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Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

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Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#111

Post by jayd16 »

JohnBooty wrote: post #46
Thaxll wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The obvious answer is that performance/watt is literally everything when talking about laptops. Most people favor laptops these days even if they (like me) leave their machines "docked" 90% of the time. do we know for a fact that a 90w Apple GPU would perform 4x faster if it was running at 500w It's somewhat besides the point IMO, but don't GPU workloads tend to scale well simply by adding more compute units? This sh…

Performance/watt it not everything. It's not really even something. It's a derivative concern.

The only reason I care about performance/watt is because I actually care about noise, heat and battery life. I'm not running a data center off a laptop so the cost benefits of performance/watt are not even a concern.

Its a nice chip but we shouldn't confuse the marketing for the actual benefits.

If a higher performance/watt but much lower absolute performance chip was released, I wouldn't be interested.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#112

Post by PragmaticPulp »

whynotminot wrote: post #8
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…

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.

> But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing.

Right, and I acknowledged the battery life as amazing.

But currently, I can't buy an M1 Max desktop if I wanted to. So instead I have a 16" MacBook Pro semi-permanently attached to my monitor and keyboard at my desk. It's basically a desktop for me.

I don't expect a laptop to outperform my AMD/nVidia desktop workstation. And sure enough, it doesn't! But it comes surprisingly close for common tasks and I'm very happy to have it.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#113

Post by PragmaticPulp »

minhazm wrote: post #63
p1necone wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For laptop usage, it's an amazing feat.

But it's kind of a strained comparison. Power usage doesn't scale linearly with performance for any CPU (power consumption scales with the square of voltage) so squeezing the last 20% of performance out of a desktop chip could require doubling the power consumption. Which is actually find for a desktop because I really don't care if my CPU consumes 100-200W for a few minutes while doing a compile. But trying to compare performance-per-watt between two parts tuned for different parts of the power/efficiency curve is always going to be misleading.

If we wanted to compare straight across, comparing to AMD's mobile Ryzen parts would make more sense.

AMD has a 35W mobile part that isn't all that far behind the M1 parts: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/11001445

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#114

Post by jessriedel »

> We already know that the M1 Max CPU should have really strong matrix multiplication performance due to Apple's "hidden"/undocumented AMX co-processor embedded in the CPU complex, and that it is leveraged when you use Apple's Accelerate framework

Does this hold for the M1 Pro?

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#115

Post by AnthonyMouse »

whynotminot wrote: post #8
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…

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.

> 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.

The problem with this take is this:

https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2685?vs=2613

This is mobile vs. desktop Zen 2 with the same number of cores. You give a CPU three times the power budget and it gets marginally faster. Because the last few hundred MHz of clock speed uses a ton of power, and that's it.

But then you have this:

https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2613?vs=2666

Nearly double the multi-threaded performance at the same TDP, because it has twice as many cores and it only has to give back the last few hundred MHz of base clock to do it.

A laptop with performance largely equivalent to <= 8-core desktops wasn't a novelty. What a desktop really gets you is the ability to have a lot more cores.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#116

Post by vel0city »

JohnBooty wrote: post #55
vel0city wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

SSE/AVX/etc aren't optimizations for a single application, they're optimizations for specific kinds of math instructions. Any application using that processor can use them, and they're overall pretty general instructions.

Hyper-optimizing for a particular application means the way that particular application works gets accelerated, but not things in general. Sure, if a browser behaved identically to Safari, it too would potentially experience the speed up barring any weird microcode/firmware that only allows those extensions to be used by Apple-signed binaries which is a whole 'nother level of nightmare. Stepping outside of that highly optimized path is essentially a penalty though as it by definition wouldn't be so highly optimized. And once that optimized path has been etched into the silicon, there's no real updating it unless we move to CPUs being more like FPGAs which isn't likely to happen.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#117

Post by emodendroket »

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.

Battery life, energy costs, waste heat... take your pick.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#118

Post by vel0city »

CamJN wrote: post #66
vel0city wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that really due to the hardware or because of the overall behavior of the two browsers? Isn't Safari better battery-wise than Chrome even on Intel Macs? IIRC Edge has better efficiency in Windows than Chrome, so its not surprising me Chrome is less efficient. Its a bloated shadow of its original self.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#119

Post by emodendroket »

jayd16 wrote: post #111
JohnBooty wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious answer is that performance/watt is literally everything when talking about laptops. Most people favor laptops these days even if they (like me) leave their machines "docked" 90% of the time. do we know for a fact that a 90w Apple GPU would perform 4x faster if it was running at 500w It's somewhat besides the point IMO, but don't GPU workloads tend to scale well simply by adding more compute units? This sh…

Performance/watt it not everything. It's not really even something. It's a derivative concern. The only reason I care about performance/watt is because I actually care about noise, heat and battery life. I'm not running a data center off a laptop so the cost benefits of performance/watt are not even a concern. Its a nice chip but we shouldn't confuse the marketing for the actual benefits. If a higher performance/watt…

> The only reason I care about performance/watt is because I actually care about noise, heat and battery life.

Yeah, all pretty major concerns?

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#120

Post by xoac »

ls612 wrote: post #109
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.

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.

I'll believe it when I see it.
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