By the looks of it, 3 more generations before we get 4K 30fps of such realistic looking graphics for games.
Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
81–90 of 328 posts
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
task energy comparisons are usually won by the processor that gets it done fastest in absolute terms: because of the overhead of the rest of the system, it takes a really big perf/watt win to come out ahead of the system that maybe isn't as efficient in actual watts but gets it done in half the time, because you pay the system overhead for a shorter period of time. it's also a 128-thread processor being put against a…
I think you're getting a bit confused.
The 3990x is not designed for energy efficiency, on an older node, and on an older architecture... uses 3kWh vs Apples 2kWh (using a very flawed methodology).
An yet you're claiming Apple has a 3-6x power efficiency advantage.
I'm not sure how that makes any sense.
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 architec…
CPUs are designed to hit a certain clock rate. The target frequency influences the design of literally every circuit in the CPU. Downclocking a CPU is not the same as designing it for a lower frequency. An x86 CPU is designed to run at ~5GHz in its highest turbo mode. Simply reducing the frequency in the BIOS does not undo all the tradeoffs the architects made that deliberately sacrificed IPC for frequency.
You could make a very wide CPU indeed if you decided to run it at 100MHz. That would be obviously stupid, though, because it is the product of IPC and frequency that matters.
It certainly looks like Apple has made the better tradeoff. However, you can only tell that from the benchmarks. Either going wider or going faster are valid approaches.
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#84The 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…
By the way, Apple said their graphic card in M1 MAX has the same performance as mobile 3080 using much less power. But this was a lie. M1 MAX has only ~10 TFLOPS and 3080 has ~19 TFLOPS, so M1 MAX is almost twice slower than mobile 3080. So the whole superiority of M1 MAX is greatly overstated by fake numbers. and also don't forget - 3080 is almost a year old GPU.
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
By the way, Apple said their graphic card in M1 MAX has the same performance as mobile 3080 using much less power. But this was a lie. M1 MAX has only ~10 TFLOPS and 3080 has ~19 TFLOPS, so M1 MAX is almost twice slower than mobile 3080. So the whole superiority of M1 MAX is greatly overstated by fake numbers. and also don't forget - 3080 is almost a year old GPU.
"said their graphic card in M1 MAX has the same performance as mobile 3080 using much less power"
Apple never said it compared to a 3080 in Gaming Performance. People made conjectures that it could be roughly in that arena. In Productivity applications (work applications that use a GPU), there it's very close to a 3080.
Also, TFLOPS is a terrible number for performance because it depends on the level of precision and is highly variable on workload. Good luck loading, say, a 48GB 3D Model on a RTX 3090 - but a M1 Max would handle it fine. Similarly, the 10.8 TLOPs PlayStation 5 had better performance than the 12 TFLOPs Xbox Series X for months after launch.
Finally, as for many of the games that were compared - notice how many of them use MoltenVK, which is a Vulkan -> Metal translator that impacts performance. Then look at how many were x86, needing Rosetta translation on top of that. These weren't exactly the most native of game ports.
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#86The 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).
It’s slightly faster at considerably greater power usage — and, more importantly, it hasn’t shipped yet so we don’t know what the true availability or performance will be when it arrives next year. Apple soured on Intel in part due to repeated delays so while I hope that they ship on schedule at full volume, it certainly would not be unprecedented for them to be late or limited quantity.
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#87>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
Not really, because the first Xeon CPU he compares against is ten years old . That kind of system isn't worth the cost of shipping it somewhere. A current generation desktop i3 is likely faster in almost any workload. It's not even interesting that the M1 is "slightly" beaten by a Mac Pro's Xeon, because nobody is doing raytracing on CPUs . A Pascal nvidia GPU will render scenes in Blender faster than a current mid-t…
> It's not even interesting that the M1 is "slightly" beaten by a Mac Pro's Xeon, because _nobody is doing raytracing on CPUs._
This is backwards -
Nearly all major raytracing workloads today are done primarily on CPUs: vfx, animated film and tv, etc.
There are several reasons for this, including memory limits and the lack of coherence in both path tracing algorithms and common acceleration structures. GPU-based tracing is currently a small subset of rendering tasks (primarily those with real-time requirements).
As GPU memory increases, GPUs will become more attractive in this space - likely in the next few years.
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#88> 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.
x86 is quite a bit older instruction set. It has a lot of cruft and the all chips are really backward compatible with older software and many operating systems. Its extremely flexible at a cost to performance. The new Apple chips while impressive, only run new ARM64 instruction set programs compiled for apple machines. Depending on your use case that might not matter, but its still something. And competition is good for a cpu market that was lacking the massive year to year improvements of 20 years ago..
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#89Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has to be 3x faster to match M1's efficiency given the TDP is 30 vs 105.
I could care less about efficiency, it's still 2x faster for 2/3x less expensive. Isn't the m1 max tdp between 60 and 90w?
Well yes but ones a laptop chip with a 17 hour life and the other I’ve got under my desk heating my entire condo lol