[HN Gopher] Apple M1 Ultra
___________________________________________________________________
Apple M1 Ultra
Author : davidbarker
Score : 546 points
Date : 2022-03-08 19:00 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.apple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.apple.com)
| mwcampbell wrote:
| I wonder how long it will be until a CPU as capable as this one
| will be the required baseline for ordinary apps. Is there any
| hope that the upgrade treadmill will stop any time soon?
| FredPret wrote:
| One day we'll be up to our eyeballs in computronium, and it
| will never be enough.
|
| Thinking is a superpower even better than being the first
| species to develop sight.
|
| See also "The Last Question" by Asimov.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| There will always be apps that use all the power you throw at
| them. Raytracing scales pretty much linearly with the core
| count. Compression does too.
|
| But your everyday apps like your browser have been fast for at
| least a decade.
| xedrac wrote:
| While I'm not on the Apple train, I love how they are pushing
| AMD, Intel and NVidia out of complacency. No more of these little
| tiny incremental improvements to milk the industry. Bring your
| BEST to the table or get left behind!
| 3836293648 wrote:
| None of those three were anywhere near complacent before Apple
| released the M1. A few years ago, before Zen, absolutely, but
| now it's actually very competitive. But more competition
| doesn't hurt
| dartharva wrote:
| This can also backfire on consumers if the competitors decide
| to keep up with their user-hostile practices as well: locked-
| down walled gardens, zero customisability/upgradability for
| hardware, low repairability, low interoperability with set
| standards to "distinguish" their products, planned
| obsolescence, etc.
| olliej wrote:
| I'm find the slow drip of M1 extensions to be kind of ehn -
| like the tick part of the old intel cycle, only in this case
| it's literally just gluing more of the same cores together
| (obviously work is involved, but not at the level of an
| architecture rev)
|
| (edit: calm down people, I recognize it's impressive, but it's
| just not as fun an announcement as an architecture rev, which I
| was hoping for after a year :D )
| teilo wrote:
| It's literally not.
| outworlder wrote:
| If 'gluing cores together' were this simple, every random
| desktop CPU would have 20 cores. That's not the case.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| You're forgetting price. If simplicity was the main
| concern, every random desktop CPU _would_ have 16+ cores
| right now.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| what? the unified memory growth IS an architecture rev
| soheil wrote:
| Milk?
| mulmen wrote:
| milk verb 2 : to draw something from as if by
| milking: such as b : to draw or coerce profit or
| advantage from illicitly or to an extreme degree : exploit
| milk the joke for all it's worth
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/milk
| jonplackett wrote:
| Makes you wonder how many they can glue together. Looking at
| you Mac Pro
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Probably at least four together with LPDDR5X to get up to 1.5
| TB and forty cores.
| amelius wrote:
| Let's hope they don't also push their lock-in business models
| onto others.
| pphysch wrote:
| > This enables M1 Ultra to behave and be recognized by software
| as one chip, so developers don't need to rewrite code to take
| advantage of its performance. There's never been anything like
| it.
|
| Since when did the average developer care about how many sockets
| a mobo has...?
|
| Surely you still have to carefully pin processes and reason about
| memory access patterns if you want maximum performance.
| KolenCh wrote:
| For any applications people use to justify buying a more than
| one socket machine needs this.
|
| Eg simulation softwares often used in the industry (but the one
| I've on top of my head is Windows only.)
|
| Anyway, the point the make is this: if you claim doubling
| performance, but only the selected few softwares as you
| observed would be optimized to take advantage of this extra
| performance, then this is mostly useless to the average
| consumer. So their point is made exactly with your observation
| in mind, that all your softwares is benefiting from it.
|
| But actually their statement is obviously wrong for people in
| the business--this is still NUMA and your software should be
| NUMA aware to be really squeezing the last bit of performance.
| It just degrades more gracefully to non optimized code.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I think its more the case that OSX hasn't really had SMP/numa
| for a long time.
|
| My understanding was the the dustbin was designed with one big
| processor because SMP/numa was a massive pain in the arse for
| the kernel devs at the time so it was easier to just drop it
| and not worry.
| jra101 wrote:
| They are referring to the GPU part of the chip. There are two
| separate GPU complexes on the die but from the software point
| of view, it is a single large GPU.
| grork wrote:
| I thought that to extract peak performance out of NUMA based
| systems, you had to get down-and-dirty with memory access &
| locality to ensure you don't cross sockets for data thats
| stored in RAM attached to other CPUs.
|
| Or am I out of date on NUMA systems?
| pphysch wrote:
| The big dies these days (M1 included) have non-uniform memory
| access baked in because they distribute the memory caches. If
| you want maximum performance, you will certainly want to be
| aware of which "performance core" you're running in.
| otherjason wrote:
| This is what they were referring to. To get optimum
| performance out of NUMA systems, you need to be careful about
| memory allocation and usage to maximize the proportion of
| your accesses that are local to the NUMA domain where the
| code is running. Apple's answer here is essentially "we made
| the link between NUMA domains have such high bandwidth, you
| don't even have to think about this."
| adfgadfgaery wrote:
| This line is nonsense and you can safely ignore it. There have
| been multi-chip-modules that act like a single socket for many
| years. In particular, pretty much every current AMD CPU works
| that way. I guarantee you that for the M1 Ultra, just like
| every CPU before it, the abstraction will be leaky. Programmers
| will still care about the interconnect when eking out the last
| few percent of performance.
|
| Remember the Pentium D? Unfortunately, I used to own one.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| The existing AMD CPUs aren't _quite_ like that. Technically
| they are all UMA, not NUMA - the L3 cache is distributed, but
| they are all behind a single memory controller with
| consistent latencies to all cores. But the Threadripper 1st
| gen was absolutely like that. Straight up 2+ CPUs connected
| via infinity fabric pretending to be a single CPU. So is that
| 56 core Xeon that Intel was bragging about for a while there
| until the 64 core Epycs & Threadrippers embarrassed the hell
| out of it.
| yuuko11 wrote:
| Not sure what is required of a dev, but as an example, Adobe
| Premiere pro doesn't take any advantage of >1 CPU, at least on
| Windows. https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Should-you-
| use-a-...
| masklinn wrote:
| It's probably not "average developer" either but some of the
| big box software still has per-socket licensing, or had until
| recently anyway.
| w0mbat wrote:
| Article is 5 years old.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| CPU as in core or socket? These days most CPUs are "many-CPU-
| cores-in-1-socket" and having X CPU cores over 1 or 2 sockets
| make a small difference, but software does not care about
| sockets.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Plenty of enterprise software is licensed on a per-socket
| basis.
| pphysch wrote:
| And if they read this press release they will probably
| try to switch to per-core licensing.
| excerionsforte wrote:
| They say this is the M1 Ultra Benchmark
| https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/13330272 Wow.
| lend000 wrote:
| Are the neural engines actually used for anything, to anyone's
| knowledge?
|
| Edit: Apparently in iPhones, they are used for FaceID.
| can16358p wrote:
| Probably object tracking in videos will be the best use of
| them.
|
| Or, there will be some new form of video generation (like the
| ones generating video from Deep Dream etc, but something aimed
| at studio production) using ML that wasn't practically usable
| before.
|
| It opens many doors, but it will take at least many months, if
| not years, to see some new "kind" of software to emerge that
| efficiently makes use of them.
| daggersandscars wrote:
| Adobe uses them Lightroom / Photoshop for some functions.
|
| https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/apple-m1-chip-makes-...
| acchow wrote:
| I thought it's also used to activate Siri by voice without any
| CPU usage
| bm-rf wrote:
| Would something like huggingface transformers ever be able to
| support this? Or is it best fit to just use the GPU.
| sharikous wrote:
| CoreML models may run on them to macOS's discretion. If you
| manage to get your neural network in CoreML's format you may
| use it.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Adobe Photoshop, Premiere etc make use of it for scene
| detection, content aware fill, "neural filters" and so on
| poyu wrote:
| This[1] neural filter?
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq8DgpgtSQQ
| speed_spread wrote:
| It's to build a giant distributed Aleph in which a preserved
| digitized Steve Jobs can live once again.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| I think the most important use of the neural engines so far is
| for the internal camera postprocessing. Better camera
| postprocessing is the reason why people buy new iPhones.
| piyh wrote:
| Throw in translation, on device image labeling, stuff like on
| body walking/biking detection, voice recognition.
| sercand wrote:
| Neural Engines may be used in CoreML models. I don't know it
| can be used with Apple's BNNS library [1]. You can use with
| TensorFlow Lite with coreML delegate as well [2]. And some
| tried to reverse engineer it and used it for model training
| [3].
|
| [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/accelerate/bnns
|
| [2] https://www.tensorflow.org/lite/performance/coreml_delegate
|
| [3] https://github.com/geohot/tinygrad#ane-support-broken
| vmception wrote:
| > M1 Ultra can be configured with up to 128GB of high-bandwidth,
| low-latency unified memory
|
| Nice! Good enough to run a Solana node!
|
| I was slightly annoyed that the M1 Max's 64gb RAM puts it just
| under the system requirements, at that premium price
|
| But I don't have any other theoretical use case for that much
| resources
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Didn't AMD do something similar with putting 2 CPU chips together
| with cache in-between? What's the difference here in packaging
| technology? (maybe there is no shared cache here)
| diamondlovesyou wrote:
| Yes. AMD has had integrated CPU+GPU+ _cache-coherent HBM_ for a
| while. You can 't buy these parts as a consumer though. And
| they're probably priced north of 20k$/each at volume, with the
| usual healthy enterprise-quality margins.
| paulpan wrote:
| I think you're referring to AMD's 3D V-Cache, which is already
| out in their Epyc "Milan X" lineup and forthcoming Ryzen
| 5800X3D. https://www.amd.com/en/campaigns/3d-v-cache
|
| Whereas AMD's solution is focused on increasing the cache size
| (hence the 3D stacking), Apple here seems to be connecting the
| 2 M1 Max chips more tightly. It's actually more reminiscent of
| AMD's Infinity Fabric interconnect architecture.
| https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/infinity_fabric
|
| The interesting part for this M1 Ultra is that Apple opted to
| connect 2 existing chips, rather than design a new one
| altogether. Very likely the reason is cost - this M1 Ultra will
| be a low volume part, as will be future iterations of it. The
| other approach would've been to design a motherboard that
| sockets 2 chips, which seems would've been cheaper/faster than
| this - albeit at expense of performance. But they've designed a
| new "socket" anyway due to this new chip's much bigger
| footprint.
| calaphos wrote:
| They have been shipping multi die CPUs for quite a while, but
| the interconnect is closer to a PCIe connection (slower, longer
| range, less contacts).
|
| Intels upcomming Saphire Rapid server CPUs are extremly
| similar, with wide connections between two close dies.
| Crossectional bandwith is in the same order of magnitude there.
| adfgadfgaery wrote:
| AMD is currently shipping high-end CPUs built with up to nine
| dies. Their ordinary desktop parts have up to three. They are
| not built with "cache in-between". There is one special I/O die
| but it does not contain any cache. Each compute die contains
| its own cache.
| MBCook wrote:
| This doesn't seem to be two cores connected in standard SMP
| configuration, or with a shared cache between them. Apple
| claims there were like 10,000 connection points.
|
| It _sounds_ like this operates as if it was one giant physical
| chip, not two separate processors that can talk very fast.
|
| I can't wait to see benchmarks.
| haneefmubarak wrote:
| Modern SMP systems have NUMA behavior mostly not because of a
| lack of bandwidth but because of latency. At the speeds
| modern hardware operates at, the combination of distance,
| SerDes, and other transmission factors result in high
| latencies when you cross dies - this can't be ameliorated by
| massively increasing bandwidth via parallel lanes. For
| context, some server chips which have all the cores on a
| single die exhibit NUMA behavior purely because there's too
| many cores to all be physically close to each other
| geometrically (IIRC the first time I saw this was on an 18
| core Xeon, with cores that themselves were a good bit smaller
| than these).
|
| It's probably best to think of this chip as an extremely fast
| double socket SMP where the two sockets have much lower
| latency than normal. Software written with that in mind or
| multiple programs operating fully independent of each other
| will be able to take massive advantage of this, but most
| parallel code written for single socket systems will
| experience reduced gains or even potential losses depending
| on their parallelism model.
| msoad wrote:
| At what point Apple will put those chips in their servers or sell
| server chips? It only makes sense for them to take this
| architecture to the cloud deployments
| ghostly_s wrote:
| Unfortunately I still don't think the market has much interest
| in energy-efficient servers. But maybe the energy-sector crunch
| created by Putin's war will precipitate some change here...
| FredPret wrote:
| Energy is probably the biggest bill for a data centre.
|
| Lower TDP = lower electric bills and lower airconditioning
| bill. Win win
| lambda_dn wrote:
| They could be secretly working on their own cloud platform,
| with their data centres having a choice between M1, Pro Max
| ultra instances. $$$$
| memco wrote:
| Don't they already offer Xcode build as a service? That
| presumably is using Mac servers so it wouldn't be totally out
| of the blue to have more Mac SaaS.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| For a company betting so heavily on "services," it would be
| borderline incompetence if they weren't working on this. Even
| just for internal use it would still be a better investment
| than the stupid car.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| It's going to be a couple years. The guys who bought those
| power workstations and servers will be very peeved if it
| happens too quickly
| arcticbull wrote:
| They likely won't re-visit the Xserve, IMO. No reason to. They
| can't sell them at a premium compared to peers and its outside
| their area of expertise.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I don't know, the performance per watt has a big effect on
| data-centers, both in power budget and HVAC for cooling.
| em500 wrote:
| > They can't sell them at a premium compared to peers
|
| Intel is believed to have pretty good margins on their server
| CPUs
|
| > and its outside their area of expertise.
|
| That's what people used to say about Apple doing CPUs in-
| house.
| npunt wrote:
| FWIW, Apple's been helping define CPU specs in-house since
| the 90s. They were part of an alliance with Motorola and
| IBM to make PowerPC, and bought a substantial part of ARM
| and did a joint venture to make Newton's CPU. And they've
| done a bunch of architecture jumps, from 6502 to 68k to PPC
| to Intel to A-series.
|
| Folks who said CPUs weren't their core expertise (I assume
| back in 2010 or before, prior to A4) missed out on just how
| involved they've historically been, what it takes to get
| involved, the role of fabs and off the shelf IP to
| gradually build expertise, and what benefits were possible
| when building silicon and software toward common purpose.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I doubt they'll go after the web server market. But I wonder
| if they might go after the sort of rendering farms that
| animation studios like Pixar use. Those guys are willing to
| pay silly money for hardware, and are market Apple has a long
| history with.
| xyst wrote:
| It makes sense, although what I am concerned about is the cost.
| Apple isn't exactly know for providing services at or near
| cost.
| adfgadfgaery wrote:
| It doesn't make much sense to me. The M1 is designed to have
| memory in the same package as the processor. This leads to
| reduced latency and increased bandwidth. Moving to off-package
| memory might totally destroy its performance, and there is an
| upper limit on how much memory can go in the package.
|
| The M1 Ultra is already a little light on memory for its price
| and processing power; it would have much too little memory for
| a cloud host.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| As more developers move to ARM architecture by buying Macbooks
| (I did it last year the first time in my life), ARM cloud will
| grow very fast, and Apple needs growth, so they can't afford
| not to do it in a few years (probably with M2 architecture they
| are already thinking of it). Regarding the exact timeline: I
| don't know :)
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| They'd have to go all-in on supporting third party OSs like
| Linux first. Sure, there are projects to bring linux to the
| M1, but enterprises that buy commercial server hardware will
| demand 1st party support
| ksubedi wrote:
| Knowing Apple, their version of "cloud" servers would
| probably be some sort of SDK that lets developers build
| applications on top of their hardware / software stack, and
| charge per usage. Kind of like Firebase, but with Apple's
| stack.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| It will be a hard business decision for them, as at this
| point it's extremely hard to compete with Amazon, Google
| and Microsoft. Maybe they will buy up some cloud services
| provider, we'll see.
| tylerjd wrote:
| The major Linux providers already offer 1st party supported
| Linux on AWS. Both RHEL and Ubuntu instances offer support
| contracts from their respective companies, as well as
| Amazon Linux from AWS themselves. It is already here and a
| big force there. You can provision ElastiCache and RDS
| Graviton instances too.
| superkuh wrote:
| It sounds like the chip is fast but I wonder, if like other M1
| products, the computers built with it will be fairly restricted,
| like a console, in terms of the hardware they're able to use (not
| being able to boot off external HDDs, problems with thunderbolt 3
| compatibility in peripherals, having to use abstraction layers to
| run most of the software world indirectly or have specific
| porting projects dedicated to M1, etc).
| aaomidi wrote:
| > having to use abstraction layers to run most of the software
| world indirectly
|
| Nearly everything I use daily is built for M1 now.
|
| https://isapplesiliconready.com/
|
| And honestly, if it's not, its a good indication that it's time
| to move away from that product as they don't care about a huge
| segment of their users.
| drcongo wrote:
| Dropbox and Signal are the only two I ever use, and yeah, the
| lack of interest in porting to M1 from both of those
| companies is increasing my lack of interest in their apps.
| nintendo1889 wrote:
| That page says that both of those apps are supported.
| cersa8 wrote:
| Maybe this is the same marketing speak as we've seen with the
| 1600 nits peak, and 1000 nits sustained brightness claim for
| the new mini led displays. Which later became 500 nits for SDR
| content, when ambient temperature allows. [0]
|
| I want to see proper benchmarks before getting too exited.
|
| [0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-new-MacBook-Pro-14-only-
| ma...
| jjuuaann wrote:
| Geee wrote:
| This is insane. They claim that its GPU performance tops the RTX
| 3090, while using 200W less power. I happen to have this GPU on
| my PC and not only it costs over $3000, but its also very power-
| hungry and loud.
|
| Currently, you need this kind of GPU performance for high
| resolution VR gaming at 90 fps, but its just barely enough. This
| means that the GPU will run very loudly and heat up the room, and
| running games like HL Alyx on max settings is still not possible.
|
| It seems that Apple might be the only company who can deliver a
| proper VR experience. I can't wait to see what they've been
| cooking up.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| But it's still impossible to replace RTX 3090 with this new Mac
| Studio because games just will not run on MacOS.
| idonotknowwhy wrote:
| Maybe Valve can port proton to mac
| gameswithgo wrote:
| unless it has its own gddr6 it won't be anything like a 3090
| for games
| TheKarateKid wrote:
| What we're seeing right now with Apple's M1 chips for desktop
| computing is on the same level of revolutionary as what the
| original iPhone did for mobile phones.
|
| The advancements in such a short period of time in the amount
| of computing power, low power usage, size, and heat usage of
| these chips is unbelievable and game-changing.
| bradmcgo wrote:
| It really feels like this is all in the name of their AR/VR
| efforts. The killer device as far as I can think would be a
| simple headset that packs the capabilities of full-blown
| workstations. Apple Silicon seems like it could totally be on
| that track in some way.
| outworlder wrote:
| Too bad that historically Apple has not given any attention to
| Mac gaming.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Part of Apple's historic MO has been to not invest in areas
| they don't see themselves having a competitive advantage in.
| Now that they can make gaming happen with a very low wattage
| budget they may well try to enter that space in earnest.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| The gaming performance of the existing M1 GPUs is, well,
| crap (like far behind the other laptop competition, to say
| nothing of desktop GPUs). The Ultra probably isn't changing
| that, since it's very unlikely to be a hardware problem and
| instead a software ecosystem & incentives problem.
| altairprime wrote:
| The difference between an Apple TV and a Mac Mini is
| essentially how powerful of Apple silicon it has, whether
| it runs tvOS or macOS, and whether it has HDMI out or not.
|
| The Studio is a more compact form factor than any modern 4K
| gaming console. If they chose to ship something in that
| form factor with tvOS, HDMI, and an M1 Max/Ultra, it would
| be a very competitive console on the market -- _if_ game
| developers could be persuaded to implement for it.
|
| How would it compare to the Xbox Series X and PS5? That's a
| comparison I expect to see someday at WWDC, once they're
| ready. And once a game is ported to Metal on _any_ Apple
| silicon OS, it's a simple exercise to port it to all the
| rest; macOS, tvOS, ipadOS, and (someday, presumably) vrOS.
|
| Is today's announcement enough to compel large developers
| like EA and Bungie to port their games to Metal? I don't
| know. But Apple has two advantage with their hardware that
| Windows can't counter: the ability to boot into a
| signed/sealed OS (including macOS!), load a signed/sealed
| app, attest this cryptographically to a server, and lock
| out other programs from reading with a game's memory or
| display. This would end software-only online cheating in a
| way that PCs can't compete with today. This would also
| reduce the number of GPUs necessary to support to one,
| Apple Metal 2, which drastically decreases the complexity
| of testing and deployment of game code.
|
| I look forward to Apple deciding to play ball with gaming
| someday.
| neetdeth wrote:
| This all makes sense, and in that context it's
| unfortunate that Apple's relationship with the largest
| game tools company, Epic, is... strained, to say the
| least.
|
| They could always choose to remedy that with a generous
| buyout offer.
| miohtama wrote:
| Apple has now too much money and is running out of core
| business areas. Expect more investing in non-Apple areas like
| gaming, cars, etc.
|
| Though every video game company on the planet hates them
| because of App Store terms.
| jen20 wrote:
| > Expect more investing in non-Apple areas like gaming,
| cars, etc.
|
| I remember people saying this about phones in 2006.
| nr2x wrote:
| The first half of the event was old wine in new bottles - I
| reckon that's the main growth area they are squeezing.
| lazyeye wrote:
| I'm surprised Apple found time outside of focusing on growing the
| Chinese economy to work on this.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/07/apple-chi...
| gigatexal wrote:
| I used to be one of the biggest Apple fanboys/apologists but I've
| since put Linux on my MacBook Pro from 2013 and built a Linux
| workstation and rarely use my 2020 MacBook Pro anymore, I say
| this because I yawned at the over-the-top Apple marketing. The
| products are interesting, sure, but I wasn't blown away. It's
| mostly the prices. The hardware is just far above what I can
| afford these days -- even though my MacBook Pro from 2013 is so
| well made it still works now, and buying a 2 or 3 thousand dollar
| MacBook now I am sure it'd last just as long but it's just too
| much. Though I am saving for one for multimedia work, probably a
| used M1 MacBook Air.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| In some ways I wish this processor was available from a CPU chip
| seller. As a compute engine it gets a lot "right" (in my opinion)
| and would be fun to hack on.
|
| That said, the idea that USB C/Thunderbolt is the new PCIe bus
| has some merit. I have yet to find someone who makes a peripheral
| card cage that is fed by USBC/TB but there are of course
| standalone GPUs.
| [deleted]
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > That said, the idea that USB C/Thunderbolt is the new PCIe
| bus has some merit. I have yet to find someone who makes a
| peripheral card cage that is fed by USBC/TB but there are of
| course standalone GPUs.
|
| I hope we get closer to that long-standing dream over the next
| few years.
|
| But right now you can see laptop manufacturers so desperate to
| avoid thunderbolt bottlenecks that they make their own custom
| PCIe ports.
|
| For the longest time, thunderbolt ports were artificially
| limited to less than 3 lanes of PCIe 3.0 bandwidth, and even
| now the max is 4 lanes.
| dheera wrote:
| > USB C/Thunderbolt is the new PCIe bus
|
| Oh please hell no.
|
| I have to unplug and plug my USB-C camera at least once a day
| because it gets de-enumerated very randomly. Using the best
| cables I can get my hands on.
|
| File transfers to/from USB-C hard drives suddenly stop mid-
| transfer and corrupt the file system.
|
| Don't ask me why, I'm just reporting my experiences, this is
| the reality of my life that UX researchers don't see because
| they haven't sent me an e-mail and surveyed me.
|
| Never had such problems with PCIe.
| delusional wrote:
| You have a very exotic configuration if you plugged your
| webcam and thumb drives into PCIe slots.
| icelancer wrote:
| My USB-C dongle (AMD processor, so not Thunderbolt) that has
| PD plugged into it permanently and is my "docking station"
| for the office, and I have to cycle its power (unplug/plug
| PD) to get the DisplayPort monitor that's connected to it to
| work, on top of the fact that there are other issues with it,
| especially with external drives as you also reported.
|
| So, I'm in total agreement.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Friendly reminder that USB-C is a form factor, and
| thunderbolt is the actual transfer protocol.
|
| Sounds like you're listing the common complaints with usb-3
| over usb-c peripherals, which are not a suitable replacement
| for PCIe. Thunderbolt is something different, more powerful &
| more reliable.
| jamesfmilne wrote:
| https://www.sonnettech.com/product/thunderbolt/pcie-card-exp...
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Thanks! Of course they are bit GPU centric but the idea is
| there.
|
| Very interesting stuff. I wonder both if the Zynq Ultrascale
| RFSOC PCIe card would work in that chassis and if I could get
| register level access out of MacOS.
| jcadam wrote:
| Well, more reasonable than a mac pro, price wise. Might have to
| consider this when the time comes to replace my Ryzen9 rig.
| alberth wrote:
| I'm cross posting a question I had from the Mac Studio thread
| (currently unanswered).
|
| ----
|
| Mac Pro scale up?
|
| How is this going to scale up to a Mac Pro, especially related to
| RAM?
|
| The Ultra caps at 128 GB of RAM (which isn't much for video
| editing, especially given that the GPU uses the system RAM).
| Today's Mac Pro goes up to 1.5TB (and has dedicated video RAM
| above this).
|
| If the Mac Pro is say, 4 Ultra's stacked together - that means
| the new Mac Pro will be capped at 512GB of RAM. Would Apple stack
| 12 Ultra's together to get to 1.5TB of RAM? Seems unlikely.
| dagmx wrote:
| A few points to make...
|
| - the shared CPU+GPU RAM doesn't necessarily mean the GPU has
| to eat up system RAM when in use, because it can share
| addressing. So whereas the current Mac pro would require two
| copies of data (CPU+GPU) the new Mac studio can have one.
| Theoretically.
|
| - they do have very significant video decoder blocks. That
| means that you may use less RAM than without since you can keep
| frames compressed in flight
| arcticbull wrote:
| Also, the memory model is quite different - with the ultra-
| fast SSD and ultra-fast on-die RAM. You can get away with
| significantly less RAM for the same tasks, not just because
| of de-duplication but because data comes in so quickly from
| the SSD that paging isn't nearly the hit it is on say an
| Intel based Mac.
|
| I'd expect it to work more like a game console, streaming in
| content from the SSD to working memory on the fly, processing
| it with the CPU and video decode blocks, and insta-sharing it
| with the GPU via common address space.
|
| All that is to say, where you needed 1.5TB of RAM on a Xeon,
| the architectural changes on Apple Silicon likely mean you
| can get away with far less and still wind up performing
| better.
|
| The "GHz myth" is dead, long live the "GB myth."
| fpoling wrote:
| Another thing to consider is memory compression. If Apple
| added dedicated hardware for that, it can effectively
| double the total memory with minimal performance hit.
| rocqua wrote:
| Memory compression only works in certain scenarios. It
| requires your memory to actually have low entropy.
| masklinn wrote:
| > ultra-fast on-die RAM
|
| The RAM is not on die. It's just soldered on top of the SoC
| package.
|
| > All that is to say, where you needed 1.5TB of RAM on a
| Xeon, the architectural changes on Apple Silicon likely
| mean you can get away with far less and still wind up
| performing better.
|
| No, it does not. You might save a bit, but most of what you
| save is the _transfers_ , because moving data from the CPU
| to the GPU is just sending a pointer over through the
| graphics API, instead of needing to actually copy the data
| over to the GPU's memory. In the latter case, unless you
| still need it afterwards you can then drop the buffer from
| the CPU.
|
| You do have some gains as you move buffer _ownership_ back
| and forth instead of needing a copy in each physical
| memory, but if you needed 1.5TB physical before... you
| won't really need much less after. You'll probably save a
| fraction, possibly even a large one, but not "2 /3rd"
| large, that's just not sensible.
| samatman wrote:
| This went by so fast I'm not sure I heard it right, but I
| believe the announcer for the Ultra said it the last in the M1
| lineup.
|
| They just can't ship a Mac Pro without expansion in the normal
| sense, my guess is that the M2 will combine the unified memory
| architecture with expansion busses.
|
| Which sounds gnarly, and I don't blame them for punting on that
| for the first generation of M class processors.
| skunkworker wrote:
| This is what I've been thinking as well, a M2 in a Mac Pro
| with 128/256gb soldered and up to 2TB 8 channel DDR5-6400
| expandable, and do a tiered memory cache
| cehrlich wrote:
| I think some of this can be guessed from the SoC codenames
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apple_codenames
|
| M1 Max is Jade C-Die => 64GB
|
| M1 Ultra is Jade 2C-Die => 128GB
|
| There is a still unreleased SoC called Jade 4C-Die =>256GB
|
| So I think that's the most we'll see this generation, unless
| they somehow add (much slower) slotted RAM
|
| If they were to double the max RAM on M2 Pro/Max (Rhodes Chop /
| Rhodes 1C), which doesn't seem unreasonable, that would mean
| 512GB RAM on the 4C-Die version, which would be enough for
| _most_ Mac Pro users.
|
| Perhaps Apple is thinking that anyone who needs more than half
| a Terabyte of RAM should just offload the work to some other
| computer somewhere else for the time being.
|
| I do think it's a shame that in some ways the absolute high-end
| will be worse than before, but I also wonder how many 1.5TB Mac
| Pros they actually sold.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| How is slotted RAM slower? 6400Mhz DIMM exists. This would
| match the specs of the RAM on the M1 Max. Even octa-channel
| has been done before so the memory bus would have the exact
| same width, latency and clock frequency.
| fastball wrote:
| The memory bandwidth of the M1 Max is 400 GB/s with 64GB of
| RAM, where as the memory bandwidth of Corsair's 6400MHz
| DDR5 32GB RAM module is 51GB/s per stick, or 102GB/s for
| the M1 Max equivalent.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| 51GB/s * 8 (octa-channel, not dual channel as you are
| calculating) is 408 GB/s. Basically the same as the M1
| Max. It's not fair to use an off the shelf product since
| even if the RAM is slotted Apple wouldn't use an off the
| shelf product.
|
| Whether they use slotted RAM or not has nothing to do
| with performance. It's a design choice. For the mobile
| processors it makes total sense to save space. But for
| the Mac pro they might as well use slotted RAM. Unless
| they go for HBM which does offer superior performance.
| rocqua wrote:
| Is 8 channel RAM doable, are there downsides? If no to
| both, why don't high end x86 processors have it?
| rowanG077 wrote:
| High-end x86 do have it. Threadripper 3995WX for example.
| my123 wrote:
| Note that those are overclocked out of spec configurations
| today.
|
| https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/134599
| /...
|
| 4800 MT/s is the actual maximum spec, anything beyond that
| is OC.
| mnholt wrote:
| Agreed, I think they will use the 4C config to debut M2 and
| make a slash. They said in the keynote that M1 Ultra
| completes the M1 family. Timing works out well for November
| launch with the 2 year apple silicon transition timeline they
| gave themselves. Not sure what they are going to call it and
| if it will be A15 or A16 based.
|
| A16 would give great performance, and I think it's safe for
| them to have a two year iteration time on laptop/desktops vs
| one year for phone/tablet.
| can16358p wrote:
| I think they will unveil M2 which can probably at least double
| the 64GB max to 128GB max RAM of M1-series.
|
| Then, on the highest configuration, I think they actually can
| put 6 M2-top-specced or more into the Mac Pro.
| bpicolo wrote:
| Does the mac studio potentially replace the mac pro concept? It
| seems targeted at exactly the audience that mac pros targeted
| (ridiculous amounts of video simul-editing)
| sharikous wrote:
| The presentor very explicitly said they are not done and they
| will replace the Mac Pro.
|
| But yes, I see a lot of folks replacing current Mac Pros with
| Studios.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| No this looks like a modular replacement of the iMac Pro. If
| it was to replace the Mac Pro they wouldn't have said at the
| end of the event "the Mac Pro will have to wait until next
| time".
| alberth wrote:
| To me, this seems to have killed the iMac Pro not the Mac
| Pro.
| Asmod4n wrote:
| The Mac Pro will have replaceable RAM. It will use the RAM
| soldered onto the CPU as cache.
|
| You'll most likely also be able to buy dedicated GPUs/ML
| booster addon Cards and the likes for it.
|
| It's the most likely thing to happen or they won't release
| another Mac Pro.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Why would they use soldered RAM as cache? It's not like it's
| faster then replaceable RAM. Unless they go HBM2 but I doubt
| that.
| fpoling wrote:
| The bandwidth of the soldered ram is much higher which
| makes it much faster for code that accesses a lot of RAM
| like video editors.
| [deleted]
| vimy wrote:
| The pro is most likely going to have ram and PCIe slots.
| ostenning wrote:
| I read "Apple unveils MK ULTRA"
| yurishimo wrote:
| Low key what if this was planned to change Google results to
| "Did you mean M1 Ultra?" when searching for the experiment? The
| CIA is using all that money for something consumers can use
| now!
|
| /takes off foil hat
| [deleted]
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| Can we trust the performance measurements that are listed?
| Lramseyer wrote:
| Yes, but assume that they're cherry picked. Don't get me wrong,
| these numbers are impressive, but it claims that it's GPU is
| faster than the highest end discrete GPU (RTX 3090) but it's
| unclear on what benchmark it used. It's important to keep in
| mind that their GPUs are not architected with gaming in mind,
| whereas the 3090 definitely is. So it's not unreasonable to
| find some metrics where their GPU performs better.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| The very same dual-chiplet design marcan predicted - nice!
| klelatti wrote:
| I wonder if the max 128GB graphics memory opens up some
| applications that would not have been viable before?
| freemint wrote:
| Not really. Thanks to the GPU interconnect NVLINK we have
| system 320GB. https://www.deltacomputer.com/nvidia-
| dgx-a100-320gb-3ys-edu....
|
| There are even some with 640GB. This is at a different price
| point though.
| klelatti wrote:
| Not on a single GPU though and it's 40x the cost!
| freemint wrote:
| Rewriting a CUDA application to use NVLINK is a lot easier
| then rewriting it for Apples GPU.
| 314 wrote:
| 640GB should be enough for anyone.
| manquer wrote:
| Perhaps until VR becomes more main stream and gets higher
| frame rates, resolutions etc.
|
| Rendering in VR takes a lot of memory at higher
| resolutions.
| yisonPylkita wrote:
| Bill said it 40 years ago and here we are with 2 orders of
| prefix more of memory. I wonder if in next 40 years we'll
| get to 640 peta bytes
| nintendo1889 wrote:
| Does it mine bitcoin well?
| judge2020 wrote:
| Not Bitcoin but Ethereum
|
| https://9to5mac.com/2021/11/10/m1-pro-macbook-pro-cryptocurr...
|
| M1 Pro -> 5.8 MH/s, with a 17w draw, means $12.82 a month
| profit. I don't imagine the M1 Ultra is too much better, maybe
| 20 MH/s at absolute most, but we'll see. It definitely won't be
| as economical as 3070 or 3080 FE cards at current profitability
| levels.
| vmception wrote:
| & $.10 per KwH, many residences are often higher but
| professional operations are closer to $.03 per KwH or
| sometimes even zero or negative
|
| also note that mining calculator they used assumes 2 Ether
| per block paid to miners
|
| In Ethereum it can be _much much_ higher because people pay
| to use that blockchain. Mining can be insanely profitable and
| I'm not aware of any calculator that shows it. Everyone is
| operating on bad data. A cursory look right now shows latest
| blocks having 2.52 Ether in them, which is 26% greater yield.
|
| Block 14348267 a few minutes ago had 4.83 Ether, 140% greater
| yield
|
| There have been prolonged periods of time, weeks and months,
| where block rewards were 6-9 Ether.
|
| Miners were raking it all in while the calculators said "2
| Ether"
|
| All this to say it could probably make $20-30 a month.
| cosmotic wrote:
| I'm sure an ASIC would best the M1.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Is it actually more powerful than a top of the line
| threadripper[0] or is that not a "personal computer" CPU by this
| definition? I feel like 64 cores would beat 20 on some workloads
| even if the 20 were way faster in single core performance.
|
| [0]https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-
| threadripper-3...
| jbellis wrote:
| Next-gen Threadripper Pro was also announced today:
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-details-ryzen-threadri...
| paulmd wrote:
| Bit of a wet fart though, even Charlie D thinks it's too
| little too late. OEM-only (and only on WRX80 socket), no
| V-cache, worse product support.
|
| https://semiaccurate.com/2022/03/08/amd-finally-launches-
| thr...
|
| The niche for high clocks was arguable with the 2nd-gen
| products but now you are foregoing v-cache which also
| improves per-thread performance, so Epyc is relatively
| speaking even more attractive. And if you take Threadripper
| you have artificial memory limits, half the memory channels,
| half the PCIe lanes, etc, plus in some cases it's _more_
| expensive than the Epyc chips. It is a lot to pay (not just
| in cash) just for higher clocks that your 64C workloads
| probably don 't even care about.
|
| AMD moved into rent-seeking mode even before Zen3 came out.
| Zen2 threadripper clearly beats anything Intel can muster in
| the segment (unless they wanted to do W-3175X seriously and
| not as a limited-release thing with $2000 motherboards) and
| thus AMD had no reason to actually update this segment when
| they could just coast. Even with this release, they are not
| refreshing the "mainstream" TRX40 platform but only a limited
| release for the OEM-only WRX80 platform.
|
| It was obvious when they forced a socket change, and then
| cranked all the Threadripper 3000 prices (some even to
| higher-levels than single-socket Epyc "P" skus) what
| direction things were headed. They have to stay competitive
| in server, so those prices are aggressive, but Intel doesn't
| have anything to compete with Threadripper so AMD will coast
| and raise prices.
|
| And while Milan-X isn't cheap - I doubt these WRX80 chips are
| going to be cheap either, it would be unsurprising if they're
| back in the position of Threadripper being more expensive for
| a chip that's locked-down and cut-down. And being OEM-only
| you can't shop around or build it yourself, it's take it or
| leave it.
| dljsjr wrote:
| Apple's ARM chips can process a metric ton of ops per cycle due
| to the architecture of the chip:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25257932
| zamadatix wrote:
| But the answer to the question is still "no".
| klelatti wrote:
| Only if the only thing you compare is CPU performance -
| adding a big GPU on die adds a certain amount of 'power' by
| any measure.
| [deleted]
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Doesn't have to though. A Threadripper 3990X uses barrels
| of electricity, generates plenty of heat, comes with no
| GPU, has worse single-threaded performance, and still costs
| $4000 by itself without any of the parts needed to make it
| actually work.
| Nition wrote:
| The question is in relation to Apple's claim that it's
| "the world's most powerful and capable chip for a
| personal computer".
| gzer0 wrote:
| It might also be reasonable to say that the threadripper
| is a workstation chip, not a chip for personal computers.
|
| Edit: even AMD themselves call their threadripper lineup
| workstation chips, not personal.
|
| https://www.amd.com/en/processors/workstation
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Threadripper _Pro_ is the workstation chip. Regular
| Threadripper (non-Pro) was not aimed at workstations, it
| was aimed at the "HEDT" market. Strictly speaking it's
| considered a consumer market (albeit for the enthusiasts
| of enthusiasts)
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I'd call them personal chips. When I think of non-
| personal chips I think IBM POWER or Ampere Altra.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Depends on what you define "capable" as. Remember, they
| specify that it is the most powerful and capable _chip_ ,
| not necessarily complete system.
|
| There's no other chip that has the power of an RTX 3090
| and more power than an i9-12900K in it - after all,
| Threadripper doesn't have a lick of graphics power at
| all. This chip can do 18 8K video streams at once, which
| Threadripper would get demolished at.
|
| I'm content with giving them the chip crown. Full system?
| Debatable.
| dathinab wrote:
| Through you would need to compare it to the coming
| threadripper 5000WX(?) or better the soon coming Ryzen
| 7000 CPUs (which seen to have integrated graphics).
|
| I mean they all are CPUs coming out this year as far as I
| know.
| zamadatix wrote:
| It's a fantastic chip but that wasn't the question. I
| love my M1 Max and I love my Threadripper workstation,
| each has their own strengths and that's alright.
| guelo wrote:
| It's bad for competition that only Apple gets to use TSMC's 5nm
| process. Though what's really bad is that Intel and Samsung
| haven't been able to compete with TSMC.
| paulmd wrote:
| AMD will be on TSMC N5P next year, which will give them node
| parity with Apple (who will be releasing A15 on N5P this
| year), and actually a small node lead over the current
| N5-based A14 products. So we will get to test the "it's all
| just node lead guys, nothing wrong with x86!!!" theory.
|
| Don't worry though there will still be room to move the
| goalposts with "uhhh, but, Apple is designing for high IPC
| and low clocks, it's totally different and x86 could do it if
| they wanted to but, uhhh, they don't!".
|
| (I'm personally of the somewhat-controversial opinion that
| x86 can't really be scaled in the same super-wide-core/super-
| deep-reorder-buffer fashion that ARM opens up and the IPC gap
| will persist as a result. The gap is _very wide_ , higher
| than 3x in floating-point benchmarks, it isn't something
| that's going to be easy to close.)
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| There is a third variable: Apple is putting ram much closer
| to the CPU than AMD. This has the advantage that you get
| lower latency (and slightly higher bandwidth), but the
| downside that you're currently limited to 128gb of ram,
| compared to 2tb for threadripper (4tb for epic). Amd's 3d
| cache that they're launching in a few months will be
| interesting since it lets the L3 go up a ton.
| Macha wrote:
| We've already seen x86 draw even with Intel 12th gen:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0bsjUMz3EM
| alwillis wrote:
| It doesn't support your argument when we're talking about a
| massive processor like a threadripper vs. a M1 Ultra.
|
| The performance per watt isn't in the same universe and that
| matters.
| wyattpeak wrote:
| The article claims that the chip is "the world's most
| powerful and capable chip for a personal computer". It's
| reasonable to ask whether it genuinely is faster than another
| available chip, it's not an implicit argument that it's not
| powerful.
| adfgadfgaery wrote:
| The M1 Ultra is by a very wide margin the bigger of the two.
| According to Tom's Hardware [1], top-of-the-line Epycs have
| 39.54 billion transistors. That is about a third of the 117
| billion in the M1 Ultra. Apple builds bigger than anyone
| else, thanks largely to their access to TSMC's best process.
|
| The M1 Ultra is a workstation part. It goes in machines that
| start at $4,000. The competition is Xeons, Epycs, and
| Threadrippers.
| bpye wrote:
| That's not really a fair comparison. Apples chip spends
| most of that on their GPU, and the neural engine takes a
| chunk too. Threadripper is only a CPU.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| > The performance per watt isn't in the same universe and
| that matters.
|
| I couldn't give less of a shit about performance-per-watt.
| The ONLY metric I care about is performance-per-dollar.
|
| A Mac Studio and Threadripper are both boxes that sit
| on/under my desk. I don't work from a laptop. I don't care
| about energy usage. I even don't really care about noise. My
| Threadripper is fine. I would not trade less power for less
| noise.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| The vast majority of developers today has a laptop as their
| main machine. Performance-per-watt is absolutely crucial
| there.
| hu3 wrote:
| This is what some folks miss.
|
| One hour of my time is more expensive than an entire month
| of a computer electricity bill.
|
| Some people just want tasks to perform as fast as possible
| regardless of power consumption or portability.
|
| Life's short and time is finite.
|
| Every second adds up for repetitive tasks.
| ghshephard wrote:
| The power is only relevant because it makes the machine
| quite in a compact form. If you've got a bit of space,
| then a water cooled system accomplishes a lot of the same
| thing. For some people there is an aesthetic element.
|
| Power does make a big difference in data centers though -
| it's often the case that you run out of power before you
| run out of rack space.
|
| Where power for a computer might make a difference could
| be in power-constrained (solar/off grid) scenarios.
|
| I don't know if I've ever heard anyone make an argument
| based on $$$.
| altcognito wrote:
| The only reason I've ever cared about watts is that
| generally speaking 120 watt and 180 watt processors
| require more complicated cooling solutions. That's less
| true today than it ever was. Cases are designed for
| things like liquid cooling, and they tend to be pretty
| silent. The processors stay cool, and are pretty
| reliable.
|
| I personally stick to the lower wattage ones because I
| don't generally need high end stuff, so I think Apple is
| going the right direction here, but it should be noted
| that Intel has also started down the path of high
| performance and efficiency cores already. AMD will find
| itself there too if it turns out that for home use, we
| just don't need a ton of cores, but instead a small group
| of fast cores surrounded by a bunch of specialist cores.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Air coolers can handle 300 watts without any complexity.
| Just a big block of fins on heat pipes.
| paulmd wrote:
| wattage doesn't really tell you how difficult it is to
| cool a part anymore. 11th-gen Intel is really easy to
| cool despite readily going to 200W+. Zen3 is hard to cool
| even at 60W.
|
| Thermal density plays a huge role, the size of the chips
| is going down faster than the wattage, so thermal density
| is going up every generation even if you keep the same
| number of transistors. And everyone is still putting more
| transistors on their chips as they shrink.
|
| Going forward this is only going to get more complicated
| - I am very interested to see how the 5800X3D does in
| terms of thermals with a cache die over the top of the
| CCD (compute die). But anyway that style of thing seem to
| be the future - NVIDIA is also rumored to be using a
| cache die over the top of their Ada/Lovelace
| architecture. And obviously 60W direct to the IHS is
| easier to cool than 60W that has to be pulled through a
| cache die in the middle.
| chaostheory wrote:
| It doesn't matter. Speaking as an Apple cult member imo
| Threadripper is better value if you're not using the machine
| for personal use.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| My 1st gen 16 core Threadripper is _barely_ faster than an M1
| Pro /Max at kernel builds, so a 64 core TR3 should handily
| double the M1 Ultra performance.
|
| But you know, I'm still happy to double my current build perf
| in a small box I can stick in my closet. Ordered one :-)
| mhh__ wrote:
| How many threads are actually getting utilized in those
| kernel builds? I don't work on the kernel enough to have
| intuition in mind but people make wildly optimistic
| assumptions about how compilation stresses processors.
|
| Also 1st gen threadrippers are getting on a bit now, surely.
| It's a ~6 year old microarchitecture.
| nextos wrote:
| Yes, it'd be interesting to see this comparison made with
| current AMD CPUs and a full build that has approximately
| the same price.
|
| I am curious whether there is a real performance
| difference?
|
| I do lots of computing on high-end workstations. Intel
| builds used to be extremely expensive if you required ECC.
| They used that to discriminate prices. Recent AMD offerings
| helped enormously. I wonder whether these M1 offerings are
| a significant improvement in terms of performance, making
| it worthwhile to cope with the hassle of switching
| architectures?
| manmal wrote:
| I wouldn't automatically expect a linear decrease in compile
| time with growing core count. That would have to be tried.
| gtvwill wrote:
| Thaxll wrote:
| Well compare that to a 400$ CPU like a 5900x, the first M1 is
| slower than this one and cost 2x the price.
| [deleted]
| cehrlich wrote:
| Seems like for things that are: 1. Perfectly parallel 2. Not
| accelerated by some of the other stuff that's on the Apple
| Silicon SoC's ...it will be a toss-up.
|
| Threadripper 3990X get about 25k in Geekbench Multicore [1]
|
| M1 Max gets about 12.5k in Geekbench Multicore, so pretty much
| exactly half [2]
|
| Obviously different tasks will have _vastly_ different
| performance profiles. For example it's likely that the M1 Ultra
| will blow the Threadripper out of the water for video stuff,
| whereas Threadripper is likely to win certain types of
| compiling.
|
| There's also the upcoming 5995WX which will be even faster: [3]
|
| [1] https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-
| threadrip...
|
| [2]
| https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q...
|
| [3] https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-
| threadripper-p...
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| Something is seriously fishy about those geekbench results.
|
| 24-core scores 20k, 32-core scores 22.3k, and 64-core score
| 25k. Something isn't scaling there.
| e4e78a06 wrote:
| Many GB5 (and real world) tasks are memory bandwidth
| bottlenecked, which greatly favors M1 Max because it has
| over double a Threadripper's memory bandwidth.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| Sort of. The CPU complex of the M1 Max can achieve ~200
| GB/s, you can only hit the 400 GB/s mark by getting the
| GPU involved.
|
| At the same time the Threadrippers also have a gargantuan
| amount of cache that can be accessed at several hundred
| gigabytes per second per core. Obviously not as nice as
| being able to hit DRAM at that speed.
| e4e78a06 wrote:
| That cache is not uniform time access. It costs over
| 100ns to cross the IO die to access another die's L3,
| almost as much as going to main memory. In practice you
| have to treat it as 8 separate 32 MB L3 caches.
|
| Also, not everything fits into cache.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Probably it's the thermals that don't scale. The more the
| cores, the lower the the peak performance per core.
| enneff wrote:
| Yeah, it's the real world tasks that GeekBench tries to
| simulate that don't tend to scale linearity with processor
| count. A lot of software does not take good advantage of
| multiple cores.
| fivea wrote:
| > A lot of software does not take good advantage of
| multiple cores.
|
| It sounds pointless to come up with synthetic benchmarks
| which emulate software that is not able to handle
| hardware, and then use said synthetic benchmarks to
| evaluate the hardware performance.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| It has a very specific point: communicating performance
| to people who don't know hardware.
|
| Most consumers are software aware, not hardware aware.
| They care what they _will_ use the hardware for, not what
| they _can_ use it for. To that end, benchmarks that
| correlate with their experience are more useful than a
| tuned BLAS implementation.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| That's certainly true. But if that's your workload you
| shouldn't be buying a 64-core CPU...
|
| I use a few 32 and 64 core machines for build servers and
| file servers, and while the 64-core EPYCs are not twice
| as fast as the 32-core ones due to lower overall
| frequency, they're 70% or so faster in most of the things
| I throw at them.
| brigade wrote:
| Does Geekbench actually attempt to simulate that in their
| multi-core score? And how?
|
| I was under the impression that all of their multi-core
| tests were "run N independent copies of the single-
| threaded test", just like SPECrate does.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Geekbench is extremely sensitive to the OS. Like the same CPU
| on Windows & Linux score _wildly_ different on Geekbench. For
| example the 3990X regularly hits 35k multicore geekbench when
| run on Linux: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/11237183
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Also of note is that half of the Mac Studio's case is
| dedicated to cooling. Up to this point, all M1 Max benchmarks
| are within laptops while all Threadripper benchmarks are in
| desktops. The M1 Max in the Mac Studio will probably perform
| better than expected.
| tacLog wrote:
| This is sound logic and probably be the case but I wonder
| if this effect will be less than what we have seen in the
| past because of the reduced TDP of the M1 processors in
| general.
|
| Maybe the cooling and power delivery difference between
| laptop formfactors and PC formfactors will be less with
| these new arm based chips.
| runako wrote:
| Having not seen benchmarks, I would imagine that claimed memory
| bandwidth of ~800 GB/s vs Threadripper's claimed ~166 GB/s
| would make a significant difference for a number of real-world
| workloads.
| paulmd wrote:
| Someone will probably chime in and correct me (such is the
| way of the internet - Cunningham's Law in action) but I don't
| think the CPU itself can access all 800 GB/s? I think someone
| in one of the previous M1 Pro/Max threads mentioned that
| several of the memory channels on Pro/Max are dedicated for
| the GPU. So you can't just get a 800 GB/s postgres server
| here.
|
| You could still write OpenCL kernels of course. Doesn't mean
| you _can 't_ use it, but not sure if it's all just accessible
| to CPU-side code.
|
| (or maybe it is? it's still a damn fast piece of hardware
| either way)
| runako wrote:
| Fascinating!
|
| Linking this[1] because TIL that the memory bandwidth
| number is more about the SoC as a whole. The discussion in
| the article is interesting because they are actively trying
| to saturate the memory bandwidth. Maybe the huge bandwidth
| is a relevant factor for the real-world uses of a machine
| called "Studio" that retails for over $3,000, but not as
| much for people running postgres?
|
| 1 - https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-
| performanc...
| crest wrote:
| On an M1 Max MacBook Pro the CPU (8P+2E) cores peak at a
| combined ~240GB/s the rest of the advertised 400GB/s memory
| bandwidth is only useable by the other bus masters e.g.
| GPU, NPU, video encoding/decoding etc.
| paulmd wrote:
| So now the follow-on question I really wanted to ask: if
| the CPU can't access all the memory channels does that
| mean it can only address a fraction of the total memory
| as CPU memory? Or is it a situation where all the
| channels go into a controller/bus, but the CPU link out
| of the controller is only wide enough to handle a
| fraction of the bandwidth?
| brigade wrote:
| It's more akin to how on Intel, each core's L2 has some
| maximum bandwidth to LLC, and can't individually saturate
| the total bandwidth available on the ring bus. But Intel
| doesn't have the LLC <-> RAM bandwidth for that to be
| generally noticeable.
| kiratp wrote:
| My workstation has a 3990x.
|
| Our "world" build is slightly faster on my M1 Max.
|
| https://twitter.com/kiratpandya/status/1457438725680480257
|
| The 3990x runs a bit faster on the initial compile stage but
| the linking is single threaded and the M1 Max catches up at
| that point. I expect the M1 Ultra to crush the 3990x on compile
| time.
| howinteresting wrote:
| Try mold.
| petecooper wrote:
| >Try mold
|
| Curiosity got the better of me:
|
| https://github.com/rui314/mold
| kiratp wrote:
| We plan to move to it once MacOS support lands (for the
| laptops).
| fivea wrote:
| > The 3990x runs a bit faster on the initial compile stage
| but the linking is single threaded and the M1 Max catches up
| at that point.
|
| Isn't linking IO-bound?
| codeflo wrote:
| For a clean build and a reasonably specced machine, all the
| intermediate artifacts will still be in the cache during
| linking.
| kiratp wrote:
| Exposing my limited understanding of that level of the
| computing stack - it is but Apple seems to have very very
| good caching strategies - filesystem and L1/2/3.
|
| https://llvm.org/devmtg/2017-10/slides/Ueyama-lld.pdf
|
| There is a breakdown in those slides discussing what parts
| of lld are single threaded and hard to parallelize so I
| suspect single thread performance plays a big role too. I
| generally observe one core pegged during linking.
| fivea wrote:
| > Exposing my limited understanding of that level of the
| computing stack - it is but Apple seems to have very very
| good caching strategies - filesystem and L1/2/3.
|
| That would mean that these comparisons between
| Threadripper and the M1 Ultra do not reflect CPU
| performance but instead showcase whatever choice of SSD
| they've been using.
| nicoburns wrote:
| https://github.com/rui314/mold would suggest otherwise.
| Massive speedups by multithreading the linker. I think
| traditional linkers just aren't highly optimised.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| It is worth noting that it has, at least according to Apple's
| graphs, slightly more than an RTX 3090 in graphics performance.
|
| So, even if it doesn't quite beat Threadripper in the CPU
| department - it will absolutely _annihilate_ Threadripper in
| anything graphics-related.
|
| For this reason, I don't actually have a problem with Apple
| calling it the fastest. Yes, Threadripper might be marginally
| faster in real-world work that uses the CPU, but other tasks
| like video editing, graphics, it won't be anywhere near close.
| komuher wrote:
| It wont be even close to RTX 3090 looking at m1 max and using
| same scaling maximum it can be close to 3070 performance.
|
| We all need to take Apple claims with grain of salt as they
| are always cherrypicked so i wont be surprise if it wont be
| even 3070 performance in real usage.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| I'm obviously going to reserve judgement until people can get
| their hands on them. Apple makes good stuff but their keynote
| slides are typically heavily cherrypicked (e.g. our video
| performance numbers compare our dedicated ASIC to software
| encoding on a different architecture even though competing
| ASICs exist kinds of things).
| gtvwill wrote:
| randyrand wrote:
| These CPU names are terrible. When did Apple get bad at naming
| things?
| mrcwinn wrote:
| Pro, Max, Ultra.
|
| The board has been set. M1 Endgame is nearly ready.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| With Ultra Fusion....UltraFabric next to stack them all
| vertically.
| jmull wrote:
| Superman could've kicked the crap out of Ultraman, just FYI.
| [deleted]
| neycoda wrote:
| I really wish popular companies would focus more on software
| optimization than hardware renovations. It's really sad to see
| how fast products die due to increasingly bloated and overly-
| complex software.
| zwaps wrote:
| So then, when will common ML frameworks work on Apple? I guess
| compiled Tensorflow works with some plugins or whatever, where
| afaik performance is still subpar. Apple emphasizes that they
| have this many Tensorcores... but unfortunately to use them one
| has to roll one's own framework on what Swift or something. I am
| sure it gets better soon.
| contingencies wrote:
| Desktop marketing seems to be getting desperate. Few people use
| the apps they show in the Mac Studio benchmarks. Fewer still care
| that their chips use less power... if they did, they would stay
| on their phones.
| etchalon wrote:
| The "few people" who use those apps are the people Apple is
| selling these systems to.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Large businesses do. I bet in some places you could get
| grant/loan incentives to replace a PC fleet with these things.
|
| Back in the Pentium-4 days, iirc I was able to get almost $250k
| in grants and $1.5M in subsidized loans to do accelerated
| refresh of a PC fleet and small datacenter, all through a
| utility's peak load reduction program.
| contingencies wrote:
| I don't deny such things happen but it's illogical. If you
| have 20 people on desktops a small fraction of them will use
| more energy for microwaving lunch, making coffee or on air
| conditioning than they will save in aggregate on this nominal
| reduction in power draw.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Microwaving lunch: 2 minutes at 800W; desktop with monitor:
| 8 hours at 150W, that is 45 times higher. Similar for
| coffee, no simple math for AC. If you can reduce 150W to
| 80W, it is both significant and achievable - this is what
| my desktop usually draws.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 20, yes, it's a waste of time. At 2000, reducing power
| consumption by 30%, may yield $100k annually.
| [deleted]
| yoloyoloyoloa wrote:
| MKUltra was a better chip
| [deleted]
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Ugh really wish that a non-Apple vendor could make an ARM chip of
| this calibre. Jealous but cat bring myself to use a proprietary
| OS and get locked into Apple.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| There is always Asahi Linux
| kristianp wrote:
| I wonder what clock rate the studio runs these chips at with the
| extra cooling. Frustrating that the marketing materials don't
| mention that.
| top_sigrid wrote:
| This is a very little discussed question but one of the most
| interesting unknowns I think.
|
| The pro and max come only in laptops, so the cooling difference
| should be quite significant, but also there is more chip and an
| interconnect to cool. Really looking forward to the in depth
| analysis of this.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Apple have some serious chip design abilities. Imagine if they
| entered the server market, with this architecture it could be
| very successful.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| They tried that before and flopped.
|
| The server market is different. Companies buy servers from the
| low bidder. Apple has never really played in that market.
| flatiron wrote:
| People care about performance per watt now. So they could
| compete. The real question is if they would support Linux. In
| our containerized world I can't see their servers getting
| super big running macOS
| greenknight wrote:
| The reason they dominate at PPW, is because they are on
| TSMCs 5nm process. No one else has made a cpu chip on this
| process yet. AMD are scheduled for later this year (they
| are currently using 7nm).
|
| It will be interesting to see the difference in performance
| and performance per watt, when both companies are on the
| same node.
| flatiron wrote:
| Arm I believe helps a bit as well.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| This is pretty true. While people who buy racks consider
| vertical improvements they tend to think laterally and how
| easy is it to expand (aka how cheap is the +1 server)
| alwillis wrote:
| That was before people cared about performance per watt.
|
| Besides for some use cases, these Mac Studios will be racked
| and in data centers as is.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Haha, bloody hell, what a monster of a chip. I find my M1 Max
| already remarkably fast. The change is so huge. It's like in the
| old days when you'd get a new computer and it felt like it could
| do things before you could think of doing them.
|
| But surely the GPU things can't be real? The GPU in the M1 Ultra
| beats the top-of-the-line Nvidia? That's nuts.
| acchow wrote:
| > The GPU in the M1 Ultra beats the top-of-the-line Nvidia?
| That's nuts.
|
| We don't know yet. Apple is benchmarking against Workstation
| graphics cards
|
| "production 2.5GHz 28-core Intel Xeon W-based Mac Pro systems
| with 384GB of RAM and AMD Radeon Pro W6900X graphics with 32GB
| of GDDR6"
| sercand wrote:
| > Highest-end discrete GPU performance data tested from Core
| i9-12900K with DDR5 memory and GeForce RTX 3090.
|
| From the linked article. Apple is comparing against RTX 3090.
| lastdong wrote:
| Nvidia 3090, I wonder what Relative Performance equates to.
|
| Can't wait for the (real world) reviews to be published
| lastdong wrote:
| Just to add in any case Apple is solving a big problem
| related to limited GPU memory, which is quite cool
|
| Hopefully AMD, Nvidia, others can follow the trend
| bkyiuuMbF wrote:
| > But surely the GPU things can't be real? The GPU in the M1
| Ultra beats the top-of-the-line Nvidia?
|
| Dubious. https://www.pcgamer.com/apple-m1-max-nvidia-
| rtx-3080-perform...
| xsmasher wrote:
| Just for clarity, that article is about the M1 Pro and the M1
| Max chips from October.
| brutal_boi wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > Apple even says its new GPU is a match for Nvidia's RTX
| 3080 mobile chip, though you'll have to take Apple's word for
| it on that one. We've also reached out to Nvidia to see what
| it might have to say on the matter.
|
| > RTX 3080 mobile chip
|
| > mobile chip
|
| There's a 50%[1] (!) difference with mobile and non-mobile
| versions of the chip. So that's hardly a deal breaker.
|
| [1] https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
| gowld wrote:
| The "mobile" scam in GPUs is terrible. Nvidia flat out lies
| about Mobile performance by giving misleading product names
| (same as the desktop names).
| LegitShady wrote:
| its beyond that. the same chip might have several tdps
| and drastic performance differences between models, such
| that a high tdp 3070 mobile is faster than a low tdp
| 3080. you end up having to get benchmarks for each
| particular laptop configuration.
| Omniusaspirer wrote:
| Based on Anandtech benchmarks the M1 Max GPU is basically on
| par with a mobile 3080, which a quick search tells me is about
| 60% as fast as a desktop 3080. Not unreasonable to believe 2 of
| them combined will outperform a 3090- with nearly 128 GB of
| VRAM to boot.
|
| Even more incredible Anandtech reports the M1 max GPU block
| maxing at 43W in their testing. So a 90W GPU in the M1 Ultra is
| trading blows with a 350+ watt 3090.
|
| 1) https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-
| performanc...
| cassac wrote:
| What on earth are you talking about. That link shows it's not
| even half as fast as the 3060, let alone the 3080.
|
| In borderlands it got 24 FPS while the 3080 got 52 FPS. How
| is that on par?
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| If you buy a Mac for gaming, you're going to have a bad
| time. Look at the GFXBench 5.0 benchmark. The first graph
| on the page.
| [deleted]
| Omniusaspirer wrote:
| Gaming benchmarks are completely irrelevant when discussing
| the actual raw power of the GPU. As the other commenter
| said- look at the actual GPU benchmark in the first graph.
|
| Legacy games written for x86 CPUs obviously are going to
| perform poorly. I recommend you actually read the review
| and don't just scroll to the worst gaming benchmark you can
| find.
| cassac wrote:
| There are only two real gaming benchmarks and they are
| both real bad for the M1. In Tomb Raider it fairs even
| worse at 4K than it does in borderlands.
|
| It's a great chip but it doesn't trade blows with
| anything Nvidia puts out especially at comparable price
| points.
|
| Maybe you buy things to run benchmarks. I buy them to run
| the software I own. For games they come up short on fps
| and high on price. That is the inverse of what I'm
| looking for.
| Omniusaspirer wrote:
| If your interest is purely in playing unoptimized games
| coded for different architectures then absolutely there's
| better options.
|
| However if your workloads are in a more professional
| domain as mine are then it's entirely fair to say this
| chip is trading blows with Nvidia's best at lower prices.
| Don't forget this is an entire SOC and not just a GPU,
| power saving aren't irrelevant either if you actually
| work your hardware consistently as I do.
| mhh__ wrote:
| > Gaming benchmarks are completely irrelevant when
| discussing the actual raw power of the GPU.
|
| Maybe, but the "raw power" is useless if it can't be
| exploited.
|
| > Legacy games written for x86 CPUs obviously are going
| to perform poorly.
|
| Not if they're GPU-bound. Even native performance isn't
| that impressive
| Omniusaspirer wrote:
| If the power is substantial enough it will get exploited
| eventually. Hopefully even if Metal ports don't occur the
| eventual Asahi-adjacent open source drivers will open the
| gaming doors.
| Macha wrote:
| GPU scaling is absolutely not linear in that way. nvidia gave
| up on that in recent generations as without software support
| to match, you had situations where double 1080s were 95% as
| fast as one 1080 with worse frame times.
|
| Might be nice for e.g. ML where you can effectively treat
| them as entirely independent GPUs but for games I would be
| surprised if this matches a high end GPU.
| vimy wrote:
| macOS will see it as one gpu.
| teilo wrote:
| Given that it's basically double the performance of the Max,
| with massive memory bandwidth, seems reasonable to me. But
| Apple always fudges things a bit. Like, which Nvidia exactly is
| this being compared to, and under what workload exactly?
| make3 wrote:
| the problem on mac is the super tiny game selection
| Thaxll wrote:
| > But surely the GPU things can't be real? The GPU in the M1
| Ultra beats the top-of-the-line Nvidia? That's nuts.
|
| People that game on Mac know it's a lie, GPU for gaming on mac
| is vastly slower than recent graphic cards.
| [deleted]
| jlouis wrote:
| Insane claims requires insane evidence. We don't have that
| there.
|
| For some workloads i would not be surprised at all. But for all
| workloads, ...
| [deleted]
| thfuran wrote:
| That thing has four times as many transistors as a 3090.
| maronato wrote:
| Although true, transistor count is only tangentially related
| to performance
| mhh__ wrote:
| Cache size is _very_ related to performance.
| thfuran wrote:
| It's certainly not the sole determinant of performance but
| given two reasonably solid designs, one with a vastly
| larger transistor budget and major node advantage to boot,
| I know which one I'd pick as likely winner.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| That counts memory, right?
| wmf wrote:
| No, but it does include cache; the M1 Ultra should have
| 96MB of cache (>6B transistors) while Nvidia GPUs have
| relatively little cache. 128GB of DRAM has 1 trillion
| transistors.
| swyx wrote:
| was surprised to learn that the CPUs and GPUs on the M1x chips
| are essentially a single unit, and for the M1 Ultra they
| basically slapped two M1's together.
|
| in traditional PC building, the CPU is quite distinct from the
| GPU. can anyone ELI5 what the benefits are to having the CPU
| closely integrated with GPU like the M1 has? seems a bit unwieldy
| but i dont know anything about computer architecture
| Koshkin wrote:
| I remember how AMD 3DNow! and Intel MMX were meant to render
| GPUs obsolete.
| tediousdemise wrote:
| How does Apple manage to blow every other computing OEM out of
| the water? What's in the secret sauce of their company?
|
| Is it great leadership? Top tier engineering talent? Lots of
| money? I simply don't understand.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| marketing and a forgiving audience.
|
| You have to remember that since the 2014 retina, Apple's
| offerings have been a bit crap.
|
| This is a return to form ( and a good one at that) but its not
| worthy of hero worship. They've done a good job turning things
| around, which is very hard.
| yurishimo wrote:
| I think it's mostly engineering and the cash to make things
| happen. You heard it today in the presentation that since they
| launched M1, sales have skyrocketed for Apple computers.
|
| Hopefully leadership is really looking hard at this trend and
| adjusting future offerings accordingly. Consumers WANT machines
| with high performance and great I/O and they're willing to pay
| for them.
|
| With Apple, Intel, and AMD really stepping up the last couple
| of years, I think the next decade of personal computing is
| going to be really exciting!
| stalfosknight wrote:
| Put simply, it is vertical integration paired with management
| that is adept at playing the long game.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Willingness to risk a ton of capital over many years into
| developing hardware.
| amilios wrote:
| D) all of the above?
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| If I had to guess, their secret sauce is that 1) they're paying
| lots of money to be on a chip fabrication node ahead of both
| AMD and Intel, 2) since their chip design is in-house, they
| don't have to pay the fat profit margin Intel and AMD want for
| their high-end processors and can therefore include what is
| effectively a more expensive processor in their systems for the
| same price, and 3) their engineering team is as good as
| AMD/Intel. Note that the first two have more to do with
| economics rather than engineering.
| [deleted]
| forgotmyoldacc wrote:
| Apple isn't an OEM? They don't sell products that are marketed
| by another company.
| xyst wrote:
| "M1 Ultra Pro Max", wen?
|
| Naming scheme aside, this is great!
| iskander wrote:
| So little memory?
|
| The now outdated Mac Pro goes up to 1.5TB, only 128GB available
| here.
| masklinn wrote:
| Their design is basically gated by the number of memory
| controllers: 1MC tops out at 16GB (M1), 2MCs for 32 (Pro), 4
| MCs for 64 (Max), and I guess 8 MCs for 128 (Ultra which is
| apparently two Maxes stapled together).
|
| Hopefully the next gen will provide more capable and flexible
| memory controllers, both so they can scale the top end for a
| full Pro-scale offering, and so there is more memory
| flexibility at the lower end e.g. the ability to get an M1 with
| 32+GB RAM, or a Pro with 64+.
| bengale wrote:
| They mentioned the Mac Pro replacement is still to come.
| fulafel wrote:
| "Apple's innovative packaging architecture that interconnects the
| die of two M1 Max chips to create a system on a chip (SoC)"
|
| Did they get their terminology confused? Later it says "By
| connecting two M1 Max die with our UltraFusion packaging
| architecture [...]" which also sounds like it's a MCM and not a
| SoC.
| crazypython wrote:
| Intel 12th gen i9 is 11% better at single core and 42% slower at
| multicore. https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-
| intel_core_i9_1290...
|
| For most non-parallel tasks, my guess is the Intel 12900K will
| beat at performance.
|
| Intel's next generation will have 50% more cores and beat this
| chip at multithreading.
| teilo wrote:
| And overnight, Intel's Ice Lake is again way behind.
| pjmlp wrote:
| 80% of the desktop market and 100% of cloud deployments won't
| care.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Would 80% of "the desktop market"--whatever that means--care
| about Ice Lake to begin with, or any high end chip at all?
| pjmlp wrote:
| What they definitely won't care is Apple hardware at Apple
| prices, specially outside first world countries.
| manquer wrote:
| Desktop will care about noise of the fans.
|
| Data centers are also pretty conscious of power consumption,
| more power means more cooling infra required and higher
| energy bill, while it is not the top priority it certainly is
| a significant factor in decision making.
| fastball wrote:
| I dunno, I think cloud is starting to think more and more
| about power consumption of the chips used, where Apple
| Silicon blows the competition out of the water.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Let us know when Apple starts a cloud business.
| Thaxll wrote:
| PC user don't pay 4k for a computer, on PC you can get 2x the
| speed for 2x less the price.
| samatman wrote:
| Link me to the $2K computer that's twice as fast as the M1
| Ultra. Take all the time you need.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| > Take all the time you need
|
| Check your replies in 10 years and I'll be able to list a
| dozen ;P
|
| But sarcasm aside yeah this chip looks insane.
| Thaxll wrote:
| It took less than 6month to have a faster amd / intel CPU
| than the m1 back then, Apple charts are showing
| performance / watt which for a desktop PC is kind of
| irrelevant. In pure speed amd / intel are faster or will
| be very soon.
|
| For graphic card I don't try to argue because fps on Mac
| are very inferior in games than a average modern card.
| It's not even on the same league.
| ishansharma wrote:
| May I ask the $2000 desktop configuration with 2x the speed?
|
| Of course Apple chips won't work well for gaming, but what
| other benchmarks will this $2000 desktop win?
| joshstrange wrote:
| > PC user don't pay 4k for a computer
|
| I'm almost certain that's not true, especially for machines
| that would compete with the Studio
|
| > on PC you can get 2x the speed for 2x less the price.
|
| Citation needed. This hasn't been true for a long time as far
| as I can tell.
| [deleted]
| maronato wrote:
| This hasn't been true since M1's release
| Thaxll wrote:
| A CPU like the 5900x is better than the m1 and cost 400$.
| yurishimo wrote:
| That's one part of the equation though, not to mention
| it's a desktop chip. I can get a laptop with an M1 Max
| with hours of battery life running full tilt.
|
| Your $400 CPU needs at least another $1000 in parts just
| to boot (and those aren't even the parts you likely want
| to pair with it).
|
| Your cost comparison is silly. Nobody compares singular
| CPUs to entire machines.
| mhh__ wrote:
| If you're going to be smug why not use a recent Intel chip?
| adfgadfgaery wrote:
| Ice Lake shipped in 2019. The current generation is Alder Lake,
| which is slightly ahead of the M1 in single-threaded
| performance according to most benchmarks.
| teilo wrote:
| My bad. I meant Alder Lake.
| sharikous wrote:
| And massively behind in terms of power consuption
| adfgadfgaery wrote:
| Yes, certainly. I don't think that's relevant in this case,
| though. Why would anyone care if their workstation CPU
| draws 60W or 200W? It's easy to cool in either case and the
| power consumption is trivial.
|
| M1 is clearly the best design on the market for mobile
| devices and is merely _very good_ for desktops. Let 's keep
| the enthusiasm realistic.
| manquer wrote:
| Higher power means more cooling, which usually means more
| noise. A lot of people find value in quieter machines.
| secondcoming wrote:
| >Why would anyone care if their workstation CPU draws 60W
| or 200W?
|
| I care. I work from home and my main power sink is my
| desktop. Considering the soaring energy prices these days
| I really do care about what my usage is.
| abletonlive wrote:
| You say it's easy to cool but that's actually not the
| case, for anybody that cares about noise. Any music
| studio is going to happily take the 60W over 200W because
| they record and monitor music and need the quietest
| machine possible in the room.
|
| Unsurprisingly, it's called Mac _Studio_ , as in music
| studio, or art studio, or what have you studio, where
| these things matter.
|
| This is a machine aimed at content creators.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Its behind M1 but it's worth pointing out that Alder Lake
| is not a power-hog on "normal" workloads i.e. gaming when
| compared to it's other X86 competitors. It only starts
| cooking itself on extremely heavy workloads.
| didip wrote:
| The power leveling in this chip's naming scheme can rival Dragon
| Ball Z.
| amne wrote:
| How many CUDA cores? It's over ninethousaaaaa .. oh wait
| nevermind!
| Jetrel wrote:
| I for one am holding out for the ULTRA GIGA chips.
| willis936 wrote:
| My first thought was "does it include an LSD subscription?".
| ccwilson10 wrote:
| I wish HN was like this more often
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Be the comments you want to see in the HN
| et-al wrote:
| I don't.
|
| There's already Reddit if you want to crack puns and farm
| karma. Let's try to keep the signal:noise ratio higher here.
| rpmisms wrote:
| I appreciate that it's infrequent. Sure, it's fun to blow off
| some steam and have a laugh, but that's fundamentally not
| what this place is about. Confining it to Apple release
| threads makes it more of a purge scenario.
| technocratius wrote:
| I really hope it won't. Let's cherish the high quality
| comments of HN. Once this comment section becomes a karma-fed
| race to the bottom driven by who can make the most memeable
| jokes, it will never recover. Case in point: Reddit.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| the M1-O9000
| t_mann wrote:
| Would be interesting to get more info on the neural engine. On
| one hand, I find it fascinating that major manufacturers are now
| putting neural architectures into mainstream hardware.
|
| On the other hand I wonder what exactly it can do. To what degree
| are you tied into a specific neural architecture (eg recurrent vs
| convolutional), what APIs are available for training it, if it's
| even meant to be used that way (not just by Apple-provided
| featues lke FaceID)?
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| It's a general purpose accelerator. You have coremltools[1] to
| convert your trained model into a format or you can make your
| own using CreateML[2].
|
| [1] https://coremltools.readme.io/docs
|
| [2] https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/create-ml/
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Typical "neural engines" are intended for real-time network
| inference, not training. Training is highly parallel and
| benefits more from GPU-like vector processing.
| mlajtos wrote:
| Apple is pushing for training & fine-tuning on the devices
| too.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreml/model_custo.
| ..
| slimsag wrote:
| They're doing quite a lot of work here:
|
| https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/
|
| https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/create-ml/
|
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/createml
| slmjkdbtl wrote:
| Curious about the naming here, terms like "pro" "pro max" "max",
| "ultra" (hopefully there's no "pro ultra" and "ultra max" in the
| future) is very confusing and hard to know which one is more
| powerful than which, or if it's a power-level relationship. Is
| this on purpose or it's just bad naming? Is there example of good
| naming for this kind of situation?
| polyrand wrote:
| I think the GPU claims are interesting. According to the graph's
| footer, the M1 Ultra was compared to an RTX 3090. If the
| performance/wattage claims are correct, I'm wondering if the Mac
| Studio could become an "affordable" personal machine learning
| workstation (which also won't make the electricity bill
| skyrocket).
|
| If Pytorch becomes stable and easy to use on Apple Silicon
| [0][1], it could be an appealing choice.
|
| [0]:
| https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/47702#issuecomment...
| [1]: https://nod.ai/pytorch-m1-max-gpu/
| whoisburbansky wrote:
| Cursory look gives you a ~$3500 price tag for a gaming PC with
| a 3090 [1], vs. at least $4k for a Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra.
| Roughly the same ballpark, but I wouldn't call the M1 Ultra
| more affordable given those numbers.
|
| 1. https://techguided.com/best-rtx-3090-gaming-
| pc/#:~:text=With....
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _Cursory look gives you a ~$3500 price tag for a gaming PC
| with a 3090_
|
| That 3500 is for a DIY build. So, sure, you can always save
| on labor and hassle, but prebuilt 3090 rigs commonly cost
| over 4k. And if you don't want to buy from Amazon because of
| their notorious history of mixing components from different
| suppliers and reselling used returns, oof, good luck even
| getting one.
| airstrike wrote:
| You mean I get to save _AND_ have fun building my own PC?
| _joel wrote:
| FSVO fun if you use Newegg
| unicornfinder wrote:
| Not to mention if you build your own PC you can upgrade
| the parts as and when, unlike with the new Mac where
| you'll eventually just be replacing the whole thing.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Since the context here is using these machines for work,
| a mid-level engineer will easily cost an extra $1000 in
| his own time to put that together :)
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Prebuilt 3090 builds can often be found for less than the
| cost of the corresponding parts.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| They are also absolutely massive and probably much more
| expensive long-term because of the massively increased
| electricity usage.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Unless you're running a farm of these, the power cost
| differences is going to be largely unnoticeable. Like even
| in a country with very expensive power, you're talking a
| ~$0.10/USD per hour premium to have a 3090 at full bore.
| And that's assuming the M1 Ultra manages to achieve the
| same performance as the 3090, which is going to be
| extremely workload dependent going off of the existing M1
| GPU results.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Hahaha good luck getting your hands on a 30xx series card
| though.
|
| Here in Australia, 3090's go for close to 3k on their own.
| dmz73 wrote:
| And cheapest Mac Studio with M1 ultra is A$6000 so yes....
|
| 20-Core CPU 48-Core GPU 32-Core Neural Engine
| 64GB unified memory 1TB SSD storage1 Front:
| Two Thunderbolt 4 ports, one SDXC card slot Back:
| Four Thunderbolt 4 ports, two USB-A ports, one HDMI port,
| one 10Gb Ethernet port, one 3.5-mm headphone jack
|
| A$6,099.00
| sorry_outta_gas wrote:
| We've been buying tons of 3090s at work for about 1.6 USD-
| 2k USD without to much trouble
| nightfly wrote:
| > tons
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| You better not be working at a mining facility.... /s?
| alasdair_ wrote:
| Note the label on the y-axis. "relative performance" from
| "0-200" seems like marketing bullshit to me.
|
| "M1 Ultra has a 64-core GPU, delivering faster performance than
| the highest-end PC GPU available, while using 200 fewer watts
| of power."
|
| Note that they say "faster performance" not "more performance".
| What does "faster" mean? Who knows!
| savant_penguin wrote:
| And hopefully not make you deaf with their buzzing fans
| kllrnohj wrote:
| The GPU claims on the M1 Pro & Max were, let's say, cherry
| picked to put it nicely. The M1 Ultra claims already look
| suspicious since the GPU graph tops out at ~120W & the CPU
| graph tops out at ~60W yet the M1 Studio is rated for 370W
| continuous power draw.
|
| Since you mention ML specifically, looking at some benchmarks
| out there (like https://tlkh.dev/benchmarking-the-
| apple-m1-max#heading-gpu &
| https://wandb.ai/tcapelle/apple_m1_pro/reports/Deep-Learning...
| ), even if the M1 Ultra is 2x the performance of the M1 Max (so
| perfect scaling), it would still be _far_ behind the 3090. Like
| completely different ballpark behind. But of course there is
| that price & power gap, but the primary strength of the M1
| GPUs seems to really be from the essentially very large VRAM
| amount. So if your working set doesn't fit in an RTX GPU of
| your desired budget, then the M1 is a good option. If, however,
| you're not VRAM limited, then Nvidia still offers far more
| performance.
|
| Well, assuming you can actually buy any of these, anyway. The
| M1 Ultra might win "by default" by simply being purchasable at
| all unlike pretty much every other GPU :/
| brigade wrote:
| 100W of that is probably for the USB ports; afaik TB4 ports
| are required to support 15W, and I don't think there's been a
| Mac didn't support full power simultaneously across all
| ports. (if that's even allowed?)
| joshspankit wrote:
| Watching the keynote I was almost thinking that Nvidia missed
| the boat when they chose not to sign whatever they had to to
| make OSX drivers.
|
| Thank you for recalibrating me to actual reality and not
| Apple Reality (tm)
| Macha wrote:
| An M1 Ultra is $2000 incrementally over a M1 Max, so there is
| no price gap, even with the inflated prices 3090s actually go
| for today.
| apohn wrote:
| The 3090 also can do fp16 and the M1 series only supports
| fp32, so the M1 series of chips basically needs more RAM for
| the same batch sizes. So it isn't an Oranges to Oranges
| comparison.
|
| Back when that M1 MAX vs 3090 blog post was released, I ran
| those same tests on the M1 Pro (16GB), Google Colab Pro, and
| free GPUs (RTX4000, RTX5000) on the Paperspace Pro plan.
|
| To make a long story short, I don't think buying any M1 chip
| make senses if your primary purpose is Deep Learning. If you
| are just learning or playing around with DL, Colab Pro and
| the M1 Max provide similar performance. But Colab Pro is
| ~$10/month, and upgrading any laptop to M1-Max is at least
| $600.
|
| The "free" RTX5000 on Paperspace Pro (~$8 month) is much
| faster (especially with fp16 and XLA) than M1 Max and Colab
| Pro, albeit the RTX5000 isn't always available. The free
| RTX4000 is also a faster than M1 Max, albeit you need to use
| smaller batch sizes due to 8GB of VRAM.
|
| If you assume that M1-Ultra doubles the performance of M1-Max
| in similar fashion to how the M1-Max seems to double the gpu
| performance of the M1-Pro, it still doesn't make sense from a
| cost perspective. If you are a serious DL practitioner,
| putting that money towards cloud resources or a 3090 makes a
| lot more sense than buying the M1-Ultra.
| Koshkin wrote:
| For some definitions of "affordable."
| forgotmyoldacc wrote:
| Neural Engine cores are not accessible for third party
| developers, so it'll be severely constrained for practical
| purposes. Currently the M1 Max is no match for even last
| generation mid-tier Nvidia GPU.
| viktorcode wrote:
| They are accessible to third party developers, only they have
| to use CoreML.
| komuher wrote:
| xD
| LegitShady wrote:
| I always take such claims with a grain of salt anyways. It
| usualy on one specific benchmark. I wait for better benchmarks
| always instead of trusting the marketing
| pathartl wrote:
| Even if their claims are accurate, it usually has the
| asterisk of *Only with Apple Metal 2. I honestly cannot
| understand why Apple decided they needed to write their own
| graphics API when the rest of the world is working hard to
| get away from the biggest proprietary graphics API.
| moralestapia wrote:
| RIP Intel
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| not yet. Intel Alder lake have mostly positive reviews.
| cube2222 wrote:
| Looks like all the people saying "just start fusing those M1
| CPU's into bigger ones" were right, that's basically what they
| did here (fused two M1 Max'es together).
|
| And since the presenter mentioned the Mac Pro would come on
| another day, I wonder if they'll just do 4x M1 Max for that.
| iSnow wrote:
| >I wonder if they'll just do 4x M1 Max for that.
|
| They'll be running out of names for that thing. M1 Ultra II
| would be lame, so M1 Extreme? M1 Steve?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| "M1 More", would show Apple is fun again!
| tiernano wrote:
| M1 Max Pro... :P
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "iPhone 14 Pro Max, powered by the M1 Max Pro".
| bee_rider wrote:
| It seems kind of strange to have the "A" line go from
| smartphones to... iPads, and then have the "M" line go all
| the way from thin-and-lights proper workstations. Maybe they
| need a new letter. Call it the C1 -- "C" for compute, but
| also for Cupertino.
| gordon_freeman wrote:
| M1 Hyper or M1 Ludicrous:)
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| M1 Houndstooth
| bacro wrote:
| M1 God
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > M1 Steve
|
| That would be the funniest thing Apple has done in years. I
| totally support the idea.
| Isamu wrote:
| Pro < Max < Ultra < Ne Plus Ultra < Steve
| jhgb wrote:
| And Steve < Woz, perhaps?
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Just need to increment the 1 instead... Eventually moving
| into using letters instead of numbers, until we end up with
| the MK-ULTRA chip.
| Roboprog wrote:
| I suspect they will have a different naming convention
| after they get to M4.
|
| There might be some hesitance installing an M5. You should
| stay out of the way if the machine learning core needs more
| power.
|
| I guess by the time they get to M5, anyone old enough to
| get the reference will have retired.
| jckahn wrote:
| That would really be a trip!
| NoSorryCannot wrote:
| M1 Magnum XL
| ceva wrote:
| Epic M1 fit good
| concinds wrote:
| I like "X1" way more than "M2 Extreme".
| stretchwithme wrote:
| I like M1 Steve, as it can honor two people.
| rpmisms wrote:
| Steve would be awesome, but a deal with Tesla to use "Plaid"
| would be perfection.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| I would think they could just go to Mel Brooks instead of
| dealing with Tesla.
| TylerE wrote:
| Never happen.
|
| Elon is somewhat toxic these days...
| bobsil1 wrote:
| M1 Plaid
| bacro wrote:
| M1 Greta in 2030 (when it is "carbon neutral")
| randomdata wrote:
| iM1 Pro.
| tsuru wrote:
| I'm pretty sure all their messaging is preparing us for "M1
| Outrageous"
| chaosharmonic wrote:
| Super M1 Turbo HD Remix
| theyeenzbeanz wrote:
| M1 Ludicrous the IV
| gonzo wrote:
| Maximum Plaid
| mhb wrote:
| Just get the guys who came up with the new name for the
| iPhone SE working on it. Oh, wait.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| its a chiplet design. whenever people ask what we going to do
| after 1nm...well, we can combine two chips into one
| ksec wrote:
| >Looks like all the people saying "just start fusing those M1
| CPU's into bigger ones" were right,
|
| Well they were only correct that Apple managed to hide a whole
| section of Die Image. ( Which is actually genius ) Otherwise it
| wouldn't have made any sense.
|
| Likely to be using CoWoS from TSMC [1] since the bandwidth
| numbers fits. But needs further confirmation.
|
| [1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/tsmc/cowos
| kodah wrote:
| I've been using a Vega-M for some time which I think follows
| this model. It's really great.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Throwing more silicon at it, like this, sounds extremely
| expensive or price-inefficient.
|
| It's at least two separate chips combined together. That makes
| more sense, mitigates the problem.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Right. Still riding gains from the node shrink and on package
| memory.
|
| Could AMD/Intel follow suit and package memory as an additional
| layer of cache? I worry that we are being dazzled by the
| performance at the cost of more integration and less freedom.
| scns wrote:
| The next CPU coming from AMD will be the 5800X3D with 96MB
| cache. They stack 64MB L3 on top. Rumours say it comes out
| 20th of April.
|
| edit: typo + stacking + rumoured date
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| They might have to have the unified memory more dense to get to
| 1.5 TB max of RAM on the machine (also since this would be
| originally shared with a GPU). Maybe they could stack the RAM
| on the SoC or just get the RAM at a lower process node.
| paulmd wrote:
| The M1 Max/Ultra is already extremely dense design for that
| approach, it's really almost as dense as you can make it.
| There's packages stacked on top, and around, etc. I guess you
| could put more memory on the backside but that's not going to
| do more than double it, assuming it even has the pinout for
| that (let's say you could run it in clamshell mode like GDDR,
| no idea if that's actually possible, but just
| hypothetically).
|
| The thing is they're at 128GB which is way way far from
| 1.5TB. You're not going to find a way to get 12x the memory
| while still doing the embedded memory packages.
|
| Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised but it seems like they're
| either going to switch to (R/LR)DIMMs for the Mac Pro or else
| it's going to be a "down" generation. And to be fair that's
| fine, they'll be making Intel Mac Pros for a while longer
| (just like with the other product segments), they don't have
| to have _every single_ metric be better, they can put out
| something that only does 256GB or 512GB or whatever and that
| would be fine for a lot of people.
| my123 wrote:
| > You're not going to find a way to get 12x the memory
| while still doing the embedded memory packages.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/17058/samsung-announces-
| lpddr...
|
| > It's also possible to allow for 64GB memory modules of a
| single package, which would correspond to 32 dies.
|
| It is possible, and I guess that NVIDIA's Grace server CPU
| will use those massive capacity LPDDR5X modules too.
|
| The M1 Ultra has 8 memory packages today, and Apple could
| also use 32-bit wide ones (instead of 64-bit) if they want
| more chips.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| You don't just "fuse" two chips together willnilly. that was
| designed in from the beginning for the architecture for future
| implementation.
| wilg wrote:
| https://hypercritical.co/2021/05/21/images/city-of-chiplets....
| kasperni wrote:
| > I wonder if they'll just do 4x M1 Max for that.
|
| Unlikely, M1 Ultra is the last chip in the M1 family according
| to Apple [1].
|
| "M1 Ultra completes the M1 family as the world's most powerful
| and capable chip for a personal computer.""
|
| [1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/03/apple-
| unveils-m1-ultr...
| johnmaguire wrote:
| In a previous Apple press release[1] they said:
|
| > The Mac is now one year into its two-year transition to
| Apple silicon, and M1 Pro and M1 Max represent another huge
| step forward. These are the most powerful and capable chips
| Apple has ever created, and together with M1, they form a
| family of chips that lead the industry in performance, custom
| technologies, and power efficiency.
|
| I think it is just as likely that they mean "completes the
| family [as it stands today]" as they do "completes the family
| [permanently]."
|
| [1]
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/10/introducing-m1-pro-
| an...
|
| edit: This comment around SoC code names is worth a look too:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30605713
| paulmd wrote:
| That doesn't necessarily rule out more powerful iterations
| that also launch under the M1 Ultra branding though.
|
| (edit: per a sibling comment, if the internals like IRQ only
| really scale to 2 chiplets that pretty much would rule it out
| though.)
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| Probably not on the same design as the current M1 series,
| at least not for the Mac Pro. The current x86 pro supports
| up to 1.5TB of RAM. I don't think they will be able to
| match that using a SoC with integrated RAM. There will
| probably be a different CPU design for the Pro with an
| external memory bus.
| nicoburns wrote:
| They also said that the Mac Pro is still yet to transition.
| So they'll have to come up with something for that. My
| suspicion is that it won't be M branded. Perhaps P1 for pro?
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| What is M2 really going to be difference wise?
| 1123581321 wrote:
| ~15-20% faster if releases start this year, plus whatever
| optimizations learned from M1 in wide release such as
| perhaps tuning the silicon allocation given the various
| system. If next year, M2 or M3 (get it) will use Taiwan
| Semi's so-called 3nm, which should be a significant jump
| just like 7-5nm several years ago for the phones and iPads.
| masklinn wrote:
| Hopefully one of the changes of the M2 design will be a
| better decorrelation of RAM and cores count.
|
| They'd need that anyway for a Mac Pro replacement (128GB
| wouldn't cut it for everyone), but even for smaller
| config it's frustrating being limited to 16G on the M1
| and 32 on the Pro. Just because I need more RAM doesn't
| mean I want the extra size and heat or whatever.
| bouncing wrote:
| For my purposes, the biggest drawback of using an SoC is
| being constrained to just the unified memory.
|
| Since I run a lot of memory intensive tasks but few CPU
| or GPU bound tasks, a regular m1 with way more memory
| would be ideal.
| bpye wrote:
| I doubt there will be much learned after actually
| shipping M1. Developing silicon takes a long time. I
| wouldn't be surprised if the design was more or less
| fixed by the time the M1 released.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| I've been saying 4x M1 Max is not a thing and never will be a
| thing ever since the week I got my M1 Max and saw that the
| IRQ controller was only instantiated to support 2 dies, but
| everyone kept parroting that nonsense the Bloomberg reporter
| said about a 4-die version regardless...
|
| Turns out I was right.
|
| The Mac Pro chip will be a different thing/die.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Could they do a multi-socket board for the Mac Pro?
| pathartl wrote:
| They would never do that
| restlake wrote:
| They have done this previously for dual socket Xeons.
| Historical precedence doesn't necessarily hold here, but
| in fact, it's been done on the "cheese graters"
| previously
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Plus they are running out of M1 superlatives. They'll have
| to go to M2 to avoid launching M1 Plaid.
| aneutron wrote:
| Bloomberg brought the Supermicro hit pieces. I personally
| can't take them seriously anymore. Not after the second
| article with 0 fact checking and sad attempt at an
| irrelevant die shot. And their word is certainly irrelevant
| against one of people who are working (and succeeding) at
| running linux on M1.
| wdurden wrote:
| Ahhh, reminiscent of the G4 Desktop Supercomputer ..
|
| https://www.deseret.com/1999/9/1/19463524/apple-unveils-g4-d...
|
| I kinda believe em this time, but time will tell.
| ur-whale wrote:
| Where be the Linux distro that can run on an M1 (ultra or
| otherwise)?
|
| Without having to be a kernel hacker, that is.
| neogodless wrote:
| This is the one that has that as a core goal:
|
| https://asahilinux.org/
| jedberg wrote:
| Given how low the power consumption is for the power you get, I
| wonder if we'll see a new push for Mac servers. In an age where
| reducing power consumption in the datacenter is an advantage, it
| seems like it would make a lot of sense.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| > M1 Ultra features an extraordinarily powerful 20-core CPU with
| 16 high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores. It
| delivers 90 percent higher multi-threaded performance than the
| fastest available 16-core PC desktop chip in the same power
| envelope.
|
| Maybe not a _huge_ caveat, as 16-core chips in the same power
| envelope probably covers most of what an average PC user is going
| to have, but there are 64-core Threadrippers out there available
| for a PC (putting aside that it 's entirely possible to put a
| server motherboard and thus a server chip in a desktop PC case).
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| Is that Threadripper in anything like the "same power
| envelope"?
| ollien wrote:
| If I'm reading the graph in the press release right, M1 Ultra
| will have a TDP of 60W, right? A 3990X has a TDP of 280W. I
| know TDP != power draw, and that everyone calculates TDP
| differently, but looking purely at orders of magnitude, no,
| it's not even close.
| [deleted]
| eloff wrote:
| "in the same power envelope" is a pretty big caveat. Desktop
| chips aren't very optimized for power consumption.
|
| I'd like to see the actual performance comparison.
| adfgadfgaery wrote:
| That line is blatantly dishonest, but not for the reasons you
| pointed out. While the i9-12900K is a 16-core processor, it
| uses Intel's version of big.LITTLE. Eight of its 16 cores are
| relatively low performance 'E' cores. This means it has only
| half the performance cores of the M1 Ultra, yet it achieves 3/4
| of the performance by Apple's own graphic.
|
| Alder Lake has been repeatedly shown to outperform M1 core-per-
| core. The M1 Ultra is just way bigger. (And way more power
| efficient, which is a tremendous achievement for laptops but
| irrelevant for desktops.)
| j_d_b wrote:
| M1 has the most powerful chip ever yet it still can't handle two
| monitors.
| neogodless wrote:
| This is not relevant to the Apple M1 Ultra.
|
| From the Mac Studio technical specifications
|
| > Simultaneously supports up to five displays:
|
| > Support for up to four Pro Display XDRs (6K resolution at
| 60Hz and over a billion colors) over USB-C and one 4K display
| (4K resolution at 60Hz and over a billion colors) over HDMI
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-03-08 23:00 UTC)