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Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

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Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#121

Post by [deleted] »

soylentnewsorg wrote: post #106
defaultname wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name those laptop Xeon CPUs that beat the pants off the M1 Max? [Spoiler because I don't think I'll get a response -- there are none. Even when you get into the "luggable" category of workstation that is ostensibly portable but really needs to be plugged in, there is no competition right now. The upcoming Alder Lake should significantly improve Intel's entrant in this category, and hopefully brings some real…

Xeon W-11855M (6 cores) Xeon W-11955M (8 cores)

[deleted]

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#122

Post by pabs3 »

howinteresting wrote: post #76

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.

Once the Asahi Linux folks get their work into Linux/mesa mainline, you will be able to run any distro on Apple M1.

https://asahilinux.org/

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#123

Post by TYPE_FASTER »

speed_spread wrote: post #104
glasshead969 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has to be 3x faster to match M1's efficiency given the TDP is 30 vs 105.

If you're plugged in all the time, lower TDP is nice but not critical. And if you live in a cold country, you have to heat up the house six months per year, TDP is just heating with a computing side effect.

This winter I'm going to experiment with having a Raspberry Pi act as a thermostat that starts/stops containers running on a server in our basement. That, combined with the laptop we just got for gaming that has a 3070 in it, should do nicely to supplement our heating system.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#124

Post by paulmd »

soylentnewsorg wrote: post #120
paulmd wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that a laptop Xeon from 2021 is also going to be the same as an 1185G7 or something similar - because they’re the same silicon. It’s not like you’re getting more silicon because it’s a Xeon, it’s not a server chip, it’s just a laptop chip with the enterprise features enabled. So, really no need to test them specifically. Go get an 1185G7 or something and you know what “Mobile Xeon” benches will look like…

>enterprise features enabled Right. That's what a pro laptop is. 128G of ECC RAM so you don't get crashes and errors. 24MB of cache. Fast and solid. That's a workstation - we use those for work. But... Now you're saying the xeon I listed is the same as a 1 year old CPU, with half the cache of the Xeon, a lower clock, and half the core count. The mental gymnastics you have to perform are funny as hell to watch. Trump…

Just to humor you I looked it up - your Xeon W-11955M is the same chip as a consumer 11980HK, which is one of the processors in Anandtech’s benchmark. Same cores, same cache, same clocks, slightly lower TDP limit - the consumer one has a 65W boost configuration. It is the same TGL-H die with (very slight) variations in what feature fuses are blown.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_Lake#List_of_Tiger_Lake_...

So based on Anandtech’s benchmark you can pretty much extrapolate how that is going to go - slightly lower performance and slightly higher efficiency due to TDP limiting clocks a bit, but same cache, same core configuration, etc mean that it’ll be identical to if you went into bios on a 11980HK and set a lower power limit.

By the way the 11980HK is specifically the chip they called out the M1 Max as being a factor-of-6 more power efficient than. And in fact they said exactly what I just said - that limiting TDP will reduce performance on the 11955M and the perf/W gap will close a bit, but the performance gap will get even wider.

> 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.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

What’s your dealie, why so toxic?

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#125

Post by DeRock »

soylentnewsorg wrote: post #101
DeRock wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share a laptop with one of them for comparison?

One of my laptops is a Dell Precision 7760. Xeon W-11855M, NVIDIA RTX, 128GB ECC RAM. I don't need too much storage, but you can get it with 14TB if you want. Note mine is a 6-core. There is an 8-core available w/ the Xeon W-11955M, which is faster than mine. It's only a little thicker than the macbook pro. It's keyboard doesn't break, and the product line has had a 4k screen since 5 years ago. It's 120Hz refresh rat…

M1 max beats intels best CPU (which spoiler, is not their Xeon line) at both single threaded: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... And multithreaded: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

You go on a diatribe about how it doesn’t compete, but your only source is some proprietary workload that you claim is much faster on your laptop.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#126

Post by onepointsixC »

justinator wrote: post #102
zeusk wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's launching this week fwiw

It's crazy that I can't get a bicycle chain for the next six months, but these chipsets are shipping?

I would imagine if you were willing to buy a bicycle chain which had a several hundred dollar profit margin, then you would be able to find one rather quickly.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#127

Post by dagmx »

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?

You've got a few flawed basis points in your math.

1) that forest isn't near the complexity of most major feature films. It's great, but it's got a ton of instancing, it's not got very complex shaders, it's not got very complex lighting. It's a good benchmark scene, but it's not approaching the level of scenes in most feature films.

2) You're assuming a single render happens per frame. Every scene in a movie is rendered several times. Potentially every single time a new hand touches it, and definitely multiple times as lighters iterate on it. On average I think a single shot must be rendered about 40-50 times or more in a large production. At least 10 times per each major department.

3) Pixar and other studios don't have really extraordinary computers. They're usually run of the mill HP or Dell workstation specced machines with a dual Xeon and tons of RAM.

4) static scenes with diffuse lighting are fast to render. Add in motion and things get tricky. Do you want motion blur in render (as opposed to composited in via motion vectors)? Well now you're sampling multiple frames. What about depth of field? Way more samples to resolve properly. Now add in more lights, and you need more samples per light to resolve a noiseless render.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#128

Post by jb1991 »

tim-- wrote: post #93
KennyBlanken wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Renderman (Pixar/Disney's renderer) has only recently (~2017 iirc) started working with GPUs to do scene renders.

It was only within the last year that a hybrid CPU/GPU renderer was added to Pixar‘s commercial Renderman.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#129

Post by dagmx »

bhouston wrote: post #47
gene91 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah it is a bit stale. 3D artists these days want their render boxes to be filled with gpus so they can use cycles or redshift or octane to render fast. Old school artists use cpus these days.

Completely untrue. Most feature films are CPU rendered. Good luck getting a lot of high end production scenes rendering on a GPU.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#130

Post by adfrhgeaq5hy »

paulmd wrote: post #92
adfrhgeaq5hy wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This of course has the subtle implication that it’s equally easy for x86 to go as wide as ARM, and it’s not. 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 effic…

Why do you think x86 can't go as wide as ARM? (I predict your answer will involve something about decoders and nothing about uop caches.)

What goalpost have I moved? I have said one (true) thing: that you should judge by performance rather than by implementation details. You are falling victim to the Megahertz Myth, just the other way 'round.

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