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Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

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Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#271

Post by rsynnott »

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 The outdated Xeon Apple had in their old laptops - a year behind everyone else, is also slower.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…

> The outdated Xeon Apple had in their old laptops

Apple has never sold a laptop with a Xeon in it.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#272

Post by carlob »

Dagonfly wrote: post #218
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.

Ok, lets build an equivalent PC. These are prices in Germany (incl. VAT): A 14' Macbook Pro (M1 Max with 32 GPU cores, 32 GB RAM, 512 GB storage) is 3440€. A PC: 5950X (750€), 32GB RAM (150€), Mainboard (130€), WD SN850 500GB (90€). Now if you build from scratch you need a PSU, CPU cooler and a case (~200€ together). That's 1320€ without a GPU. Depending on your workload the GPU performance seems to be between a desk…

I wonder how much a comparable desktop monitor would add to that.

On the other hand I really want to give the keyboard a shot before I pull the trigger, after 3 years of Thinkpad I think that will be the real pain point...

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#273

Post by dagmx »

bhouston wrote: post #242
dagmx wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Funny thing I mostly know what I am talking about. You are only however talking about your subjective experience and projecting it onto the entirety of the industry. I've worked in both animated features and VFX at a few of the bigger studios. What sort of studio do you work at? I'd suggest looking at the landscape of big feature films and seeing what studios are using GPU rendering. It's rare to see any of the big…

> What sort of studio do you work at? Wrote and sold software into the VFX industry. Most notable Deadline, a fairly popular render manager. Also wrote/sold another dozen or so tools into the industry. While CPU renderers are popular among the old crowd, no one wants to use them because they are super slow. The cycle time is brutal and it kills artist productivity. Artists want redshift, octane, GPU cycles, and hybri…

That is not the part of your statement that I was saying is incorrect. The part that I still say you're wrong about is the statement that people who use CPU renderers do so because they're old school. To claim that is ignoring the realities of how GPU renderers handle large scenes.

You again try and say the big studios are laggard in adopting tech, and have tired pipelines. That's not why they're using CPU rendering. It's because GPU renderers did not scale to meet their needs.

A lot of the big VFX studios are renderer agnostic (e.g ILM), and would have no issue adopting GPU renderers if it met their needs.

You're continuing to project your subjective (and frankly incorrect) opinion that GPU renderers have superseded CPU renderers already onto the industry, without understanding the limitations involved.

You even mention "hybrid Renderman" in which I think you mean XPU, but that's yet another example of a GPU renderer that isn't at parity with the CPU one. The same goes for Arnold GPU etc...

"I was speaking about what artists want" is fine, but you're also dismissing the very real reasons people are still on CPU renderers by saying it's a matter of legacy.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#274

Post by pier25 »

Dagonfly wrote: post #218
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.

Ok, lets build an equivalent PC. These are prices in Germany (incl. VAT): A 14' Macbook Pro (M1 Max with 32 GPU cores, 32 GB RAM, 512 GB storage) is 3440€. A PC: 5950X (750€), 32GB RAM (150€), Mainboard (130€), WD SN850 500GB (90€). Now if you build from scratch you need a PSU, CPU cooler and a case (~200€ together). That's 1320€ without a GPU. Depending on your workload the GPU performance seems to be between a desk…

You'd need to add a HiDPI HDR screen too.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#275

Post by howinteresting »

wincy wrote: post #156
rewtraw wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decent desktop Linux distro needs to be created first though.

Mint is okay. Except the time that grub randomly failed for me and I had to manually fix my boot config. But at least my webcam and brightness buttons worked on my ten year old laptop, which they didn’t when I booted into windows even after spending a few hours trying to find the correct drivers. My wife (who while smart doesn’t like tinkering with computers) has been using Ubuntu for two years now and her only compl…

Linux distros suck the least when something goes wrong. Both Windows and MacOS fail in inscrutable ways and have required me to do complete reinstalls in the past, whereas on Linux there's usually some sort of forum discussion or Arch wiki page that will get you back on the right track.

It's a big reason I like Linux.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#276

Post by howinteresting »

rewtraw wrote: post #91
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.

A decent desktop Linux distro needs to be created first though.

Thank you for the helpful contribution. Truly extraordinary.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#277

Post by muybasado »

ykl wrote: post #172
zbobet2012 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>this is really interesting Sadly this is not really interesting, it's disingenuous. He benchmarked against a ten year old (03/06/2012) server CPU. My two year old intel laptop cpu (i7-9750H) also outperforms the xeon's he's comparing against by almost 40%. The M1 is a great chip, it's sad that this got published with a "server chip" comparison at all. A real server class CPU from the modern era, at a comparable pric…

Hello, author here! I'm aware that that the Xeon E5-2680 is ancient, which is why I also included comparisons with the Xeon W-3245 that is in the current 2019 Mac Pro, and with the Threadripper 3990X, which came out in February 2020. Unfortunately I don't exactly have access to piles of fancy server chips sitting around, so I had to make do with just testing against what I have access to, and that's all I had access…

You should feel bad for luring retards like this. Well, maybe not.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#278

Post by mlyle »

zeusk wrote: post #94
mlyle wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes-- they show a few percent victory in absolute performance while using nearly 5x the power, for a chip that's several months away.

it's launching this week fwiw

It is? Source please. I've heard, for availability, "before the end of the year" and "Q1 2022" for mobile Alder Lake, which is what we're talking about.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#279

Post by zamadatix »

rob74 wrote: post #119
dnautics wrote: post #2

> 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.

Yeah, your quote is a bit unfair to x86 - after all the x86 architecture is hampered by having to maintain compatibility not only with the original 8086, but also with most other instruction set extensions that Intel and/or AMD came up with during the last 40 years. Compared to that, the M1 is almost a "clean sheet" design. So, while still a great achievement, its dramatically better efficiency is not that surprising…

Windows ARM failure to take of so far seems more likely to do with the relative underperformance of Qualcomm chips not the lack of software. Especially since in recent years you've been able to run x86 software anyways.

Windows 10/11 on an M1 Mac via parallels however has been the best Windows ARM device I've ever used and I have no trouble using it daily as my main work laptop.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#280

Post by mhh__ »

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #136
mhh__ wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are there any easily digestible resources you could point to for getting a better grasp of this?

What in particular?
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