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Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

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Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#51

Post by judge2020 »

convery wrote: post #33
parhamn wrote: post #29

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.

If you're using the same software, you can assume there's no super high-level speedups like that happening on the M1, although it might specifically target speedups on common instructions used in these workloads.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#52

Post by paulmd »

adfrhgeaq5hy wrote: post #48
paulmd wrote: post #30

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…

>A factor of 2-to-3 IPC difference? 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.

It is very relevant: people keep bringing up the "x86 loses because it is clocked higher" (you did so yourself!) but the thing is, sure, clock that x86 down and then instead of matching in performance and losing heavily in perf/watt you lose heavily in performance and match in perf/watt.

The fact of the matter here is that Apple is getting much better IPC at a much better power-per-core, and that is the real architectural gap. You can slide around where on the scale that x86 falls, but there isn't enough gain from a full node shrink to close a factor-of-6 perf/watt gap and a 3x IPC gap.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#53

Post by paulmd »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #44
paulmd wrote: post #30

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…

I don't really know where to start on this. SKUs that target very different markets are necessarily going to have different performance and efficiency tradeoffs. And core which target different cycle times are going to be able to achieve different IPC. This clearly confuses the basis of performance and different freq/ipc design points. I also didn't suggest Apple would never have the best chips ever. Clearly all else…

> I don't really know where to start on this. SKUs that target very different markets are necessarily going to have different performance and efficiency tradeoffs. And core which target different cycle times are going to be able to achieve different IPC. This clearly confuses the basis of performance and different freq/ipc design points.

see my response elsewhere, but these aren't unrelated problems: Apple has higher IPC at a lower power-per-core. You can slide around where on the scale x86 falls - maybe you can match perf/watt but then you're getting wiped by a factor of 3 on performance, and you can match on performance but then you're getting wiped by a factor of 6 on perf-watt. You can't do both at once.

There simply isn't enough transistor gain from a single node shrink there to clear that much of a gap, basically Apple is also seeing much better performance-per-transistor and that's a harder gap to close.

> 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 where in the world are you getting that this is again, 3990WX is an absolute best-case scenario here, that is putting a laptop Apple chip up against a HEDT-class (really, server-class) CPU with 6 times the silicon area and five times the TDP, and all it can do is match it. Mac Pro is the Apple competitor to those chips, and you'll see it slide back into the lead again.

and again, task energy as a measurement favors getting it done faster over pure perf/watt. It's still a 280W TDP / 350W PPT chip against a 60W laptop chip, and it has way more silicon, it's the best case scenario and all they can do is match the M1 in task energy.

That's actually still an extremely good outcome for the M1 and the 40-core Mac Pro is going to slide back over the top again.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#54

Post by Osiris »

mhh__ wrote: post #21
throwawaylinux wrote: post #4

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…

Two thoughts: 1. The instruction set isn't so much a performance thing as much as a thing that bites you with power usage (you need to have a big fat decoder on all the time in the worst case). The widest X86's can only dispatch 75% of the instruction per cycle but X86 instructions can do more, so you'd have to check a specific benchmark. 2. I want X86 to die more because it's fucking ugly than performance as per se.…

The vast majority of developers will never even see assembly for x86 or ARM. Compiler developers and those need to hand optimize code may care but for everyone else it's a black box.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#55

Post by partiallypro »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #9

>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

Intel's Alder Lake benchmarks show that their new mobile processor is faster than the M1 Max. So, this domination doesn't seem to be a long term thing.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#56

Post by floatingatoll »

Thaxll wrote: post #19

I mean apple have it "easy", they control the hardware and the software, they don't need to to something that work with pci, old ram, thousands of different configs, different disk etc ... They can do whatever they want with 0 compatibility or backward compatibility. Why is the test not testing against some AMD CPU, CPU that cost $400, 5800x or 5900x for example.

You’ve correctly identified one reason Apple’s hardware is so effective: they have a hardware-accelerated standard library, something that requires cooperation between their software and silicon developers. The nearest comparison is if Dell released a line of servers that, when paired with Ubuntu LTS, provided a hardware-accelerated glibc. They could do this at any time, but it’s not easy; the capital cost is incredibly high and demand is incredibly low. Apple has managed to deliver, and now owns a niche last claimed by Amiga decades ago. The advantages of that niche are exactly as you describe them, but if it were as easy to profit from that niche as your dismissiveness implies, there wouldn’t have been a twenty year gap between Amiga and Apple Silicon.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#57

Post by sydthrowaway »

partiallypro wrote: post #55
MangoCoffee wrote: post #9

>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

Intel's Alder Lake benchmarks show that their new mobile processor is faster than the M1 Max. So, this domination doesn't seem to be a long term thing.

Finally some objectivity to stop the M1 love fest

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#58

Post by [deleted] »

pier25 wrote: post #10
MangoCoffee wrote: post #9

>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.

[deleted]

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#59

Post by mlyle »

partiallypro wrote: post #55
MangoCoffee wrote: post #9

>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

Intel's Alder Lake benchmarks show that their new mobile processor is faster than the M1 Max. So, this domination doesn't seem to be a long term thing.

Yes-- they show a few percent victory in absolute performance while using nearly 5x the power, for a chip that's several months away.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#60

Post by gjsman-1000 »

sydthrowaway wrote: post #57
partiallypro wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel's Alder Lake benchmarks show that their new mobile processor is faster than the M1 Max. So, this domination doesn't seem to be a long term thing.

Finally some objectivity to stop the M1 love fest

And it will probably devour a ridiculous amount of power and generate a thermos of heat to be marginally overall faster. It also won’t have a comparable GPU.

M1 Max still is the better experience and innovation.

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