How is the memory bandwidth so much better than intel ?
Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
641–650 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
#642Anyone can comment on what Intel and AMD are going to do now? Will they be able to catch up or will Qualcomm become the alternative for ARM laptop chips? (and maybe desktop chips too)
Intel is releasing heterogeneous chips in less than a month. Both Intel and AMD bet heavily on 3d stacking and it should hold Apple off desktop. A lot of Apple advantage is due to node advantage and I expect that AMD will start getting latest nodes much sooner than now, 5nm ryzen should be able to compete with m2, Intel's own nodes should get better in few years relatively to latest TSMC nodes(they are not that much behind). But x86 will surely loose market share in the coming decade.
Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
#643Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
But only the Iris Pro 5200 (codename: Crystalwell) had eDRAM. All other Iris Pro were just normal DDR4.
EDIT: Oh, apparently there were smaller 64MB eDRAM on later chips, as you mentioned. Well, today I learned something.
Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
#644Disingenuous for Apple to compare these against 2017 Intel chips and call them 2x and 3.7x faster. I would love to see how they fare against 2021 Intel and amd chips.
Intel's 2021 laptop chips (Alder Lake) are rumoured to be released later this month (usually actual availability is a few months after "release"). I expect them to be pretty compelling compared to the previous generation Intel parts, and maybe even vs AMD's latest. But the new "Intel 7" node (formerly 10++ or something) is almost certainly going to be behind TSMC N5 in power and performance, so Apple will most likely…
I'd still bet on Apple for the all round package for a laptop but Intel should be coming out of the gates flying when Alder Lake launches.
This is their first ISA that actually reacts to Zen, from what I've heard.
Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
#645Based on the numbers it looks like the M1 Max is in the RTX 3070-3080 performance territory. Sounds like mobile AAA gaming has potential to reach new heights :D
Who actually supports MacOS though? Didn't valve just give up?
Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
#646Earlier quoted context omitted.
This exact question was asked a year ago when the M1 was announced. In the year since, their laptop market share increased about 2% from 14 to 16%[0]. The reasons for this are: 1. When deciding on a computer, you often have to decide based on use case, software/games used, and what operating system will work best for those use cases. For Windows users, it doesn't matter if you can get similar performance from a Macbo…
These are unit market share numbers, so will include large numbers of PCs - both consumer and corporate - at price points where Apple isn't interested in competing because the margins are probably too low. I suspect by value their share is far higher and their % of profits is even bigger. The strategy is very clear and it's the same as the iPhone. Dominate the high end and capture all the profits. Of course gaming is…
Laptops are only small component of biz for CPU chip manufacturers like AMD/Intel. AMD is traditionally weak in laptops and has not decent market share ever. This doesn't impact their business that much (Intel's numbers are not down that much after loosing Apple's deal after all)
AMD and especially Intel have high margin server CPU business, Apple's entire value prop is low power segment, their chips are not designed to compete in high power category and they will never sell outside their products offerings as only chips . AMD also does custom chip stuff like with PlayStation 5 etc, none of that is threatened by Apple.
Servers Chips with ECC support, enterprise features and other typically high end chips have very high profit /unit lot more than even Apple can make per chip( maybe higher % for Apple, but not absolute $ / chip). Apple is a minor player in the general CPU business.
There will be of course pressure from OEMs who stand to loose sales to Apple to step up their game, AMD/Intel are not loosing sleep over this in terms of revenue/margin yet.
Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
#647Will the 64GB RAM max chip be practical for training deep learning models? Any benchmarks vs GTX 3090?
It will be definitely handy for finetuning large models due to huge ram, but in training from scratch 3090 is certainly better. They are seemingly cooking 128 core GPU, if they release this kraken it will beat 3090 in pretty much everything.
Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
#648Kind 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?
I've answered this a few times, so I'll just give a bog-standard answer here.
Apple had really good game support 3 years ago. Mojave was really among the best when it had Valve Proton natively supported, and it was starting to seem like there might be some level of gaming parity across MacOS, Linux and Windows. Apple broke compatibility with 32-bit libraries in Catalina though, which completely nixed a good 95% of the games that "just worked" on Mojave. Adding insult to injury, they burned their bridges with OpenGL and Vulkan very early on, which made it impossible to implement the most important parts of Proton, like DXVK and CL-piping.
So, is it possible to get these games running on MacOS? Maybe. The amount of work that needs to be done behind-the-scenes is monumental though, and it would take one hell of a software solution to make it happen. Apple's only option at this point is HLE of x86, which is... pretty goddamn terrible, even on a brand-spanking new M1 Max. The performance cores just don't have the overhead in clock speed to dynamically recompile a complete modern operating system and game alongside it.
Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
#649Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
World of Warcraft & Eve Online are both native.
Neither of which are exactly AAA recent games, WoW is from 2004 right ? The other ones I can think of are the old GTA titles which run "Natively" since they have an iOS port
While at the same time you have (running on Rossetta):
* Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
* Dying Light
* Rise of the Tomb Raider/Shadow of the Tomb Raider
* Dirt Rally
* Metro: 2033, Last Light, Exodus
* Mafia III
* Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
* Mad Max
* Sleeping Dogs
* Batman Arkham City
* Bioshock 1 & 2
* Borderlands 2
Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
#650Those power comparisons aren't really fair IMO. They're testing power consumption... They're using a "msi prestige 14 evo (intel CPU)" vs an optimized laptop using an M1. Further, where's AMD? They have a better power vs performance ratio. I'm not sure it's as good or not, but that's a lot of cherry picking.
Can you be more specific in how the M1 is optimized while MSI's isn't? Also why was MSI a bad comparison? It seems reasonable to me but I don't follow PC much these days.
Intel chips eat much more energy than AMD ones. Comparatively to AMD gap isn't that big(and it's mostly due to better node).