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Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

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Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#41

Post by madeofpalk »

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.

We know (more or less) exactly what the Pro desktop chips will be, in the same way that these laptop chips weren't much of a surprise - they'll be basically exactly this, but bigger. More of it.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#42

Post by wayeq »

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…

Yes.. software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#43

Post by thatswrong0 »

ardit33 wrote: post #9
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 was like you at first, seeing that my chrome speeds don't feel that fast, then I did my first XCode build. Holly.. it is so much faster than my 2017 Macbook Pro. Super fast builds, and A huge productivity boost. I think it shows that if software is optimized for it, M1 can be/feel crazy fast. Unfortunately, anything running with Roseta, will not feel that fast, as it's performance will be hobbled by the emulation l…

Yet even still under Rosetta, my M1 Pro can handle more than twice as much "stuff" in my Ableton projects vs. my 2018 MBP, all while barely heating up and without _any_ fan noise (whereas my 2018 MBP starts sounding like a jet engine almost immediately after opening any sizeable project).

So for me, its performance completely lives up to the hype. I don't think I'll need a new machine for a loooong time.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#44

Post by Ginden »

newaccount74 wrote: post #15
amelius wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If software is the issue, can't you run Linux on it?

I'm a Mac app developer, I'm stuck with Xcode. But it's not all or nothing. For example I've started using Syncthing instead of iCloud Drive for some use cases and that works surprisingly well (Syncthing isn't without flaws either, but at least it shows exactly what it's doing making it a lot easier to debug).

AFAIR if you have Mac, you are legally allowed to run MacOS in VM on that computer.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#46

Post by JohnBooty »

Thaxll wrote: post #37
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.

The obvious answer is that performance/watt is literally everything when talking about laptops. Most people favor laptops these days even if they (like me) leave their machines "docked" 90% of the time.

    do we know for a fact that a 90w Apple GPU would 
    perform 4x faster if it was running at 500w
It's somewhat besides the point IMO, but don't GPU workloads tend to scale well simply by adding more compute units? This should be pretty easy to extrapolate by comparing M1 / M1 Pro / M1 Max power consumption and performance relative to the # of GPU cores.

I would certainly like to see Apple go nuts and make a true, cost-and-power-consumption-are-no-object world destroying GPU. If only as a halo product. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#47

Post by herpderperator »

thatswrong0 wrote: post #43
ardit33 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was like you at first, seeing that my chrome speeds don't feel that fast, then I did my first XCode build. Holly.. it is so much faster than my 2017 Macbook Pro. Super fast builds, and A huge productivity boost. I think it shows that if software is optimized for it, M1 can be/feel crazy fast. Unfortunately, anything running with Roseta, will not feel that fast, as it's performance will be hobbled by the emulation l…

Yet even still under Rosetta, my M1 Pro can handle more than twice as much "stuff" in my Ableton projects vs. my 2018 MBP, all while barely heating up and without _any_ fan noise (whereas my 2018 MBP starts sounding like a jet engine almost immediately after opening any sizeable project). So for me, its performance completely lives up to the hype. I don't think I'll need a new machine for a loooong time.

Imagine how much better it will be with the native build: https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/live-111-apple-silicon-suppo...

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#48

Post by vel0city »

JohnBooty wrote: post #40
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lif…

Sounds like a nightmare to me. Want to change browsers? Buy a new device with a different processor or suffer massive battery or performance penalties. Want to change media players? Buy a new device with a different processor or suffer massive battery or performance penalties.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#49

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

madeofpalk wrote: post #41
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We know (more or less) exactly what the Pro desktop chips will be, in the same way that these laptop chips weren't much of a surprise - they'll be basically exactly this, but bigger. More of it.

They can't get that much bigger. The Max is already over 400mm^2. For comparison, the biggest chips are around 600. Apple can't realistically get much bigger than this since yield already drops off a cliff at 600. Getting bigger than that will be tough for them since it isn't clear that apple has put R&D into interconnect tech needed to make effective multi-chip modules.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#50

Post by RealityVoid »

amelius wrote: post #5
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…

If software is the issue, can't you run Linux on it?

Was playing around with it just this weekend. It's... not there yet. It will be, but it's a work in progress.

You could run it today if you wanted to, but there are a bunch of things that are missing.

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