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Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

tlkh.dev

61–70 of 217 posts

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#61

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.

It looks like they were designed for chiplets from the start. So desktops could simply be the existing chips stacked.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#62
Finally some benchmarks beyond just encoding video (which is admittedly a huge use case for these CPUs). I've been on Windows for decades, and this step change in computing performance is a Siren's call for me to switch, I've never wanted an Apple product so much as this before.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#63

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.

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 d…

> lower power, proportionally lower performance

Except it's not. The performance per watt is significantly better on average. Only one of the examples in this post really talked about power usage and that example also says that the 3090 is using a special compiler and gets to use the special tensor cores in the 3090, but for the M1 Max it wasn't able to use the neural cores or the special compiler and still achieves a similar performance per watt.

If you look at more detailed benchmarks from Anandtech:

> In the SPECfp suite, the M1 Max is in its own category of silicon with no comparison in the market. It completely demolishes any laptop contender, showcasing 2.2x performance of the second-best laptop chip. The M1 Max even manages to outperform the 16-core 5950X – a chip whose package power is at 142W, with rest of system even quite above that. It’s an absolutely absurd comparison and a situation we haven’t seen the likes of.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#64

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…

You're not alone. my m1 mac mini is better, but i still see random beach balls, though the duration is less than on the intel mbp. For anyone saying "I never see this" or "something's wrong with your system" - I've seen these sorts of problems, in some capacity or another, over ... 12 years, multiple macbooks and imacs, multiple OS versions, multiple internet providers, from various parts of the world. I think the fo…

Isn't that just... normal? Windows and Linux also have weird delays sometimes. It will happen on any hardware.

And if you're paying more than 3k for a laptop, you're either rich or an idiot. Anything over that price is just brands price gouging for minimal to zero functional return.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#65

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.

There were a lot of people saying things like this after the M1 too. I'm not expecting another huge leap with whatever comes next in the M-series, but I won't be surprised if there is one either.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#66

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.

That's already the case, though. The battery life difference using Safari versus Firefox/Chrome is staggering. Sure, you don't have an option to buy a FF/Chrome mac atm, but you've definitely bought one where safari is the only decently efficient browser.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#67
post #54

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..

Would it make sense to mine BTC with it?

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#68
post #65

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.

There were a lot of people saying things like this after the M1 too. I'm not expecting another huge leap with whatever comes next in the M-series, but I won't be surprised if there is one either.

They didn't really improve the M1 with the Pro and Max chips though. They really just added more cores to the SIP, which doesn't necessarily improve performance so much as it makes more performance available.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#69

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…

The things that take up time and energy in browsers - i.e. things like garbage collection, JIT compilation, and so on - are already things that CPUs are hyper-specialized for. And the code that is ultimately intended to execute is also well-specialized for CPUs.

It's already possible to target GPUs in-browser directly; and most older HTML primitives were recast in terms of GPU operations around the time of the original iPhone. The only thing I can think of that's still been left on the table is rendering vector geometry on-GPU; but most sites don't redraw so much as to make this a huge performance win.

Video decode has been offloaded to hardware for decades as well. The only reason to decode video on-CPU is if you're decoding crazy-old formats[0] that don't have hardware decoder blocks present for them.

The other huge problem is networking - which is also heavily hardware-optimized and has been for a while. Large assets mean keeping your Wi-Fi or LTE baseband on for longer. You could mitigate this with compression; which can be hardware optimized... though I'm not sure how much of a benefit that provides outside of game consoles[1].

[0] In my personal experience: I wrote a Sorenson H.263 decoder for Ruffle. Right now it not only executes on-CPU, but blocks the event loop main thread. However, the video files in question are so low-quality that this isn't a significant problem for most Flash movies and everything works fine (though I do want to try on-GPU video decoding at some point).

[1] Current-gen game consoles (PS5/XSeries) have hardware decompression blocks. However, the intent is to quickly decompress gigabytes worth of data quickly; most websites aren't nearly that bloated.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#70

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.

Most of the time the hardware accelerators are available for everyone to use, if they program to it. Ex ffmpeg and other media encoding engines all have the ability to write coders / decoders against certain hardware accelerators. You can choose CPU coders, Nvidia specific ones, etc.
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