Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

tlkh.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 217 posts

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#161

Post by rgbrenner »

ls612 wrote: post #157
opencl wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's just not true. 3dmark shows it having a little under half the performance of a 3090 with the largest GPU, with it getting a score of 18,000 vs a 3090 having around 42,000. Scaling up linearly by a factor of 4 would lead to a comparison of 72k vs 42k, or a little less than twice as much.

It's not going to scale linearly though. The Max has 400mb of memory bandwidth. If you attempt to use as much as possible, as single Max chip uses 220-240mb/sec. The remainder is likely because they planned to use multiple chips in later products. But 2 Maxs will completely saturate it... so that's going to be a bottleneck if they try 4 Maxs. And there would be little point going above 4.

For comparison, the 3090 has almost 1TB of memory bandwidth.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#162

Post by sudosysgen »

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.

Laptop Zen and desktop Zen are basically the same in single core. The big difference is you're not more than 8 fast cores. The M1 Max also has basically 8 fast cores.

It used to be different, but now frequency is so close to the absolute limits that adding more power doesn't help single core performance that much.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#163

Post by rsynnott »

jayd16 wrote: post #134
emodendroket wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only reason I care about performance/watt is because I actually care about noise, heat and battery life. Yeah, all pretty major concerns?

The point is at best I care about perf/watt indirectly and the things I do care about can be improved in other ways so its incorrect to say perf/watt is everything. I admit it's a pedantic comment but I was pulled in by use of "literally everything".

> and the things I do care about can be improved in other ways so its incorrect to say perf/watt is everything.

Okay, noise, _maybe_, but how are you proposing to improve heat and battery life without improving perf/watt? Your options for battery life are either to reduce performance, or to increase battery size (but, well, good luck with that; the 16" MBP is already as big as a laptop battery can practically be, as if it was any bigger you wouldn't be allowed take it on a plane). Your only option to reduce heat without improving perf/watt would be to reduce performance.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#164

Post by Behemoth66 »

grishka wrote: post #78
aantix wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would you or someone happen to know/guess the hash rate of the M1 Max?

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#165

Post by littlestymaar »

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…

> 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 life with Safari.

I don't think that would be worth it. What's the point of 36 hours of battery life? How often do you need more than 12 hours of life on battery? Increasing the maximum battery life only makes sense when it also increases battery life for the more power-hungry workload (which is where you're likely to reach the limit), why bother building dedicated hardware for a specific workload that's already beyond what you need?

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#166

Post by sudosysgen »

minhazm wrote: post #142
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

The Anandtech review[1] also compares it to the Ryzen 5980HS, which is the one you linked. The M1 Max absolutely crushes that chip as well, in some of the benchmarks it's more than 2x better. I don't understand the argument people are making saying it doesn't make sense to compare it to a desktop chip. The point is that the M1 Max is actually outperforming desktop chips in a mobile form factor. It may eliminate the n…

The 5980HS is a 35W part and will not sustain more than 42W for 5 minutes and then only 35W. The M1 Max's CPU alone will happily draw and sustain 62W.

In other news, processor that draws more power on a more efficient process is faster. More news at seven.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#167

Post by sudosysgen »

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..

Hmm, technically no, an R7 5700G system and 2x 32GB sticks would be around a fifth of the price. That's if you don't need a lot of compute. It's also right around 1/8th the performance of a 3080 but it doesn't have Tensor cores which is big downside in ML.

In theory you could even push the 5700G to 128GB if you figured out a way to get ECC to work on it.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#168

Post by p1necone »

sudosysgen wrote: post #166
minhazm wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Anandtech review[1] also compares it to the Ryzen 5980HS, which is the one you linked. The M1 Max absolutely crushes that chip as well, in some of the benchmarks it's more than 2x better. I don't understand the argument people are making saying it doesn't make sense to compare it to a desktop chip. The point is that the M1 Max is actually outperforming desktop chips in a mobile form factor. It may eliminate the n…

The 5980HS is a 35W part and will not sustain more than 42W for 5 minutes and then only 35W. The M1 Max's CPU alone will happily draw and sustain 62W. In other news, processor that draws more power on a more efficient process is faster. More news at seven.

The m1 max is also not actually faster in general: https://www.notebookcheck.net/M1-Max-vs-R9-5980HS-vs-M1-Pro_...

I assume SPECfp specifically scales really well with memory bandwidth/latency.

Regardless, I was talking about GPU performance in my comment (because GP was talking about GPU performance) which all of the replies seem to be ignoring.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#169

Post by nwienert »

rgbrenner wrote: post #161
ls612 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not true. 3dmark shows it having a little under half the performance of a 3090 with the largest GPU, with it getting a score of 18,000 vs a 3090 having around 42,000. Scaling up linearly by a factor of 4 would lead to a comparison of 72k vs 42k, or a little less than twice as much.

It's not going to scale linearly though. The Max has 400mb of memory bandwidth. If you attempt to use as much as possible, as single Max chip uses 220-240mb/sec. The remainder is likely because they planned to use multiple chips in later products. But 2 Maxs will completely saturate it... so that's going to be a bottleneck if they try 4 Maxs. And there would be little point going above 4. For comparison, the 3090 has…

Aren’t you assuming they won’t scale the memory bandwidth?

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#170

Post by jayd16 »

nicce wrote: post #107
willvarfar wrote: post #27

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…)

Would tasks get faster if the internet was turned off?
Post reply on HN