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Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

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Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#121

Post by opencl »

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.

The M1 Max 32 core GPU is ~1/8 the performance of the 3090. 4x the core count should put it half of 3090 performance, not double.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#122

Post by vel0city »

novok wrote: post #70
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.

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.

Sure, that's been the case in the past and maybe that's what JohnBooty meant with his comment, but his comment specifically pointed out a particular browser so I took it to mean CPU extensions targeted for how Safari operates. Like, specific ways Safari handles Javascript or rendering with all of its specific quirks etched into silicon. Other browser manufacturers would have to pretty much behave like Safari or else run as a penalty on legacy instruction sets.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#123

Post by JohnBooty »

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…

    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.
In 10 years this is one of the more confusing I've ever seen on HN. You care about noise, heat, and battery life but you don't care about performance/watt? Performance/watt is a "derivative" concern, but somehow those metrics aren't?

Presumably, all you really care about is raw performance then?

Well, OK, fair enough. We can all care about different things. But even though, performance/watt still rules: for all practical purposes the watts part constrains the performance part.

For a given power supply and cooling system, you can only draw and dissipate X number of watts. So you are back to the question of how much performance the system can provide given X watts.

Even no-compromises cooling solutions most would consider highly impractical (involving liquid nitrogen etc) run into this issue at some point. So yeah, you actually do care about performance/watt?

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#124

Post by handrous »

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…

Frequent random beachballs made me switch from FF to Chrome ~10 years ago. Somewhat-less-frequent random beachballs made me switch to Safari.

Not that I never see them, but that cut them to under 5% the rate I'd been seeing them. Xcode still does it pretty reliably, but luckily I don't work in that much. Now if I see them it's usually because WhatsApp or Slack have gone insane, which they do every few weeks. Or some web app. Point is, there's usually one thing going nuts that causes it, it's not just a constant feature of my desktop even under light-ish load.

Some heavier stuff, like Android Studio with the Emulator running, might still beachball quite a bit. Dunno, been out of Android development for quite a while. I'm sure there are some workflows that still have the problem. The browser thing kept them from being a common feature of my personal experience, though.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#125

Post by dagmx »

vel0city wrote: post #48
JohnBooty wrote: post #40

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 already happens though given that different hardware has different support for hardware accelerated playback of video.

E.g even on the M1 Pro/Max, you're going to get much better performance and battery if you're using a video editor that supports prores decoding.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#126

Post by handrous »

cyberge99 wrote: post #90
foobiekr wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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).

I use multiple Macs, plus several iOS devices, behind a pihole, with iCloud. Never seen this. IIRC I do just use the default block lists, or something pretty close, though.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#127

Post by wincy »

opencl wrote: post #121
ls612 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The M1 Max 32 core GPU is ~1/8 the performance of the 3090. 4x the core count should put it half of 3090 performance, not double.

The path forward is simple then. 512 GPU cores.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#128

Post by JohnBooty »

tambourine_man wrote: post #88
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.

> Does the performance scales linearly? On GPUs, pretty much. It’s even called embarrassingly parallel for this reason.

At some point you hit bandwidth limitations, right? Unless each core has local, dedicated memory they will need to access the GPU's shared memory for various things right?

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#129

Post by collinvandyck76 »

emilsedgh wrote: post #18
cheeze wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone really think that running Linux on custom Apple hardware is actually going to make things _better_?

I have an M1 Air and can’t wait to install Linux on it. Backed marcan’s efforts and counting days until I go back to Linux again.

Same here. My M1 Air is good, and I use it for light purposes, but once Asahi becomes viable, OMG.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#130

Post by howinteresting »

setpatchaddress wrote: post #81
newaccount74 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Network issues, diagnosed or not, should not affect the performance of local UI operations. "Don't perform I/O on the UI thread" has been a maxim for decades.
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