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Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

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Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#31

Post by dwighttk »

newaccount74 wrote: post #4

I also got an M1 Max. The chip is amazing. Compile times are a lot faster than on the 6 core Intel Mac mini I had before. But at this point it's really held back by Apple's software. Anything related to Apple ID and iCloud regularly hangs 30-60 seconds, showing a spinner with no progress indicator whatsoever. Apps randomly take 20 seconds to launch, maybe because of [1]? The Open/Save dialog taking 30 seconds to show…

That sounds terrible, but none of that is happening on mine.

The only slowness I’ve noticed has been related to the beta private relay

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#32

Post by akdor1154 »

For all the (truly) amazing performance from the M1.*, how much of the benefits are just coming from Mac users not realising how laggy their OS is on non-extreme hardware? I used MacOS for two years on a '15 i5 MBP and didn't realise how persistently sluggish it was until i blew everything away and chucked on Xubuntu. (Nothing magic about linux here, Gnome and KDE were as bad as MacOS)

Is the incredible performance of the M1 just going to enable a whole new generation of inefficient software?

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#33

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

whynotminot wrote: post #8
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #3

Great detailed benchmarking. This mirrors my experience with my M1 Max: Absolutely amazing battery life and performance in a laptop. I’m thrilled to have it. Huge step up from last gen Apple laptops. But at the same time, it feels like some of the rhetoric around the performance claims got a little out of hand in the wake of the launch. It’s fast, but it’s not actually crushing my AMD/nVidia desktop like a lot of new…

But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing. Like that's the rhetoric--holy shit your laptop is doing this. Apple hasn't even released the Pro desktop stuff yet.

I doubt that they can make another giant performance leap. I wager that most of their gains are from being a node ahead of the competition (5nm vs 7nm TSMC) and placing RAM on package for much fatter bandwidth. I am, however, very interested in seeing what the competition does in response.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#34

Post by matja »

brrrrrm wrote: post #2

for those curious about running their own matmul benchmarks, I wrote a script a while back that works with both linux and MacOS that should make comparison easy. https://jott.live/code/blas_test.cc I saw ~1.2tflops on the regular M1

On Linux I had to use `-lcblas` instead of `-lblas`. "6.63171 gflops" with a 24-core AMD EPYC 74F3

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#36

Post by mrtranscendence »

newaccount74 wrote: post #30
joconde wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an M1 MacBook Air and the Open/Save dialog opens in less than a second. I think your system has a defect.

These issues are intermittent and only happen sometimes. My system is not broken, it's a design defect/tradeoff in macOS sandbox. I've seen it on at least 5 different Macs on a lot of different versions of macOS. It's been an issue ever since they use a separate process to show the dialog.

I don't know if your system has a defect, but I've used many, many Macs over fifteen years on all released versions of macOS, and I've never once encountered the issues you're raising.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#37

Post by Thaxll »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #3

Great detailed benchmarking. This mirrors my experience with my M1 Max: Absolutely amazing battery life and performance in a laptop. I’m thrilled to have it. Huge step up from last gen Apple laptops. But at the same time, it feels like some of the rhetoric around the performance claims got a little out of hand in the wake of the launch. It’s fast, but it’s not actually crushing my AMD/nVidia desktop like a lot of new…

I don't understand why people keep talking about power performance per watt, do we know for a fact that a 90w Apple GPU would perform 4x faster if it was running at 500w? Does the performance scales linearly?

The other thing is price, the m1 max cost $5k here. You know what kind of PC you can get for that price? A 3080 MSRP is $700 and beat any mac GPU right ( and that's a GPU from last year ). 5900x cost $480.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#38

Post by p1necone »

whynotminot wrote: post #8
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #3

Great detailed benchmarking. This mirrors my experience with my M1 Max: Absolutely amazing battery life and performance in a laptop. I’m thrilled to have it. Huge step up from last gen Apple laptops. But at the same time, it feels like some of the rhetoric around the performance claims got a little out of hand in the wake of the launch. It’s fast, but it’s not actually crushing my AMD/nVidia desktop like a lot of new…

But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing. Like that's the rhetoric--holy shit your laptop is doing this. Apple hasn't even released the Pro desktop stuff yet.

They're mentioning their desktop because Apples marketing hype mentions the desktop, not because the comparison is actually valid. As you can see in the benchmark - lower power, proportionally lower performance.

To be clear - Apples M1 hardware is good, even great. It's just that Apples marketing hype is so over the top, and so many people buy into it so hard that people (such as me) still feel the need to bring it down to earth.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#39

Post by jonstewart »

akdor1154 wrote: post #32

For all the (truly) amazing performance from the M1.*, how much of the benefits are just coming from Mac users not realising how laggy their OS is on non-extreme hardware? I used MacOS for two years on a '15 i5 MBP and didn't realise how persistently sluggish it was until i blew everything away and chucked on Xubuntu. (Nothing magic about linux here, Gnome and KDE were as bad as MacOS) Is the incredible performance o…

This article literally benchmarks a variety of low-level compute heavy operations and compares them with a Ryzen. It’s about as far away from your take as possible.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#40

Post by JohnBooty »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #33
whynotminot wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing. Like that's the rhetoric--holy shit your laptop is doing this. Apple hasn't even released the Pro desktop stuff yet.

I doubt that they can make another giant performance leap. I wager that most of their gains are from being a node ahead of the competition (5nm vs 7nm TSMC) and placing RAM on package for much fatter bandwidth. I am, however, very interested in seeing what the competition does in response.

Yeah. I'm worried that they may have played their trump cards already, so to speak.

I wonder if future perf gains will come, game console-style, from areas besides general purpose computation -- specialized instructions / cores for specialized tasks.

Imagine an entire core optimized for Safari and its Javascript engine. Their next chip is called the "M1 Marathon Edition" and you get 36 hours of real-world battery life with Safari. And/or the iWork suite. And maybe they have a behind the scenes collab with Slack and select other app makers so that they can be a part of the "Marathon" program too.

I dunno, just spitballing. Not saying that's likely or even what I'm pining for, just one possible avenue once they've plucked all the low-hanging general purpose computing fruit.

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