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Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

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Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#51

Post by breuleux »

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?

Meh, every OS has its problems. The issues I have had with Linux have been consistently more annoying than those I have had with MacOS. I'm sure it's the opposite for some people.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#52

Post by matthewmacleod »

Good to see a detailed benchmark. I’m pretty impressed by the performance in real-world applications as well - the machine is easily 2.5—3x as fast at running various builds and processing jobs as my 15” from 2018 was, and it’s cool and quiet while doing it.

The performance claims have been a bit overblown in some quarters - it’s not going to replace a 5950X with a big GPU, and some of the rhetoric is a bit silly. But it’s surprisingly close - watching a silent laptop rip through a build faster than the 125W TDP i9-10900K we have in the office is pretty cool!

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#53

Post by newaccount74 »

Ginden wrote: post #44
newaccount74 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Running macOS in a VM is okay for testing purposes, but in my experience it's not a great experience for productive work. There are a lot of graphics glitches because macOS assumes that you have hardware graphics acceleration, but no VM that I know supports that for macOS guests.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#54

Post by Jack000 »

One thing I don't see anyone mention is that the M1Max is the probably the cheapest GPU memory you can buy. The only other way to get >=64Gb GPU memory is with the A100 (?) which is like 20k by itself.

So this would be great specifically for finetuning large transformer models like GPT-J, which requires a lot of memory but not a lot of compute. Just hoping for pytorch support soon..

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#55

Post by JohnBooty »

vel0city wrote: post #48
JohnBooty wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By that logic, any time anybody optimizes for anything, they're somehow punishing everybody else with "penalties."

What if somebody on the Intel/AMD side of things includes some optimizations for SSE, AVX, etc? Are they punishing everybody else?

At any rate, my idea was less than half baked and again, not exactly something I'm pining for. Was just thinking about things Apple might conceivably be able to try with their unique vertical integration.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#56

Post by hereforphone »

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…

Do you run virtual machines on it?

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#57

Post by lopuhin »

m15i wrote: post #22

Regarding training ResNet50, even though img/sec is less than the 3090, could a 64gb m1 max accommodate larger image sizes than the 24gb 3090?

Probably they would be close - M1 still needs to use memory for the OS and other stuff, while 3090 can use fp16/mixed precision, which in many cases almost doubles effective memory. Also if we talk about training, then a more mature CUDA implementation of things like batch normalization and optimizers can also result in lower memory usage compared to a likely less mature TF Metal support.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#58

Post by rsanheim »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #49
madeofpalk wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are probably going to do two M1 Max chips in the imac, so basically take the existing m1 max, and double it (at least for multicore perf, who knows how single-threaded will play out).

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#59

Post by rsanheim »

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.

One reason: try to work alongside a 3080 or 3090 running at full power for awhile, and you will understand. Especially if you don't have really good AC in your work area during summer. =)
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