41–50 of 328 posts
Does the performance gap close if Intel starts selling similar on-package RAM to consumers?
I suspect yes, and rapidly. They have it, they just apparently don't want to sell it outside of specialized high-margin goods like Xeon Phi.
> There’s really no way to understate what a colossal achievement Apple’s M1 processor is; compared with almost every modern x86-64 processor in its class On the other hand I'm sure there's more than a few chipheads out there who are saying "it's about time", there was a longstanding prediction that the arm architecture would overtake x86.
The ISA has relatively little to do with it. Sure, x86 requires power-hungry decoders, but most of the time you'll be running from the uop cache anyway. Plus you get denser code. Arm and x86 aren't all that different under the hood these days and generally RISC vs CISC is a wash. It took heroic engineering to get x86 that fast, but that work is already done.
I was randomly curious how long it would take to render a full movie at the quality of that forest image, which absolutely blew my mind. At 24fps, a 2h movie has 172800 frames. 21,970,310 M1 seconds or 8.5 M1 months. Which is less than I was expecting. The rendering seems to scale linearly per core too. Presumably bad math or a lot more rendering complexity for the pixar super computer deploys?
Worth keeping in mind is the similarity of frames. Or, the lack of difference. If you know that the light-source isn't changing then you can get way with just copying the last frame and super-imposing < 300 pixels to reflect what's changed. i.e. there's no need to render the same wall for every frame.
But you can denoise a sequence which is similar.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought the observation was always that instruction set was not such a big difference in high performance CPUs next to manufacturing technology which was by far the first order effect. It would be expected for a high performance ARM CPU to reach roughly the same performance in that case (AMD is 1 generation behind here, I think Intel is 2). Is there really "chipheads" who are predicting ARM ISA to buck this trend a…
We'll get a live test of this very soon - Zen4 is going to be going head-to-head against Apple A16 (Apple's next core architecture) on TSMC N5P next year. Does anyone expect x86 to close a factor-of-6 perf/watt difference? (from Anandtech's M1 Max preview) A factor-of-2-to-3 IPC difference? And that's just A15, not against the next-gen A16. Node makes a big difference, it doesn't close up a factor-of-3 IPC gap in a s…
I also didn't suggest Apple would never have the best chips ever. Clearly all else being equal if ISA was irrelevant and you had 1 ARM competitor and 1 x86 competitor then sometimes the ARM CPU is going to be the better of the two.
I'm asking is there some continued effect by which people think ARM is going to continue to pull ahead. Is it going to remain < 5%, or is there some turning point where that will start to increase? I'm no expert on this, but there are experts who don't seem to think that there will be such an inflection point.
One of several tradeoffs is that M1-based stuff has a RAM ceiling, which until a few days ago was 16GB, now it's 64GB. If you need more than that, then you can't use M1. Does the performance gap close if Intel starts selling similar on-package RAM to consumers? I suspect yes, and rapidly. They have it, they just apparently don't want to sell it outside of specialized high-margin goods like Xeon Phi.
>in order to give the M1 Max some real competition, one has to skip laptop chips entirely and reach for not just high end desktop chips, but for server-class workstation hardware to really beat the M1 Max this is really interesting
The AMD Threadripper 3990X costs about $5,000 and I'm guessing that's cheap compared to the Xeons.
With Apple they are just overcharging for solid state drives, which I’m cool with these days (because at least I’ll get them)
Is it normal to render using a CPU? Shouldn’t this test be done against GPUs instead?
There are two major approaches to rendering: rasterization and ray tracing. The former is faster, the latter is more real. They are completely different approaches. Historically, ray tracing is only used for movies whereas games generally uses rasterization. The former is highly coherent workload, and is great for GPU. The latter is incoherent workload, and generally isn't suitable for GPU. Games have started using r…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought the observation was always that instruction set was not such a big difference in high performance CPUs next to manufacturing technology which was by far the first order effect. It would be expected for a high performance ARM CPU to reach roughly the same performance in that case (AMD is 1 generation behind here, I think Intel is 2). Is there really "chipheads" who are predicting ARM ISA to buck this trend a…
We'll get a live test of this very soon - Zen4 is going to be going head-to-head against Apple A16 (Apple's next core architecture) on TSMC N5P next year. Does anyone expect x86 to close a factor-of-6 perf/watt difference? (from Anandtech's M1 Max preview) A factor-of-2-to-3 IPC difference? And that's just A15, not against the next-gen A16. Node makes a big difference, it doesn't close up a factor-of-3 IPC gap in a s…
That is irrelevant. What matters is the product of IPC and frequency. x86 parts today are clocked much, much higher than Apple's parts.
IPC and frequency are both means to an end. Compare on performance and efficiency, not implementation details.
Is it normal to render using a CPU? Shouldn’t this test be done against GPUs instead?
There are two major approaches to rendering: rasterization and ray tracing. The former is faster, the latter is more real. They are completely different approaches. Historically, ray tracing is only used for movies whereas games generally uses rasterization. The former is highly coherent workload, and is great for GPU. The latter is incoherent workload, and generally isn't suitable for GPU. Games have started using r…
As far as I can tell, the biggest problem is simply that GPU raytracing requires a completely different software architecture. Giant boil-the-ocean rewrites that require not only new software but also new hardware are very difficult to justify, especially in a mature industry dominated by (relatively) short-term film production schedules. There are other technical issues too, such as VRAM limits.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We'll get a live test of this very soon - Zen4 is going to be going head-to-head against Apple A16 (Apple's next core architecture) on TSMC N5P next year. Does anyone expect x86 to close a factor-of-6 perf/watt difference? (from Anandtech's M1 Max preview) A factor-of-2-to-3 IPC difference? And that's just A15, not against the next-gen A16. Node makes a big difference, it doesn't close up a factor-of-3 IPC gap in a s…
> Does anyone expect x86 to close a factor-of-6 perf/watt difference? The one number that surprised me in this review was that the perf/W of Threadripper for the rendering phase: it is very close to the M1 Max. I understand that the numbers are not apples to apples because of the total laptop vs CPU-only comparison, but the power consumption of the Threadripper CPU itself is very high and probably takes the lion's sh…
it's also a 128-thread processor being put against a 8+2 thread processor, and that's the closest thing to something that will outweigh Apple's IPC advantage here: super wide processor clocked super slow, and unlike the more realistic comparisons (laptop processors, etc) the Epyc has deployed over four times as much silicon just to match the M1.
This is the absolute best-case scenario for x86 - they get six times as much silicon and 16 times as many threads and all they can do is match it.
Do the comparison again against the Mac Pro 40-core chip when it comes out and you'll see A15 pull ahead again.