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Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

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Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#81

Post by setpatchaddress »

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.

It sounds like you may have a undiagnosed local networking issue. I’ve been using Macs since 1991 and the last time I had the sort of issue you’re talking about was classic macOS, where AppleTalk would literally hang the entire OS when it went into the weeds.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#82

Post by foobiekr »

joconde wrote: post #23
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…

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

This is intermittent and has been an issue since Catalina (on x86) and occurs on my (fresh install, no migration, nothing weird) M1 mini on occasion.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#83

Post by bjoli »

joconde wrote: post #23
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…

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

My mother-in-laws m1 macbook air exhibits the same issue, and she hasn't installed anything but apple's own software on it.

Not every time, mind you. Only about once in 50 times. Sometimes she goes for weeks without it. Sometimes it happens several times in a day.

My 2016 imac has some weird issues as well, like not supporting some of my keyboards when I use a nonstandard layout file (swedish dvorak)- even though they work just fine with apples own keyboards.

Apple has some issues with quality control. Things have gotten steadily worse since 10.5, even though I do enjoy the new features.

Not just weird things like the one above, but basic things like standard shortcuts not working when you have Swedish layout. Now I cant remember which one it was, but it was something that should do a common thing, but instead brought up the "search in the help files" instead.

I have been bitten by it every time I use a new mac or do a fresh install.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#84

Post by setpatchaddress »

newaccount74 wrote: post #25
astrange wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you have DNS issues? It's always DNS, so they say. XPC is not asynchronous; that's up to the individual caller. The synchronous methods are easier to debug for sure.

> XPC is not asynchronous It's been some time since I dug into the internals of XPC, but my assumption was that the underlying protocol is asynchronous, and if you do sync calls the wrappers just do the waiting for you. The problem is that it has a tendency to get stuck in some rare cases, where services just don't reply for some reason. Then the sync calls are the worst -- the UI of the app is completely frozen and…

XPC sync is not in fact async underneath in recent macOS versions. It’s a severe performance pessimization to use async in many cases, because sync propagates thread priority and async often can’t.

You don’t seem to have a full grip on the reasons for the intermittent hangs you’re experiencing. Can I suggest two things?

1 Grab a sysdiagnose during one of the hangs and file a feedback report with Apple

2 Use the `sample` command line tool to see what’s actually hanging a particular process for yourself

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#85

Post by bee_rider »

I wonder if they'll somehow include the AMX 'instruction' (or whatever it is) into BLIS kernels. GEMM isn't everything, but it is a pretty important building block in linear algebra. (I mean that's the big observation of these fancy tile based BLAS implementations).

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#86

Post by dtech »

dhosek wrote: post #65
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.

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.

I wouldn't say M1 max is another leap. It's mostly scaling for linear performance gains.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#87

Post by kbenson »

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…

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

I'm not. Let them all scramble and pull out the big guns to try to compete. That's capitalism at it's finest, which isn't exactly what we've been seeing in the CPU space for the prior decades. We got lucky that AMD caught Intel with their pants down recently (if only because it strengthens AMD and makes them a better competitor), but a duopoly isn't necessarily what I would consider a good market condition for progress (as we've seen with iOS vs Android). Lots of different experiments with feedback from people on what they find good would be much preferable, and while a constrained CPU such as Apple's isn't perfect, it does represent more choice and pressure on other players to evolve in ways they may have been resistant to previously.

> 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.

RIP the general purpose computer. :(

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#88

Post by tambourine_man »

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.

> Does the performance scales linearly?

On GPUs, pretty much. It’s even called embarrassingly parallel for this reason.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#89

Post by wiredfool »

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 think it's probably something between Mojave and Big Sur based on my recent upgrades. Sandbox is as good of an explanation as any.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#90

Post by cyberge99 »

foobiekr wrote: post #74
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.

I wonder if he has nfs shares or if he’s running a pihole or similar. Apple may be expecting certain things in his configuration that are timing out.

I’ve never experienced any of these issues (multiple macs in various profiles).

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