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Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

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Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#531

So with 57B transistors for the M1 Max you can fit the AMD 5800H (10 B) and the RTX 3080 Ti (28 B) and have 19B transistors left. So the performance should be top notch but cooling and power requirements will be quite high. So battery life of 21 hours is quite the achievement. Still, i prefer the open architecture of the PC any day.

I think memory is part of that, whereas it would be excluded for the other chips you mentioned.

But OTOH 57B transistors for 64GB of memory means there would be less than one transistors per byte of memory - so I'm not sure how this works, but I'm not too knowledgeable in chip design.

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could we use M1 chips on non-apple boards? If yes, I wish Apple releases these for non mac os consumption. Eg. Running linux servers in the cloud.

Wasn't there a rumor that AMD was creating ARM chips? It will be great if we have ARM versions of EPYC chips.

They were, but have stopped talking about that for years. The project is probably canceled; I've heard Jim Keller talk about how that work was happening simultaneously with Zen 1.

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just some genuine honest curiosity here; how many workloads actually require 64gb of ram? For instance, I'm an amateur in the music production scene, and I know that sampling heavy work flows benefit from being able to load more audio clips fully into RAM rather than streaming them from disk. But 64g seems a tad overkill even for that. I guess for me I would prefer an emphasis on speed/bandwidth rather than size, but…

Another anecdote from someone who is also in the music production scene - 32GB tended to be the "sweet spot" in my personal case for the longest time, but I'm finding myself hitting the limits more and more as I continue to add more orchestral tracks which span well over 100 tracks total in my workflows. I'm finding I need to commit and print a lot of these. Logic's little checker in the upper right showing RAM, Disk…

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Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#535
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sound like HBM2, maybe HBM3 but that would be the first consumer product to include it afaik. Basically the bus is really large, and the memory dies must be really close to the main processing die. Those memory were notably on the RX Vega from AMD, and before that on the R9 Fury. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Bandwidth_Memory

If that were the case you could probably see an interposer. And I think the B/W would be even higher.

And the price would be even higher.

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#536
post #390
post #105

"Apple’s Commitment to the Environment" > Today, Apple is carbon neutral for global corporate operations, and by 2030, plans to have net-zero climate impact across the entire business, which includes manufacturing supply chains and all product life cycles. This also means that every chip Apple creates, from design to manufacturing, will be 100 percent carbon neutral. But what they won't do is put the chip in an expan…

Isn’t most of the components in MacBooks recyclable? If I remember correctly, Apple has a recycling program for old Macs so it’s not like these machines goes to landfill when their past their time or broken.

AFAIK their recycling is shredding everything, no matter if it still works and separating gold and some other metals.

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M1 still uses DDR memory at the end of the day, it's just physically closer to the core. This is in contrast to L3 which is actual SRAM on the core. The DDR being closer to the core may or may not allow the memory to run at higher speeds due to better signal integrity, but you can purchase DDR4-5333 today whereas the M1 uses 4266. The real advantage is the M1 Max uses 8 channels, which is impressive considering t…

Apple also uses massive cache sizes, compared to the industry. They put a 32 megabyte system level cache in their latest phone chip. >at 32MB, the new A15 dwarfs the competition’s implementations, such as the 3MB SLC on the Snapdragon 888 or the estimated 6-8MB SLC on the Exynos 2100 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16983/the-apple-a15-soc-perfo... It will be interesting to see how big they go on these chips.

> Apple also uses massive cache sizes, compared to the industry.

AMD's upcoming Ryzen are supposed to have 192MB L3 "v-cache" SRAM stacked above each chiplet. Current chiplets are 8-core. I'm not sure if this is a single chiplet but supposedly good for 2Tbps[1].

Slightly bigger chip than a iphone chip yes. :) But also wow a lot of cache. Having it stacked above rather than built in to the core is another game-changing move, since a) your core has more space b) you can 3D stack many layers of cache atop.

This has already been used on their GPUs, where the 6800 & 6900 have 128MB of L3 "Infinity cache" providing 1.66TBps. It's also largely how these cards get by with "only" 512GBps worth of GDDR6 feeding them (256bit/quad-channel... at 16GT). AMD's R9 Fury from spring 2015 had 1TBps of HBM2, for compare, albeit via that slow 4096bit wide interface.

Anyhow, I'm also in awe of the speed wins Apple got here from bringing RAM in close. Cache is a huge huge help. Plus 400GBps main memory is truly awesome, and it's neat that either the CPU or GPU can make use of it.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16725/amd-demonstrates-stacke...

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just some genuine honest curiosity here; how many workloads actually require 64gb of ram? For instance, I'm an amateur in the music production scene, and I know that sampling heavy work flows benefit from being able to load more audio clips fully into RAM rather than streaming them from disk. But 64g seems a tad overkill even for that. I guess for me I would prefer an emphasis on speed/bandwidth rather than size, but…

Can’t answer for music, but as a developer a sure way to waste a lot of RAM is to run a bunch of virtual machines, containers or device simulators. I have 32GB, so unless I’m careless everything usually fits in memory without swapping. If you got over things get slow and you notice.

Same, I tend to get everything in 32GB but more and more often I'm going over that and having things slow down. I've also nuked an SSD in a 16GB MBP due to incredibly high swap activity. It would make no sense for me to buy another 32GB machine if I want it to last five years.

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#539

> This also means that every chip Apple creates, from design to manufacturing, will be 100 percent carbon neutral. How is that even possible?

With offsets.

There are two kinds of offsets: 1. existing offsets where you buy them but there is no net offset creation, 2. newly created offsets where your purchase makes a net difference. An example of (1) could be buying an existing forest that wasn’t going to be felled. An example of (2) could be converting a coal electricity plant to capture CO2 instead of shutting the plant down.

A quick skim of the Apple marketing blurb at least implies they are trying to create new offsets e.g. “Over 80 percent of the renewable energy that Apple sources comes from projects that Apple created”, and “Apple is supporting the development of the first-ever direct carbon-free aluminium smelting process through investments and collaboration with two of its aluminium suppliers.” — https://www.apple.com/nz/newsroom/2020/07/apple-commits-to-b...

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#540
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of Hardware M1 Max is great. On paper you wont find anything match its performance under load. As even Gaming / Content Creation Laptop throttle after a short while. The problem is gaming isn't exactly a Mac thing. From Game selection to general support on the platform. So really performance should be the least of your concern if you are buying a Mac for games.

I'm not aware of a single even semi-major game (including popular indie titles) that run native on M1 yet. Everything is running under Rosetta and game companies so far seem completely uninterested in native support.

If you're looking for some to test try EVE, WOW, or Baldur's Gate 3. That's about it as far as major games AFAIK.
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