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Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

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Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#71

Post by GeekyBear »

p1necone wrote: post #38
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.

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…

> They're mentioning their desktop because Apples marketing hype mentions the desktop, not because the comparison is actually valid.

The third party testing does show that the comparison is valid.

>The chips here aren’t only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you’d have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max – it’s just generally absurd.

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

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#72

Post by foobiekr »

rsanheim wrote: post #58
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

They almost certainly will not do this and it would be a NUMA nightmare if they did.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#73

Post by grishka »

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 do fully expect to be blown away by the performance of the M1 Max when I finally receive mine as I'm coming from a 2012 MBP. I'm getting tired of the entire system grinding to a halt when I open one of those 25k-line classes in android studio. Probably even the regular M1 would handle this much better.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#74

Post by foobiekr »

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…

>The Open/Save dialog taking 30 seconds to show.

This is _infuriating_ as a user. There is no possible good reason for this.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#75

Post by officeplant »

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…

Even the M1 port of Chrome is clunky, but then again chrome has always been clunky with MacOS.

Firefox's M1 port actually got me to finally start transitioning out of chrome after being a fairly devoted chrome user since it released. It's the only third party browser on M1 macs that comes close to Safari in speed and handles window size changes (especially when video is playing) leagues better than Chrome.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#76

Post by officeplant »

aantix wrote: post #67
Jack000 wrote: 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?

At this point it doesn't make sense to mine BTC on any GPU.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#77

Post by thatswrong0 »

herpderperator wrote: post #47
thatswrong0 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The main issue with that is a looot of plugins I rely on day to day still haven't been updated with native support, so they wouldn't be usable while running Live native. I really don't understand the hold up since some of my plugins were updated almost immediately after the original M1 was released.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#78

Post by grishka »

aantix wrote: post #67
Jack000 wrote: 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?

BTC mining isn't memory-bound, it's compute-bound. The more sha256 hashes you can compute per second, the better. And I'm highly doubtful that any general-purpose hardware at all could even begin to compete with mining ASICs.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#79

Post by mdavis6890 »

lowercased wrote: post #28
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…

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…

Hardware used to get faster more quickly than software got slower, so you could make forward progress by upgrading hardware. Then it seemed about the same, so following a hardware upgrade things would be about as fast as they had been when my previous hardware was new several years prior.

Now we seem to be at a point where the software is getting slower more quickly than the hardware is getting faster, so that following a hardware upgrade everything is a bit slower than it was following the prior upgrade.

Software sucks, and hardware is amazing.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#80

Post by jshier »

p1necone wrote: post #38
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.

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…

Apple's marketing page for the new MacBook Pros with the M1 Pro and M1 Max strictly mentions laptops and laptop GPUs in its comparisons. Apple makes no comparison to desktop systems directly. At most they make general comparisons to the power curves of PC CPUs and GPUs, but mostly when introducing the M1 and explaining why they built it.
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