[HN Gopher] M2 Ultra Chip Benchmark Results Reveal Impressive Pe...
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       M2 Ultra Chip Benchmark Results Reveal Impressive Performance Gains
        
       Author : mfiguiere
       Score  : 14 points
       Date   : 2023-06-10 17:54 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.macrumors.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.macrumors.com)
        
       | mikece wrote:
       | Despite the performance increase in the M2 Ultra I'm more swayed
       | by the professional video and photo editors who say they are
       | still pleased as punch with the performance of their M1 MacBook
       | Pros and have no desire to upgrade.
        
       | hu3 wrote:
       | Related from 3 hours ago (165 comments):
       | 
       | "Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn't faster than AMD and Intel last year
       | desktop CPUs"
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36271804
        
       | retskrad wrote:
       | How does the M2 Ultra stack up against the PC world? Apple
       | Silicon is a SoC so it's hard to quantity the difference between
       | it and the individual parts in a PC.
       | 
       | You can get individual parts that are performing better in a PC
       | but the SoC design, I'm sure, must bring something to the table
       | right? Performance per watt is not important on desktop and
       | that's Apple's biggest advantage. If we take that way, what does
       | the M2 Ultra Mac Studio give people who spend so much money? Is
       | it for video and photo editors who want a lot of performance in a
       | quiet and small package?
        
         | sudosysgen wrote:
         | It's much slower than comparable PCs, but uses about half the
         | power (not that it matters).
        
         | dagmx wrote:
         | It's quite hard to answer because the characteristics of each
         | makes for huge swings where a PC will outperform in some use
         | cases but a Mac will in others.
         | 
         | I'll just address some areas where the SoC design helps that
         | were featured in the WWDC keynote and other recent sessions.
         | 
         | 1. Large 3D scenes were featured with the island from Moana.
         | It's something you can't actually load on a workstation GPU
         | because it takes over a hundred gigs of memory. The M2 Ultra
         | can load it because of the massive memory the GPU has access
         | to. Even my MBP is capable of loading scenes that my
         | professional workstation cannot.
         | 
         | 2. Similarly , GPU compute is another area the M2 pulls ahead
         | when you cross memory limits that PC GPUs offer. Once you cross
         | that memory limit, the mac takes a huge performance lead. This
         | is useful for GPU based rendering and simulations.
         | 
         | 3. Video decoding is huge. You can work in much higher quality
         | streams and resolutions due to the many onboard decoders. On a
         | PC, you'd be forced to make low resolution proxies
         | 
         | 4. If you let me extend it to the non ultra SOCs, you get
         | portability with desktop performance. I know you said to
         | exclude that, but consider that people like to have unified
         | experiences. So what's good for one also affects the other.
        
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       (page generated 2023-06-10 23:03 UTC)