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Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

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Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#201

Post by em500 »

microtonal wrote: post #181
Thaxll wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Except in benchmarks outside GeekBench it isn't. See e.g. the last graph in https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... The 5950X is only 55% faster than the M1 Max on multi-threaded integer benchmarks. The M1 Max is even 26% faster than the 5950X on multi-threaded FP benchmarks (maybe it has two AMX units?). The M1 Max is really in 5900X/5950X territory... in a laptop. I agree on the pricing (I a…

In Geekbench Multi-Core, the 5950X is only 33% faster (at 16.6k) than the M1 Max (which benches around 12.5k). So the difference is actually smaller than in SPEC that Anandtech uses.

For all the dissing of Geekbench, I found it to actually correlate pretty closely with supposedly more elaborate benchmarks like SPEC. (The writing was on the wall for Apple Silicon performance for many years, when the iPhone/iPad Ax CPUs where catching up and surpassing laptop CPUs in Geekbench, but lots of people dismissed it because it was just Geekbench...).

To get some context of the M1 Pro/Max perf, people should take a look at https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks, sort by Multi-Core, and slot the M1 Pro/Max in at around 12500.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#202

Post by threeseed »

smoldesu wrote: post #103
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…

The upcoming Thinkpad X1 Extreme is going to give it some stiff competition. It's wielding the insurmountable RTX 3080, and it's priced very competitively. But I'm just going to tell it to you now so we don't make the same mistake we have for the past 10 years of computer hardware discussions: specs don't matter. You could tell 90% of the people buying PCs with dGPUs about your 5nm GPU and next-gen power efficiency,…

It's using DDR4 versus DDR5 in the Mac and a fraction of the memory bandwidth so will be interesting to see its performance on heavier tasks. Also looks like it has at least half the battery life if not far less when put under heavy load.

I do love this review though:

"It is a nice laptop but extremely noisy. Even when idle the fans are on all the time."

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#203

Post by saagarjha »

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 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).

Eh, it's overhead, but isn't massive overhead. Power usage is much more a function of how the chip was designed.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#204

Post by bullen »

djxfade wrote: post #189
bullen wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is OpenGL on Metal progressing?

> With these drivers, M1 Macs are actually usable as desktop > Linux machines! While there is no GPU acceleration yet, the > M1’s CPUs are so powerful that a software-rendered desktop > is actually faster on them than on e.g. Rockchip ARM64 > > machines with hardware acceleration. https://asahilinux.org/2021/10/progress-report-september-202...

Yes, but I'm building a 3D MMO...

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#205

Post by threeseed »

soylentnewsorg wrote: post #111
paulmd wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

xeon branded workstation laptops aren't using Icelake-SP or similar server chips, they are using Tiger Lake-S or Ice Lake-S or Skylake-S client chips. They are what would previously have been branded as "Xeon E3" series chips - on the desktop platform they used to share a socket and be drop-in upgrades with consumer desktop chips, because they're basically the same chips with "enterprise" features like ECC turned on.…

Yes, your Xeon from 2013 example would be nowhere near the 2021 CPU from Apple. The outdated Xeon Apple had in their old laptops - a year behind everyone else, is also slower. The Xeon W-11955M however makes the M1 look like a kid's toy. In fact, if you remove 2 cores from that Xeon, you'll have my 6-core Xeon. Which also smokes that 10-core M1 in a bong. I'm also not sure why you're sarcastic about ECC RAM. I have 1…

> doesn't support ECC cannot be taken seriously for professional use. Like the M1 Max.

M1X is using DDR5 which does have on-die ECC.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#206

Post by Tade0 »

microtonal wrote: post #181
Thaxll wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Except in benchmarks outside GeekBench it isn't. See e.g. the last graph in https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... The 5950X is only 55% faster than the M1 Max on multi-threaded integer benchmarks. The M1 Max is even 26% faster than the 5950X on multi-threaded FP benchmarks (maybe it has two AMX units?). The M1 Max is really in 5900X/5950X territory... in a laptop. I agree on the pricing (I a…

> I think the M1 line is more impressive technically than Ryzen, given the very low TDPs.

I would say TSMC's 5nm process is more impressive technically than TSMC's 7nm process, which are used here respectively.

I think Apple will still win on a per Watt basis even when AMD starts using the current-generation process, but the question is: by how much?

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#207

Post by pilsetnieks »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #66
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.

The rackmount Mac Pro isn't really a server, it's just a Mac Pro in a rack mountable enclosure. It's 4U and kind of poorly laid out for a server. It helps if you need 10 or 20 or a 100 Mac Pros specifically and have to position them in an efficient manner but a proper server would be no more than 2U with a very compact layout and little wasted space inside so you can pack a rack as densely as possible.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#208

Post by KennyBlanken »

hunterloftis wrote: post #87
KennyBlanken wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 trac…

Final renders may be done on CPU for maximum accuracy, but that's not what is being discussed. What's being discussed is desktop workstation rendering.

Mental Ray, heavily used in the industry for feature films: GPU accelerated since eleven years ago.

Pixar licensed a bunch of GPU rendering tech from NVIDIA in 2015, so that's six years ago.

Autodesk Arnold

After Effects

Chaos V-Ray

Weta Gazebo and Manuka

...all GPU accelerated for three years or so.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#209

Post by KennyBlanken »

jaaron wrote: post #79
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…

Not necessarily true. I know several studios in Los Angeles that do 3D final renders on CPU, such as Disney Animation. GPU rendering works for realtime, but the memory constraints on GPU limit its use in the high end. Everyone in the field is looking at GPU and some significant advances have been made, but it's definitely not true that "nobody" is doing rendering on CPUs.

Do those studios do final renders on someone's Macbook Pro?

Is the article about performance in a final render pipeline?

Is this chip sold by apple in a cluster/datacenter-friendly package?

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#210

Post by notafraudster »

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…

I feel like you have the setup necessary to produce an interesting, compelling argument here -- your benchmark seems, at least to some degree, less synthetic than some do, you have an uncommonly fast workstation which a lot of people doing comparison tests wouldn't be able to do...

... but the way you present it undermines your case a bit.

It seems like what you want to say is that if money is no object, weight is no object, heat is no object, battery life is no object, and portability is no object, but the comparison must absolutely be laptop to laptop, then there exists a laptop PC configuration that beats M1. If this is your point, then probably you want to compare an M1 Max to your PC, not your coworker's Macbook Air (which is a fanless laptop...)

I think this is a pretty unusual use case and there aren't too many people who are looking for this exact market segment. I definitely think it's fair to admit that Apple isn't intending to operate in this market segment, for better or worse.

You'd probably also want to drop the part about game support, since anyone who wants to play games can spend 1/4 what your workbench costs and get a shitkicking fast small form factor PC. But also, like, recompilation isn't what you should highlight -- what you should highlight is performance. If the recompilation is fast enough for users not to notice, then it doesn't matter, and if it's not, then the reason why it matters is performance, not recompilation.

Anyway, again, I don't think you're necessarily wrong or whatever here, but you're just presenting your point in a way that I think it's extremely unlikely anyone will care or be convinced.

(Also, "discrete")

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