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Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

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Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#291

Post by dang »

paulmd wrote: post #281
adfrhgeaq5hy wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>OK, here’s the performance. Factor of 2.2X over its peers (other laptop SKUs) in multithreaded performance, going head to head with 5950X in some (floating-point) scenarios Finally a sensible comparison! As I said, it is quite impressive. >it doesn’t mean low-clocked x86 magically beats A15. Nor did I ever say it would. What I have said is a simple truth: leading on IPC and trailing on frequency is not obviously an…

>What I have said is a simple truth: leading on IPC and trailing on frequency is not obviously an advantage. it's obviously an advantage when you're leading on IPC by a factor of 4-6 (don't forget x86 has SMT) across a variety of benchmarks, and trailing on frequency by a factor of 2. Simplified numbers, but that's roughly the shape of things here. you're just throwing up your hands and insisting that nothing matters…

Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? I just had to warn you about this elsewhere in the thread. This is not cool.

You obviously know stuff about this topic and that's great, but the benefit of that is smaller than the damage you cause by flaming. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stop this going forward? We'd appreciate it.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#292

Post by hajile »

vinay427 wrote: post #219
soylentnewsorg wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

“A little thicker” is a bit of an understatement. At its thickest point, it’s apparently 71% thicker than the thickest point of the 16-inch MacBook Pro (2021), and 55% thicker at its thinnest point compared to the thickest point of the Mac. That’s a huge difference for portable electronics.

It's also "sale" price of $6,700 with a 2TB HD and just a 6-core CPU. Going with the 8-core xeon bumps price to Bump it up to $6,900 and moving to 8TB of SSD goes up to $9,200 ($8,000 for the 4TB version).

The 2TB M1 macbook 16" is $4,300 and the 8TB, max-specced version is $6,100.

I know Apple has a bad rap for high prices, but that machine's prices make Apple prices look bargain basement. You could almost buy TWO M1 macs for the price of one 4TB Dell.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#293

Post by fragmede »

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?

https://microcorruption.com/login might be one place to start, but it's got a slightly different focus, but if you broadly want to learn lower-level stuff it's a place to start.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#294

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #291
paulmd wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What I have said is a simple truth: leading on IPC and trailing on frequency is not obviously an advantage. it's obviously an advantage when you're leading on IPC by a factor of 4-6 (don't forget x86 has SMT) across a variety of benchmarks, and trailing on frequency by a factor of 2. Simplified numbers, but that's roughly the shape of things here. you're just throwing up your hands and insisting that nothing matters…

Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? I just had to warn you about this elsewhere in the thread. This is not cool. You obviously know stuff about this topic and that's great, but the benefit of that is smaller than the damage you cause by flaming. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stop this going forward? We'd appreciate it.

[deleted]

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#295

Post by hajile »

paulmd wrote: post #53
throwawaylinux wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really know where to start on this. SKUs that target very different markets are necessarily going to have different performance and efficiency tradeoffs. And core which target different cycle times are going to be able to achieve different IPC. This clearly confuses the basis of performance and different freq/ipc design points. I also didn't suggest Apple would never have the best chips ever. Clearly all else…

> I don't really know where to start on this. SKUs that target very different markets are necessarily going to have different performance and efficiency tradeoffs. And core which target different cycle times are going to be able to achieve different IPC. This clearly confuses the basis of performance and different freq/ipc design points. see my response elsewhere, but these aren't unrelated problems: Apple has higher…

The biggest die shrink in recent times was probably Intel's 22nm jump to FinFET (Global Foundries made a decent jump at 14nm, but it couldn't save bulldozer). Rather than the usual 50-70%, Intel claimed transistor density DOUBLED.

Haswell got a very modes (Sandy Bridge did much better in performance (up to 40% in some benches) and also did decently well in power consumption despite using the same node.

AMD saw massive increases with Zen on the same 12nm node. The also saw almost 20% IPC increases from Zen 2 to Zen 3 despite both being on the same N7 node

If anything, history shows that node shrinks are always overrated at improving power and performance.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#296

Post by vmladenov »

new_realist wrote: post #253
authorityofnil wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Except it is still direct electrical heating which is atrociously inefficient. Electric heating converts practically all energy into heat, making it ~100% efficient. You can make statements about cost-effectiveness compared to burning things, but not all houses can. CHP configurations are more common in colder climates with district heating, so their "waste" heat during generation often isn't wasted at all.

But a heat pump is more than 100% efficient.

Until the temperature drops below 4 C

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#297

Post by hajile »

nathanielarmer wrote: post #82
paulmd wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Energy scales very badly with clockspeed.

Anandtech mentions this in their review

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15483/amd-threadripper-3990x-...

Chip Core# TDP 1-Core 1-Core All-Core All-Core Power Freq Power Freq 3990X 64 280 W 10.4 W 4350 3.0 W 3450 3970X 32 280 W 13.0 W 4310 7.0 W 3810 3960X 24 280 W 13.5 W 4400 8.6 W 3950 3950X 16 105 W 18.3 W 4450 7.1 W 3885

As you can see, going from 4.35GHz down to 3.45GHz reduces power consumption by over 3x. Further, per-core power usage of the 3990x is very low overall.

This lower clock and lower per-core performance gives higher overall performance per watt.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#298

Post by hajile »

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?

Modern animated films often use 150,000 CPU cores over 1-2 years to render everything.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#299

Post by hajile »

ksec wrote: post #176
ben-schaaf wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any source for Apple using HBM? Even the earliest version of HBM back in 2015 had 512GB/s at 4GB. It's probably just LPDDR5.

It is not HBM, just LPDDR5. https://www.anandtech.com/print/17024/apple-m1-max-performan...

Though I bet the HBM power advantages will have them reaching for HBM3/4 when it's finally ready.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#300

Post by smoldesu »

threeseed wrote: post #205
soylentnewsorg wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just being pedantic, DDR5's implementation of on-die ECC is still not equivalent to the implementation on CPUs. It doesn't account for errors that occur during processing, and there's still a pretty significant chance of corruption in L1-3 caches.
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