPUs." This site is pretty
| low on attention to detail. Get an editor at least.
| trustingtrust wrote:
| https://wccftech.com/m2-ultra-only-10-percent-slower-than-rt...
|
| They also posted this.
| snird wrote:
| The selling point is those chips' efficiency, not raw power. And
| in that regard, they are far better than their X86 competitors.
| webaholic wrote:
| AMD/Intel run at ~5 GHz at peak. Using that vs Apple's 3.7 GHz,
| you can see that the M2 is roughly ~20% better than the others at
| iso power.
| galad87 wrote:
| Comparing the OpenCL GeekBench score is unfair. "More popular"? I
| don't really think so. Anyway of course it's going to be slower
| than a machine with more then two times its number of cores.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Why isn't it fair? NVidia GPUs are notoriously terrible at
| OpenCL.
| adastra22 wrote:
| 50% slower than the absolute best of class NVIDIA discrete GPU
| offering that consumes massively more wattage is hardly a damning
| statement.
| MBCook wrote:
| The complete lack of any power numbers is extremely telling.
| jacooper wrote:
| As if that matters on a desktop?
| st3fan wrote:
| I don't like to listen to the sound of fans constantly
| running ...
| mort96 wrote:
| It matters when comparing performance numbers in general?
| jacooper wrote:
| Depending on the usage, it why AMDs efficiency is
| impressive on laptops, but not so important on the
| desktop.
| ianai wrote:
| Performance per TDP is always relevant. Sure individuals
| may choose they just want whatever to maximize a metric,
| but that's a different decision entirely. Like comparing
| a motorcycle and a truck without mentioning all the
| things different between the two.
| sokoloff wrote:
| TDP is the wrong measure here. i9-13900K and i7-13700K
| both have 125W TDP with 253W PL2 specs. By that
| calculation, the 13900K is more performant per TDP, so is
| "better" for efficiency.
|
| Computation per kWh (or rate of computation per kW) is
| the right efficiency metric, not TDP (thermal design
| power).
| wtallis wrote:
| If you have a workload that pushes the 13700K and 13900K
| to their turbo limits (and have ensured that those limits
| are actually configured to be the same), then you really
| will find the 13900K getting more work done for the same
| power and energy. That's how the extra cores help in
| power-limited scenarios.
| [deleted]
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| It does when you multiply it across millions of CPUs.
| Saving 100 watts across 3 million CPUs (300 megawatts) is
| enough to shut down the equivalent of power plants.
| nightski wrote:
| I'm all for efficiency but if we are to progress as a
| civilization we need to find a way to not have power hold
| us back. We can get to a point where we have nearly
| unlimited power with minimal impact on the environment
| around us. That needs to happen as soon as possible.
| chongli wrote:
| There are an estimated 3 billion people in the world who
| still rely on solid fuel (wood, coal, peat moss) to cook
| food and generate heat [1]. We are extremely far away
| from being able to use 100% electricity to meet two basic
| needs for the whole population. From that perspective
| power-plant-scale computing is an incredible luxury.
|
| [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/resrep27829.23.pdf
| smoldesu wrote:
| The absolute "best of class" Nvidia card is currently the 4090,
| which can be up to 30% faster than the 4080 in scaling
| workloads.
|
| What would be more interesting is to see how Nvidia's laptop
| cards fare here though - they're constrained to much lower
| wattage (80-120w) and would make for a much fairer fight
| against the ~200w M2 Ultra.
| arpanetus wrote:
| It's interesting. I assumed at least their power consumption
| should have been much better/lower than an avg orthodox
| desktop setup of current days.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It's not unreasonably high for a TDP, and the idle
| consumption of ARM is de-facto lower than power an x86
| package.
|
| That being said, it's pretty obvious that Apple's mobile-
| style solution isn't really working out on the desktop side
| of things. The new iMac feels starkly pedestrian compared
| to the old ones, and the Mac Mini/Studio are both neat but
| not unprecedented. The M2 Ultra represents a lot of
| engineering effort going into flipping that status quo, but
| its still slipping behind by a considerable margin. Don't
| forget that a second "Ultra" style SOC with 4x M1 Maxes was
| supposedly cancelled for drawing too much power and being
| too hot. It's just not effective or efficient to force
| _that much silicon_ that close together.
| smcleod wrote:
| A decent 4090 GPU alone is over $3000 in Australia - that's
| half the price of a Mac Studio with Ultra - just for the GPU.
|
| Then you'd be looking for a 24 core CPU, 64GB RAM, 1TB PCIe 5
| SSD, mainboard with 6x thunderbolt ports, a silent cooling
| setup, high quality case that is both small and all the gear
| while running cool. and if you're stuck with MS Windows - an
| Operating System.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > What would be more interesting is to see how Nvidia's
| laptop cards fare here though - they're constrained to much
| lower wattage (80-120w) and would make for a much fairer
| fight against the ~200w M2 Ultra.
|
| Doesn't look like Apple offers Ultra in a laptop - just the
| Basic, Pro, and Max.
| caycep wrote:
| granted, wccftech is a grain of salt kind of site. To wit,
| here's another article....from the same site!
|
| https://wccftech.com/m2-ultra-only-10-percent-slower-than-rt...
| [deleted]
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Take anything from wccf with a grain of salt.
|
| And yeah, as others point out, this is Apples to oranges. x86
| desktops are great at some things, M2 Ultras are great at
| others, and the overlap that really matters is pretty small...
| Like, you have to be crazy to buy an M SoC for gaming, or buy a
| Nvidia GPU for workloads that won't fit in VRAM.
| perrohunter wrote:
| I tested the new game porting kit on a Mac mini M2 and was
| surprised I was able to run Cyberpunk 2077 and it was running
| really well, I can imagine that more powerful M processors
| will be awesome, so the argument of games might go away soon
| imbnwa wrote:
| Curious about settings for an idea of the ceiling, that
| game is insanely unoptimized
| Grazester wrote:
| What is really well? Can me have a metric? What resolution
| and what frame rate?
| katbyte wrote:
| How does it work? You install a windows game via steam and
| then tell it to port?
| stouset wrote:
| It's basically Wine with a custom D12 translation to
| Metal calls. Right now it's not really intended for end-
| users so the experience involves a lot of steps that
| aren't consumer-friendly, but some folks are publishing
| wrappers that simplify the process.
|
| I imagine that in the future, something like Steam will
| wrap this functionality to provide the ability to run the
| whole library under the toolkit. And individually-
| published games will do the same so they install and run
| with a more consumer-friendly experience.
| incrudible wrote:
| NVIDIA still beats Apple even in efficiency, or so I have read.
| If you care about wattage that much, you can just underclock
| and undervolt your GPU. It is free and the police can not stop
| you.
| olyjohn wrote:
| [flagged]
| weego wrote:
| My audi S5 is slower than a GT3 Touring car.
|
| It's just excuses.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > that consumes massively more wattage
|
| power consumption doesn't scale linearly with performances
|
| the _absolute best of class NVIDIA discrete GPU offering_ could
| possibly outperform the Apple GPU at the same power level
|
| Or, to put it in another way, to recover that remaining 50% of
| performances (2x) the increase in power consumption would be
| exponential (a lot more than 2x, like 10x)
| BoorishBears wrote:
| They said it's not faster than the desktop parts, which is
| almost a false statement since it actually is faster at
| multithreaded than both base desktop SKUs. And then they switch
| to providing a specific percentage when comparing the the 4080
| (also based on an deceptively narrow comparison, one their
| other articles counter) for dramatic effect.
|
| I don't think it was ever meant to be the most informative
| article: it seems written to serve the contrarians because
| that's profitable from a readership perspective for a
| publication like this.
| jacooper wrote:
| Absolute best of class? What?
|
| A 4080 is best of class?
|
| And second of all, for the price it should be compared to the
| 4090, which absolutely demolishes it.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| For $7,000 there should be no caveats, it should be beating
| every measurable metric outright.
| danieldk wrote:
| First, a Mac Studio with M1 Ultra is $3999.
|
| Second, people don't buy Macs only for performance. They also
| buy Macs for macOS, for integration between devices, for a
| system that is cool and quiet, for hardware acceleration of
| ProRes, for on-device privacy-preserving machine learning.
| Being a bit slower than competing AMD and Intel systems is
| acceptable, because you get so many other desirable
| properties in return.
|
| I'd definitely consider a Mac Studio with an M2 Max or M2
| Ultra, if I didn't want something portable. I would never buy
| a machine with a competing machine with an Intel or AMD
| machine, because I don't want to deal with Windows or desktop
| Linux.
|
| Other people have another set of priorities and that is fine.
| liuliu wrote:
| I don't know. Nowadays a top-of-the-spec Linux workstation
| without any cost on top (i.e. bare-components) is around
| ~10k. 5995WX in the graph wccf provided alone costs ~5k.
| the8472 wrote:
| > best of class NVIDIA discrete GPU offering
|
| Those are nvidia's best _consumer_ GPUs. I think the cheese
| grater falls into the pro segment. In that segment nvidia has
| the A6000s with 48GB VRAM and 91 SP TFlops compared to the 4090
| 's 24GB and 73 SP TFlops. But that costs as much as the Mac Pro
| alone. And even bigger options (segmented for server/datacenter
| use) are available.
| captainbland wrote:
| I think a useful way of thinking about this is it has something
| like $300-400 worth of discrete GPU equivalent performance
| assuming that the article's claims are correct (not exactly a
| given...) as it will get you something similar to a 3060 ti or
| 4060 ti.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| 4090 is what it should be compared to, that's the equivalent
| card you'd be looking at for those workflows.
| garbagecoder wrote:
| My M1 Pro is about 33% as fast as a box with a 3060 in it on
| PyTorch and obviously it is way more efficient and doesn't
| require a special power supply, which is just taken for granted
| as something you have to do with a PC.
|
| The best case this article can make is that if you need to play
| the latest game or do intense ML stuff you probably want
| NVIDIA, but that's the same as it ever was.
| incrudible wrote:
| It also costs a lot more. For the money you can get a laptop
| with a 4080m and reduce its power limit and probably get the
| same or better efficiency, but with room to the top if you
| need it.
| TradingPlaces wrote:
| The article does not say if it's a Mac Studio or Mac Pro. I
| think that matters. My understanding is that there is no TDP on
| Apple Silicon, and that it has a lot of runway in a less
| constrained thermal environment like the new Mac Pro vs Mac
| Studio.
|
| While I'm still surprised they didn't put a second Ultra in the
| Mac Pro, I'm betting there's a wider delta than people imagine
| between the two form factors.
| wmf wrote:
| The Mac Studio doesn't throttle so there is no extra headroom
| for the Mac Pro.
| TradingPlaces wrote:
| We'll find out next week
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| The article reports that the M2 Ultra is basically even with a
| 4060 Ti in OpenCL compute which they refer to as a mainstream
| card. It is more a notch above entry level. The "best of class"
| 4090 is actually 2.5x faster. But again, this is OpenCL so who
| knows how the two compare in a more relevant benchmark.
|
| Regardless, wccftech is far from reliable. IIRC, /r/amd blocks
| links to the site.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Wait, a $7000 computer doesn't come with a discrete GPU?
| StewardMcOy wrote:
| It's not just that it doesn't come with a discrete GPU. Apple
| Silicon doesn't support discrete GPUs to begin with.
|
| As far as I understand it--and this is just from watching
| Apple's presentations on the architecture--the lack of a
| discrete GPU is a big part of how the Apple Silicon machines
| achieve good performance per watt.
|
| Instead of having discrete RAM or a discrete GPU with its own
| VRAM, all of the RAM is accessible to the CPU and and the GPU
| in a unified memory architecture. On the M2 Ultra, this
| allows for 800 GB/s of memory bandwidth, and also eliminates
| a lot of the need to copy data from RAM to VRAM, as both the
| GPU and the CPU can access the same memory. In return, this
| allows the GPU to match the performance of discrete GPUs that
| have a lot more cores.
|
| Of course, the big downside is that you can't expand the RAM
| or install a beefier GPU. It's all baked in to the logic
| board.
| wtallis wrote:
| > and also eliminates a lot of the need to copy data from
| RAM to VRAM, as both the GPU and the CPU can access the
| same memory. In return, this allows the GPU to match the
| performance of discrete GPUs that have a lot more cores.
|
| Plenty of PC hardware reviewers have done sensitivity
| analysis experiments to see how discrete GPU performance is
| affected by running with a slower or narrower PCIe link.
| The consensus is usually that GPUs connected by PCIe have
| more than sufficient bandwidth, and cutting it in half only
| affects gaming framerates by a few percent. Tighter
| coupling between CPU and GPU can plausibly have a bigger
| impact for some GPU compute workloads, but for traditional
| 3D graphics it doesn't help performance much.
| Retric wrote:
| You can generally ignore FPS numbers as irrelevant
| outside of extremes, what people notice is stutter and
| that's where PCIe link bandwidth matters.
| wtallis wrote:
| I think it's more accurate to say that PCIe link
| bandwidth matters when your VRAM capacity starts to
| become insufficient, a problem that Apple sidesteps. The
| key advantage of Apple's unified memory strategy isn't
| fast communication between CPU and GPU, but in granting
| the GPU access to a high- _capacity_ memory pool (with
| some side benefits of giving the CPU access to GPU-like
| memory bandwidth).
| dtx1 wrote:
| Measured as one percent lows and again, most GPUs under
| most Conditions simply don't saturate PCIe enough for
| that to make a difference. Der8auer and GamersNexus on
| youtube have plenty of examples.
| Retric wrote:
| 1% lows in a given benchmark isn't really measuring
| stutter in practice, what you want is percentage of
| frames that don't finish in time.
|
| If once a minute you miss 4 frames in a row that's
| noticeable even if everything else is rock solid. The
| thing is people adjust their resolution/settings to reach
| acceptable FPS, thus it's fairly GPU independent. What
| matters is rendering volatility as assets are loaded etc.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| That metric is irrelevant now that we have adaptive
| refresh rates. You don't really "miss" a frame anymore.
| 1% low is now the correct metric.
| [deleted]
| numpad0 wrote:
| Or memory slots, or dual/quad socket capability, or
| compatibility with the GPU card for previous gen Mac Pro. You
| get one multicore ARM SoC with 192GB of on-package L4 cache
| and integrated graphics, and that's it.
|
| While 192GB of RAM is more than I would need, for people
| looking to use 1.5TB of RAM and a pair of NVIDIA GPU they had
| from previous model, they'd have to go elsewhere.
|
| Which leaves me wondering; how much engineering at Apple are
| happening on Mac?
| partiallypro wrote:
| Most consumers don't care about wattage on a desktop, and when
| you compare the prices they are similar and it loses.
| acdha wrote:
| Many people do care - many Americans have subsidized low
| power but that's not globally true and even if your power is
| free a hot CPU means you're listening to fan noise and
| heating up the room. In a cold winter that's not bad but I
| knew people who had to do things like leave their office
| doors open for cooling.
| gruez wrote:
| >many Americans have subsidized low power
|
| Source?
| 0zemp3c wrote:
| the people you describe aren't buying $7k desktops
| acdha wrote:
| They certainly are. Being able to pay for the extra power
| doesn't mean you like fan noise, not to mention the
| people who are doing things like video production in a
| trailer where overheating is a concern. I used to support
| scientists who didn't appreciate the heat 4 workstations
| made in their shared offices, either.
| incrudible wrote:
| A dedicated GPU with more die area and its own large fan
| will run both cooler and quieter when its power limit is
| reduced to match the performance of the Apple chip.
| MBCook wrote:
| More watts in = more heat out.
|
| It doesn't matter if the cooling solution gets the
| chops's surface temperature lower if it's heating the
| room twice as fast.
|
| Chip surface temperature is not a useful metric for this
| purpose.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Kind of. I did a quick comparison this morning between a
| MacPro and a similar high-end Dell workstation and the prices
| are similar.
|
| https://twitter.com/0xDEADBEEFCAFE/status/166747612998729728.
| ..
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| I wonder how long you have to run the Apple chip to save
| enough on electricity to make the price difference
| worthwhile? Does it only drop to one human lifetime in places
| where energy cost is insanely high?
| danieldk wrote:
| Maybe, but most of these comparisons are based on GPU
| performance (ie. games). For other workloads like machine
| learning, Tensor cores on NVIDIA GPUs will blow Apple Silicon
| GPUs out of the water. The M2 Ultra is 27 TFLOPS. The 4080't
| Tensor Cores are 48.7 TFLOPS in FP32, 194.9 TFLOPS in FP16,
| 389.9 TFLOPS in FP8 with FP16 accumulate. (IIRC on Apple
| Silicon GPUs FP16 performance is roughly the same as FP32.)
|
| (There is the Neural Engine which supports lower precision, but
| it limited in various ways.)
|
| Regardless, the strides that Apple has been making are
| impressive.
| sunflowerfly wrote:
| One differentiator is the amount of memory available. Apple's
| shared pool of memory means the GPU has potentially up to
| 96gb of ram at its disposal, where discrete GPU's are often
| limited to 8, 12, 16, etc. They mentioned in the keynote that
| the M2 can handle many tasks discrete GPUs cannot simply
| because they run out of ram.
| incrudible wrote:
| $15,000 will buy you an A100 with 80GB of RAM at 2TB/s that
| will annihilate the biggest Apple chip.
| ElFitz wrote:
| Sure, but then that's the price of multiple entire
| laptops. Or 2 Mac Pros. Not sure what point you're trying
| to make here.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| FLOPS are one thing, but 192 GB of unified memory that can be
| used as VRAM is something else. That could be a big win on
| the inference side of things, where even an RTX 4090 GPU is
| limited to only 24 GB.
|
| Then there's the power consumption difference to consider.
| This seems like one of those cases where benchmarks reveal
| only a fraction of the larger picture.
| Demmme wrote:
| On purpose to keep a100 and h100 on an additional premium.
| samwillis wrote:
| I think the exciting thing with Apple silicone and "AI" is
| inference, not training. Due to their unified memory, you can
| potentially have enormous local model inference. That's
| potentially much more expensive on a PC with a GPU having its
| own memory.
|
| Apple have an opportunity, if they 2-4x the memory on the
| entry level devices (not beyond the realms of possibility),
| to make local inference a thing available to all.
| danieldk wrote:
| Sure, but for inference it's much easier to work in lower
| precision. Training with very low precision is also
| possible, but is often more tricky due to numerical
| stability.
|
| A lot of work is going on in 8-bit inference and even 4 bit
| inference. So, models that need 64 GB in FP32 can do with
| 16GB VRAM in FP8 or INT8, which is well within the realm of
| consumer NVIDIA cards. And the latest NVIDIA tensor cores
| will absolutely destroy Apple Silicon GPUs or the Neural
| Engine in 8 bit.
|
| So, I don't think it's really a strong argument. And as
| someone who is a Mac user and a ML practitioner, I'd be
| very happy if they started supporting eGPUs again.
|
| Apple Silicon has many strengths and the GPU core are fine
| for many ends, from games to graphics apps.
|
| But let's not pretend that Apple is beating NVIDIA at their
| own game (yet). That day might come, but currently it only
| leads to disappointed users in ML forums who were hyped
| into thinking that their vanilla M2 MacBook Airs can almost
| compete with a 4090 in training a deep transformer model.
| (Yes, that happens.)
| mrcwinn wrote:
| The results speak for themselves (Apple is slower than some) but
| the context does matter: Apple has been talking about performance
| per watt since Steve Jobs showed a keynote slide announcing the
| transition from PowerPC.
|
| The cynical view is that Apple is intentionally misleading
| customers with their ambiguous graph axes. Another perspective is
| they're simply demonstrating the metric they've optimized for in
| the first place.
| kayson wrote:
| Do people really care about efficiency for plugged-in devices?
| There is the environmental factor, but there are people on 100%
| renewable a too...
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| I do. I don't like noise, or having my office heated in the
| summer, or the cost of hundreds of watts.
| danaris wrote:
| Slightly ironic, coming from someone who claims to use a
| tokamak to heat a teapot!
| acdha wrote:
| Even if your power is free, heat means a toasty office and
| fan noise, not to mention being careful about air flow around
| your furniture. Not a deal breaker but 100% of the Apple
| Silicon users I know have mentioned not previously having
| appreciated just how much noise their old systems made.
| IneffablePigeon wrote:
| I bought an m series device to replace my windows desktop
| mostly for efficiency reasons. It saves me hundreds a year in
| electricity costs at the moment (quite literally, I
| calculated it beforehand and checked real usage afterwards).
| It also means my office is now silent and cool. It's a big
| QoL improvement for me.
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| Similar story here. I replaced an AMD 3xxx series
| Hackintosh workstation with an M1 Air after running both
| together and finding they were exactly as fast as each
| other.
| menus wrote:
| Was cost of the device also taken into consideration in
| your overall cost calculation? What was the cost of your
| Windows desktop and what was the cost of your M series
| device you replaced it with?
|
| Have you ever upgraded any components of your Windows
| desktop (RAM, GPU, CPU, motherboard) or did you discard the
| entire thing?
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Like I said in another comment, the results say Apple is faster
| than both base SKUs on multithreaded and within the margin of
| error on single threaded once you consider they only used one
| Geekbench result.
|
| I don't think it's misleading anyone to say they're faster,
| when their on SoC graphics are 4060 level, they definitely are
| overall.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-06-10 23:01 UTC)