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Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

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Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#311

Post by throwawaylinux »

paulmd wrote: post #259
throwawaylinux wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> see my response elsewhere, but these aren't unrelated problems: Apple has higher IPC at a lower power-per-core. You can slide around where on the scale x86 falls - maybe you can match perf/watt but then you're getting wiped by a factor of 3 on performance, and you can match on performance but then you're getting wiped by a factor of 6 on perf-watt. You can't do both at once. I'm not sure how you established that. I…

“Intrinsically linked” doesn’t mean anything, if you want to make an argument then make it. I’ve already made mine - Anandtech shows a factor of 6 difference in perf/watt between a 11980HK and a M1 Max at peak performance, and this likely translates into a ~factor of four-ish difference in perf/watt and IPC at iso-power. That’s a performance gap that is unlikely to be closed by a node shrink - there is a large archit…

> “Intrinsically linked” doesn’t mean anything, if you want to make an argument then make it.

Yes it does, it's refuting your idea that IPC can be considered without looking at cycle time.

And you're trying to make an argument that does not address the question I asked. As I told you in my first reply.

> Ah, so you are conflating “the amount of transistors spent on x86 decoding” with “the architectural impact that x86 has on performance”.

No. Read the conversation from the start, and read the links with comments from people who have actually worked on Apple, AMD, and Intel cores.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#312

Post by 9935c101ab17a66 »

zbobet2012 wrote: post #146
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

>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…

Imagine complaining about the content of an article you obviously didn't read.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#313

Post by soylentnewsorg »

dang wrote: post #289
paulmd wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is the same cpu die with a few enterprise feature flags turned on, it’s no faster, it’s actually slower due to the lower TDP you note. You don’t understand what you’re talking about and you’re openly hostile to the person who tried to explain it to you lol.

We've banned the other account, but you broke the site guidelines badly yourself in this thread, by feeding the flamewar and generally ignoring the rules. It's not ok to do that, regardless of how badly anyone else is behaving. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules in the future. Note this one: " Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. " a.k.a. pleas…

You've done much more than banning "the other account." Banning an account does zero - it takes about 5 seconds to get a new one.

Here's what you have done over the last few years: banned the external IPs of a whole bunch of large customer sites, highrise buildings, and huge hotels. Losing many users in the process, and turning the other ones into attackers of your site - for fun. like me. Enjoy your little powertrip, retarded unpaid human who's too dumb to replace himself by a spam filtering script.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#314

Post by bradknowles »

jbverschoor wrote: post #226
bonestamp2 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait max 2 years when the AWS contracts expire

Apple has many different types of data centers.

Some are actually hosted in a cloud provider like Google, Microsoft, or AWS.

But they also have a fair amount of their own physical data centers, and I would not be surprised to find that they start filling them out with Apple Silicon hardware.

And they might roll out a lot of services on AWS using Apple Silicon hardware, because AWS has recently made available actual Apple hardware in some of their regions. I think this could potentially be a precursor, but this is just my own personal hunch and I have no information outside my own brain towards this end.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#315

Post by fomine3 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #240
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…

> My two year old intel laptop cpu (i7-9750H) also outperforms the xeon's he's comparing against by almost 40%. Yeah, but for how long? My laptop has a respectable CPU as well but any kind of sustained load would melt it down if it didn't automatically throttle itself back to 2 GHz and below after like 5 seconds. These M1 chips somehow manage to have great performance while also keeping temperatures and power draw lo…

It depends on how the laptop designed to cool it.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#316

Post by ykl »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #208
hunterloftis wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Mental Ray is used by literally nobody anymore. It was discontinued in 2017. You can't even get a license for Mental Ray anymore.

Pixar didn't license any particular special GPU rendering tech from NVIDIA in 2015; they're just using OptiX and CUDA like everyone else. Pixar released initial GPU support in RenderMan this year, but currently XPU only supports a subset of the full RenderMan functionality. Before that, the only GPU ray tracing they were using internally was on an extremely limited basis for early lookdev workflows. Final lookdev and all of lighting continues to be CPU-only. I likely know more about this particular usage than you do because... I worked on the early internal GPU ray tracing for lookdev stuff at Pixar.

Autodesk Arnold has initial GPU support, but it was only added in the past few years. Most studio usage limits Arnold GPU usage to lookdev; most desktop workflows for iterating continue to be CPU because again... not enough memory on GPUs. SPI Arnold has no GPU support at all. Yes, there are two Arnolds out there.

After Effects is not really used for high-end 3D rendering? Why is it on your list? Did you just do a Google search for "GPU renderer" and throw what you found into a list without actually understanding what each thing is?

V-Ray has had extensive GPU support for many years now, and it probably leading the pack among usage in film/vfx/etc houses. However, most film/vfx/etc places use V-Ray CPU for both iterating on the desktop and for final frames, due to GPUs not having enough memory. V-Ray GPU has seen wide adoption in the archviz world though.

Gazebo is an OpenGL viewer, used in DCC viewports. It's not even remotely close to a final frame renderer. Manuka does not have GPU support whatsoever; the Manuka development team literally published an entire ACM TOG paper on this topic which I guess you haven't checked.

I'm not entirely sure how you put your list together; everything on here is either out of date, misunderstood, or just flat out wrong, and all in ways that are immediately apparent to those of us who actually work in this industry.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#318

Post by matheusmoreira »

fomine3 wrote: post #315
matheusmoreira wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My two year old intel laptop cpu (i7-9750H) also outperforms the xeon's he's comparing against by almost 40%. Yeah, but for how long? My laptop has a respectable CPU as well but any kind of sustained load would melt it down if it didn't automatically throttle itself back to 2 GHz and below after like 5 seconds. These M1 chips somehow manage to have great performance while also keeping temperatures and power draw lo…

It depends on how the laptop designed to cool it.

Cooling laptops just isn't going to happen. I've never had one with a thermal management system that didn't suck. My current laptop has 3 noisy ridiculously loud fans and it can't cool the processor enough to maintain a sustained load at maximum speed. All I have to do to watch it nearly melt itself down at 93 °C is run make all in some project's directory.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#319

Post by speed_spread »

yxhuvud wrote: post #212
speed_spread wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. Except it is still direct electrical heating which is atrociously inefficient.

I'm in Quebec (Eastern Canada). Most of the electricity is produced from hydraulic power (dams) up north, while cities are in the southern part of the province. Most houses are electrically heated (especially those built after 1970). Production from water turbines is very efficient. Transmission losses are about 30%, because of the distance (> 1500km). Heating itself is 100% efficient, no moving parts, no maintenance. In this context, heating with a baseboard or CPU makes no difference.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#320

Post by bhouston »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #217
berkut wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mental ray is no longer heavily used in the industry for feature films: it hasn't been since ~2013 (when Arnold came around). After Effects doesn't really belong on this list? Gazebo is a preview renderer explicitly designed for GPU use, it's not designed for accurate lighting or material look. Manuka is not GPU accelerated (it used to be when first written, but it wasn't worth it given complexity of build setup for…

> Mental ray is no longer heavily used in the industry for feature films You didn't say "feature films", you said "film and TV." You're goalpost-shifting / no-true-scotsman'ing. > it hasn't been since ~2013 (when Arnold came around). The Arnold I mentioned that is GPU accelerated? Or a different Arnold? Just checking. > high end VFX facilities Again with the goalpost shifting / no-true-scotsman-ing > aren't really us…

> Mental ray is no longer heavily used in the industry for feature films

Mental Ray really isn't used anywhere. It sort of died like more than a decade ago.

Honestly, I used it back in 2003 in the VFX industry, but not since.

You have to be mistaken here. No one uses Mental Ray that I have heard of in production in the last decade. Probably someone does, but not anyone serious.

Autodesk doesn't even sell licenses of Mental Ray and I believe you will find it hard to buy them from NVIDIA as well: https://www.autodesk.com/products/mental-ray-standalone/over...

Are you thinking iRay? Still made by NVIDIA and uses GPU acceleration.

The default renderer in Maya, 3DS Max is Arnold these days, others use V-Ray, RedShift, Octane, RenderMan, etc....

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