For me, think about that memory bandwidth. No other CPU comes even close. A Ryzen 5950X can only transfer about 43GB/s. This thing promises 400GB/s on the highest-end model.
And only 10 cores so a 5950x completely wreck an M1.
Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
591–600 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
#592Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huge, apparently. I just spent a bit over $7,000 for a top-spec model and was surprised to read that it comes with a 140 watt power adapter. Prior to my current M1 MBP, my daily driver was a maxed-out 16" MBP. It's a solid computer, but it functions just as well as a space heater. And its power adapter is only 100 watts.
the power supply is for charging the battery faster. the new magsafe 3 system can charge with more wattage than usb-c, as per the announcement. usb-c max wattage is 100 watts, which was the previous limiting factor for battery charge.
USB Power Delivery 3.1 goes up to 240 W (or, I should say, “will go up” as I don’t think anybody is shipping it yet)
Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
#593Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding is that you don't really need hyperthreading on a RISC CPU because decoding instructions is easier and doesn't have to be parallelised as with hyperthreading.
Hyper threading has nothing to do with instruction decode. It's for hiding memory latency. The sparc T line is 8 way threaded.
It's slightly more general than that, hiding inefficient use of functional units. A lot of times that's totally memory latency causing the inability to keep FUs fed like you say, but i've seen other reasons, like a wide but diverse set of FUs that have trouble applying to every workload.
Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
#594I always thought it was strange that "integrated graphics" was, for years, was synonymous with "cheap, underperforming" compared to the power of a discrete GPU. I never could see any fundamental reason why "integrated" should mean "underpowered." Apple is turning things around, and is touting the benefits of high-performance integrated graphics.
Very simple: thermal budget. Chip performance is limited by thermal budget. You just can't spend more than roughly 100W in a single package, without going into very expensive and esoteric cooling mechanisms.
As the charts Apple shared in the event showed, you hit diminishing returns in performance/watt pretty quickly.
Sure. It'd be tough to be the top performing chip in the market, but you can get pretty close.
Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
#595Earlier 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…
L3 is almost never SRAM, it's usually eDRAM and clocked significantly lower than L1 or L2. (SRAM is prohibitively expensive to do at scale due to die area required). Edit: Nope, I'm wrong. It's pretty much only Power that has this.
As far as I'm aware, IBM is one of the few chip-designers who have eDRAM capabilities.
IBM has eDRAM on a number of chips in varying capacities, but... its difficult for me to think of Intel, AMD, Apple, ARM, or other chips that have eDRAM of any kind.
Intel had one: the eDRAM "Crystalwell" chip, but that is seemingly a one-off and never attempted again. Even then, this was a 2nd die that was "glued" onto the main chip, and not like IBM's truly eDRAM (embedded into the same process).
Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
#596"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…
> what they wont do is put the chip in an expandable and repairable system
Because that degrades the performance overall. SoC has proven itself to simply be more performant than a fully hotswappable architecture. Look at the GPU improvements they're mentioning - PCIe 5.0 (yet unreleased) maxes out at 128GB/s, whereas the SoC Apple has announced today is transferring between the CPU/GPU at 400GB/s.
In the end, performance will always trump interchangability for mobile devices.
Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
#597Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, no - they immediately followed the discrete laptop graphic comparison with a desktop graphic comparison, highlighting how much more power they draw for "the same" performance.
That wasn't for desktop graphics, it was for a top-end laptop graphics SKU (I think RTX 3080 Mobile on a ~135W-150W TDP configuration?). Otherwise the graph would extend all the way to 360W for a RTX 3090.
And I think based on these numbers that a desktop 3090 would have well over double the performance of the M1 Max. It's apples to oranges, but lets not go crazy just yet.
Now, I am extremely excited to see what they will come up with for the Mac Pro with a desktop thermal budget. That might just blow everything else by any manufacturer completely out of the water.
Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
#598Kind of surprising to me they’re not making more effort towards game support - maybe someone can explain what the barriers are towards mac support - is it lack of shared libraries, x64 only, sheer number of compute cores? When I see the spec sheet and “16x graphics improvement” I go okay what could it handle in terms of game rendering? Is it really only for video production and GPU compute tasks?
They never before had good graphics in mainstream products. And there's no official support for any of the industry standard API(to be fair there is MoltenVK, but not much traction yet), yes, there is support for Metal in UE4/5 and Unity, but AAA games use custom engines and cost/benefit analysis didn't make much sense, maybe now it will change.
Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
#599> M1 Pro and M1 Max also feature enhanced media engines with dedicated ProRes accelerators specifically for pro video processing
Do we know if this includes hardware encoding/decoding of AV1? I've found it to be quite lackluster on my M1, and would love to jump formats.
Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
#600Earlier 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…
> 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. But they're probably using 8-channels of LPDDR5, if this 400GB/s number is to be believed. Which is far more memory channels / bandwidth than any normal chip released so far, EPYC and Skylake-server included.
It's more comparable to the sort of memory bus you'd typically see on a GPU... which is exactly what you'd hope for on a system with high-end integrated graphics. :)