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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

#631

Post by terafo »

GeekyBear wrote: post #353
out_of_protocol wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On mobile devices - definitely On desktop - missing what, 2% or less? Checked Steam stats - yep, about 2%

Metal is Metal. Once you support Metal for iOS games they also work under MacOS when running on Apple's chips. You can support traditional MacOS application chrome with little additional effort.

Desktop games and mobile games are not the same. On mobile pretty much every heavy game uses either UE or Unity. High end PC games use custom engines that are heavily tuned for x86 and use different APIs. Metal port would be expensive and not worth it.

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

#632

Post by Andys »

rcheu wrote: post #148

400 GB/s is insane memory bandwidth. I think a m5.24xlarge for instance has something around 250 GB/s (hard to find exact number). Curious if anyone knows more details about how this compares.

Its still a bit unclear how much of the bandwidth the CPUs can use (as opposed to the GPUs)

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

#633

Post by lowbloodsugar »

sam0x17 wrote: post #111
rudedogg wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I had no idea M1 doesn't support eGPUs. I was planning on buying an external enclosure for Apple Silicon when I upgraded; thanks for pointing that out.

Not only that, but you're stuck with cards from 5 years ago with current macbooks. It's a shame too because the plug and play support is better than the very best e-gpu plug and play on linux or windows. I don't see Apple personally adding support any time soon, either. Clearly their play now is to make all hardware in house. The last thing they want is people connecting 3090s so they can have an M1 Max gaming rig. T…

Radeon 6900XT works with eGPU. But yes, intel macs only. And of course, you're not getting all 16 lanes!

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208544

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

#634

Post by hunterb123 »

mod wrote: post #511
throwawaywindev wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video game consoles have been using integrated graphics for at least 15 years now, since Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.

Yeah, and vendors like Bungie are forced to cap their framerates at 30fps (Destiny 2).

They capped PC as well.

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

#635

Post by lowbloodsugar »

WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote: post #14

I'm so ridiculously happy with my first generation M1 I have zero desire to upgrade. Kind of wild to consider given how long it has taken to get here with the graveyard of Apple laptops in my closet.

See, this is why you have kids. Now my kid gets my M1 Air, and I get a M1 Max!

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

#636

Post by dragontamer »

socialdemocrat wrote: post #627
dragontamer wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, the whole RISC thing is stupid. But ignoring that aspect of the discussion... POWER9, one of those RISC CPUs, has 8-way SMT. Neoverse E1 also has SMT-2 (aka: 2-way hyperthreading). SMT / Hyperthreading has nothing to do with RISC / CISC or whatever. Its just a feature some people like or don't like. RISC CPUs (Neoverse E1 / POWER9) can perfectly do SMT if the designers wanted.

Don’t think that is entirely true. Lots of features which exist on both RISC and CISC CPUs have different natural fit. Using micro-ops e.g. on a CISC is more important than in RISC CPU even if both benefit. Likewise pipelining has a more natural fit on RISC than CISC, while micro-op cache is more important on CISC than RISC.

I don't even know what RISC or CISC means anymore. They're bad, non-descriptive terms. 30 years ago, RISC or CISC meant something, but not anymore.

Today's CPUs are pipelined, out-of-order, speculative, superscalar, (sometimes) SMT, SIMD, multi-core with MESI-based snooping for cohesive caches. These words actually have meaning (and in particular, describe a particular attribute of performance for modern cores).

RISC or CISC? useful for internet flamewars I guess but I've literally never been able to use either term in a technical discussion.

-------

I said what I said earlier: this M1 Pro / M1 Max, and the ARM Neoverse cores, are missing SMT, which seems to come standard on every other server-class CPU (POWER9, Intel Skylake-X, AMD EPYC).

Neoverse N1 makes up for it with absurdly high core counts, so maybe its not a big deal. Apple M1 however has very small core counts, I doubt that Apple M1 would be good in a server setting... at least not with this configuration. They'd have to change things dramatically to compete at the higher end.

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

#637

Post by WantonQuantum »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #573
smoldesu wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple had a shot at making Mac gaming a reality around 2019. They decided to axe 32-bit library support though, which instantly disqualifies the lion's share of PC games. You could still theoretically update these titles to run on MacOS, but I have little hope that any of these developers would care enough to completely rewrite their codebase to be compatible with 15% of the desktop market share.

Yeah, I was living with gaming on a Mac when that happened, and watched 2/3rds of my Steam library get greyed out.

That's why the 2015 Macbook Pro I'm writing this on is still running Mojave.

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

#638

Post by morei »

dragontamer wrote: post #595
morei wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ch…

You're right. My bad. It's much less common than I'd thought. (Intel had it on a number of chips that included the Iron Pro Graphics across Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake etc)

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

#639

Post by labby5 »

satya71 wrote: post #440
haberman wrote: post #415

I 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.

this is mostly wrong. The real issue has always been memory bandwidth. the highest end consumer x86 CPU has about the same memory bandwidth as a dGPU from 10 years ago. The M1 is extremely competitive with modern dGPUs, only a bit behind a 6900 XT.
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