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Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

tlkh.dev

101–110 of 217 posts

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#101

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…

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.

Not just that it's even comparable to a desktop but that it also has excellent battery life. You've been able to get portable desktop replacements before, but they were power hungry even when barely doing anything.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#102
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't help at all on notebooks which of course are the subject of this discussion, or even nearly any Apple hardware at all at this point. But FWIW on systems that can support multiple GPUs using PCIe passthrough to a macOS Guest VM will make it perform very well. Of course legally that means only the now highly mediocre multi-year old price-unchanged Mac Pro. But running a hackintosh virtualized can work quite nicely. While very unlikely, perhaps this will become an officially possible option again someday if Apple ever does another expandable system.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#103
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Linux I had to use `-lcblas` instead of `-lblas`. "6.63171 gflops" with a 24-core AMD EPYC 74F3

I used OpenBLAS on my cheap last-generation AMD Ryzen 7 4700U laptop like so: git clone https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS && cd OpenBLAS && make PREFIX=/opt/openblas install && curl https://jott.live/code/blas_test.cc | sed -n "/ /,/code>/p" | tail -n +2 | head -n -1 > blas_test.cpp inspect blas_test.cpp file, and then... g++ -I/opt/openblas/include/ blas_test.cc -lopenblas -std=c++11 -O3 -L/opt/openblas/lib/ -o bla…

With my Ryzen 7 5800U laptop I get around 530 gflops, with a peak of 596 if I compile the test against MKL with

g++ -I/opt/intel/mkl/include/ blas_test.cc -lmkl_intel_lp64 -lmkl_gnu_thread -lmkl_core -lgomp -std=c++11 -O3 -march=native -L/opt/intel/mkl/lib/intel64 -o blas_test_mkl

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#104

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.

[deleted]

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#105

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.

Maybe not next year, but TSMC’s 3nm isn’t that far off.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#106
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you running any 3rd party kernel extensions, if so which ones? (E.g. littlesnitch, FUSE, etc....). I've got an M1 and M1 Pro and I've never seen anything like this, macOS in general has some long standing software bugs around the performance of apps like Music and Preview that I've seen hit on the M1 processor but they seem to make less of an impact to the usability compared to the Intel processors.

I'm not running any kernel extensions on this Mac, the first iCloud related hang happened during the setup process before I installed anything at all.

I avoid iCloud problems by not using iCloud. Seems to be a lot more trouble than it’s worth!

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#107

Excellent investigation. I have the first M1 MBP pro 13” and have done a lot of data stuff on it. My experience was also that python flew - cpython on the M1 being almost as fast as pypy on my 2019 i7 laptop - and java compilation was much faster too. The CPU is fast and the memory is really fast. The performance pain points though was anything involving containers, random 10-30 sec stalls in boot and app startup (I…

Delay in app start-up might be also related into binary signature checking on the cloud. (Built-in anti-virus…)

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#108

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 beachballing in Contacts has been driving me crazy for almost two years now. I have 7,413 cards in Contacts and even went so far as to completely delete my address book and reimport it from VCF. There is very clearly some synchronous dependency on iCloud. Turning Wi-Fi off is the only way I can use Contacts without it beachballing.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#109

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.

The rumors are that the M1 supersized version they are putting in the new Mac Pro is 20 CPU cores and 128 GPU cores, which would place it at a little under twice the performance of a 3090. Not saying that Nvidia can't catch up with a hypothetical 4090 next year but it'll be a tall order.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#110

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…

This article literally benchmarks a variety of low-level compute heavy operations and compares them with a Ryzen. It’s about as far away from your take as possible.

You might have missed the point - he means that more we get performance from the hardware, less we care about optimising software. And this is already a problem with Electron for example.
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