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Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

blog.yiningkarlli.com

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Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#61

Post by m0zg »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #32
pier25 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the Intel Xeon W-3245 which is from 2019. https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/193753/...

Yes, but the author is pretty intellectually dishonest when he says that his new MBP beat out a "somewhat old" xeon. That's a ten year old CPU.

That's the thing most people don't get about Intel: nothing has really changed perf-wise since Haswell, which is older than that.

If your old Haswell / Skylake machines still work (and if you don't need Windows 11 which doesn't support them), there's zero technical reason to upgrade to something newer, at least on the desktop.

There's been some progress in terms of power efficiency on laptops, but even there 5+ year old chips are pretty much as good as it gets if you want to stick to Intel. Maybe 10-15% percent slower than the very latest stuff, you won't even notice it. That's why Apple is currently obliterating Intel and AMD - the latter milked their cash cow until it fell over.

And Apple knew that they didn't even need to work particularly hard on core perf - memory bandwidth improvements alone would have delivered the goods. That's another thing people don't get - the CPUs spend quite a bit of their time waiting for bytes to come in or go out. The latencies involved in that are upwards of 200 cycles, and any significant improvement in both the latency and the bandwidth has insane, immediately noticeable benefits for perf, particularly in "modern" languages with poor cache locality. Why Intel / AMD duopoly did so little to address this deficiency is inexplicable, but here we are.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#62

Post by arcticbull »

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

Yeah the 12900HK beats the Max by 3%, even though the M1 Max is way more power efficient and likely utterly smoked it on GPU. After all it’s 8% faster than a mobile 3060.

The 3060 alone is a 60W TGP.

The M1 Max running Cinebench consumes 9W while the 11980HK (previous gen) consumes 45W. Perf/W Is about 3X higher for the M1 Max on CPU alone and I suspect factoring in graphics we’ve got a breakaway here.

Intel will catch up but not today.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#63

Post by spiderice »

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

Except it ignores the fact that it requires 5 times the power to barley edge out the M1 Max. It certainly isn't going to end the M1 love fest.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#64

Post by Thaxll »

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.

An AMD Ryzen 9 5950X cost $700 and is almost 2x faster than an m1 max in multi core.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#66

Post by bonestamp2 »

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

When these chips hit the rackmount Mac Pro, the server competition will be very interesting. It's kind of a unique package for a server, which such a powerful GPU, but that has advantages for some compute types too of course.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#67

Post by mhh__ »

Osiris wrote: post #54
mhh__ wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure but I am part of that latter category.

The unwashed masses don't have to care and won't actually use the performance, I'm not that bothered whether they care or not, although it's worth saying that X86 is such a mess that hiding instructions at weird alignments is a valid obfuscation technique - i.e. it's not just aesthetics/performance.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#68

Post by pier25 »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #22
pier25 wrote: post #7

Some of these images look incredibly real. Even knowing those are renders my brain refuses to believe these are not actual photographs. Also, these Xeons are really put to shame here.

When I viewed Figure 5 [link] at full resolution, the pine tree bark felt to me like a poorly-done bump-mapping tech demo. I think it lacks sharp contrast between the raised and recessed regions (instead having a gradient), and I think the outline/silhouette of the branches are perfectly smooth and unaffected by the bark, and too uniform and slender to look like real trees. [link]: https://blog.yiningkarlli.com/conte…

Yeah, some images look very fake, which is why I wrote that only some looked incredibly real.

The one you linked looks great to me. Some parts are more convincing than others, but in general I almost feel as if I could touch those trees. Although I admit I don't have a trained eye to see the rendering tricks used.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#69

Post by gjsman-1000 »

wefjioi3223O wrote: post #65

The new Alder Lake CPU from Intel for laptops is faster than M1 MAX: https://wccftech.com/intel-alder-lake-mobility-cpu-benchmark... So, nothing special about M1, especially if you consider that Adler Lake will use an older manufacturing process (7nm vs 5nm used by Apple).

And it devours, what, 5X the power and generates far more heat and fan noise requiring a much thicker machine to house it? Also the integrated graphics will (going from Intel) be nowhere near as impressive as the M1 Max's graphics, so it's hardly competing on that front either.

Not really a victory there. Also, it hasn't even been released yet, so comparing hypothetical unreleased products isn't a good comparison to call released products you can actually buy "nothing special."

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#70

Post by bonestamp2 »

bhouston wrote: post #43
convery wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nobody does that though. But you can denoise a sequence which is similar.

I'm guessing they don't interpolate frames either, but maybe that would be a good time saving feature if you know the end compression format and you can just interpolate the frames at the render stage instead of re-encoding it again later.
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