91–100 of 328 posts
The problem with Apple is, and remains, the software, which I find utterly hostile and inflexible for my workflows, and getting worse by the year. Personally, I only consider getting one of these after it is able to a decent Linux distribution well.
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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…
Yes, it’s true that x86 often relaxes pitch, that doesn’t make up for a factor of 6 perf/watt difference like Anandtech measures.
Like I said, I guess we’ll see, Zen4 and A16 will be on the same node next year. By that time the goalpost will move to something else, like this “x86 isn’t designed for power efficiency” defense.
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.
> these Xeons are really put to shame here. It doesn't really matter. Nobody's doing rendering on CPUs. I get that he's sticking to comparing CPU to CPU rendering to compare apples to apples, but that's like saying "My new buggy whip is amazing!" in a news article written in 1950. Everyone is doing GPU based rendering. Pascal based GPUs are still (I believe) several times faster than even current mid-tier AMD desktop…
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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.
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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.
For a task energy test - which is not the same thing as a perf/watt test - this is completely loading the dice in favor of x86 and M1 still manages to match it. That is an extremely good result for putting a laptop chip against a top of the line HEDT processor in a test that is normally all about race to sleep.
> An yet you're claiming Apple has a 3-6x power efficiency advantage.
I’m not the one claiming anything, if you disagree with Anandtech’s numbers go take it up with them. The numbers don’t change just because you find them uncomfortable.
> In multi-threaded tests, the 11980HK is clearly allowed to go to much higher power levels than the M1 Max, reaching package power levels of 80W, for 105-110W active wall power, significantly more than what the MacBook Pro here is drawing. The performance levels of the M1 Max are significantly higher than the Intel chip here, due to the much better scalability of the cores. The perf/W differences here are 4-6x in favour of the M1 Max, all whilst posting significantly better performance, meaning the perf/W at ISO-perf would be even higher than this.
> In the SPECfp suite, the M1 Max is in its own category of silicon with no comparison in the market. It completely demolishes any laptop contender, showcasing 2.2x performance of the second-best laptop chip. The M1 Max even manages to outperform the 16-core 5950X – a chip whose package power is at 142W, with rest of system even quite above that. It’s an absolutely absurd comparison and a situation we haven’t seen the likes of.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
And again, that’s with it running at half the clock and half the threads of its laptop peers, so IPC is something like 8x higher in those scenarios.
That is not the kind of gap you close up with a node shrink or tightening pitches a bit. Hackernews experts know best though.
Next year Zen4 and A16 will be on the same node, and then it’ll be another excuse for why x86 is still getting dumpstered. Just keep the goalposts on wheels, you’ll need it.
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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…
Raytracing can absolutely be done on GPU even without RTX-style hardware; there are tons of implementations of it in the literature. Last I read the research, the best approaches dynamically bundle up rays hitting the same or nearby objects to squeeze coherency out of the GPU. As far as I can tell, the biggest problem is simply that GPU raytracing requires a completely different software architecture. Giant boil-the-…
Anybody want to take my PhysX card off my hands? :)
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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…
M1 MAX is not a low-power CPU. It consumes the whole 30 WATTs (!!!) and has an active cooling system. H-series CPUs from Intel have a TPD of 35 - 45 WATTS and this is almost the same as M1 MAX. According to your calculation, Intel CPU should consume 150 WATTs which is completely wrong.
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.
> these Xeons are really put to shame here. It doesn't really matter. Nobody's doing rendering on CPUs. I get that he's sticking to comparing CPU to CPU rendering to compare apples to apples, but that's like saying "My new buggy whip is amazing!" in a news article written in 1950. Everyone is doing GPU based rendering. Pascal based GPUs are still (I believe) several times faster than even current mid-tier AMD desktop…
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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 cat…
>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…