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Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

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Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#171

Post by smoldesu »

rsanheim wrote: post #59
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.

One reason: try to work alongside a 3080 or 3090 running at full power for awhile, and you will understand. Especially if you don't have really good AC in your work area during summer. =)

Why would I run it at full power? I could have M1 Max-beating performance while staying well under 70, and modern Nvidia cards will happily idle around 30c when driving hi-res displays.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#172

Post by smoldesu »

JohnBooty wrote: post #128
tambourine_man wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

PCIe 4.0+ is capable of ~31504MB/s on an x16 interface. Besides that, you might run into memory issues, but I honestly haven't seen a memory-bottlenecked workload on GPUs outside of the crypto mining scene.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#173

Post by Benjamin_Dobell »

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…

Chiming in to say I've also got an M1 Max. I was running High Sierra until I got my M1 with Monterey. Holy heck! If you've been updating gradually, maybe you didn't notice. But woweee stability is a train-wreck now.

Issues I've reported via Feedback Assistant:

1. Issue waking external displays. Typically 10+ seconds to wake my HDMI display, Thunderbolt is faster, but still a bit slow.

Slow wake of external displays might sound like a minor issue, and it is. What's not a minor issue is having all my windows slammed on top of each other on the Macbook's built-in display every time I wake from sleep.

2. No scaling for external non-4K monitors. I've got a 1440p 144Hz display, my options are tiny text, pixelated large text (decreased resolution) or install a third-party work around (https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDummy). The third-party work around breaks screen recording. Seems there's another bug in macOS where you can't use display mirroring and record screen at once - it crashes the screen capture tool.

3. Unresponsive Finder. Sometimes I can't drag and drop files. The rest of the UI works, but you cannot click and drag. No idea why.

4. Black screen (with cursor only) after wake from sleep. Think this is somehow related to clamshell mode, as I believe it enabled briefly when I plugged external displays in before opening the lid. Had to hard reset.

5. Audio popping. System wide. Interestingly there's no category for reporting sound issues in Feedback Assistant. Pretty crazy when you think about modern Apple's origins. Seems this is a pretty wide-spread issue. Theories I've seen have been related to Rosetta. However, I can confirm that arm64 binaries (e.g. Firefox) do occasionally lead to popping, but it may be that Intel binaries are running at the same time. It comes and goes. It's almost certainly a driver issue, doesn't sound like bad speakers, sounds like corrupt buffers.

Issues I haven't reported:

1. Text boxes not being responsive. As in, you can't click in them. I don't know if this is somehow related to the Finder issue. It may well be app specific, hence why I haven't reported it. However, I've observed it in Firefox and Jetbrains products.

2. Garbled rendering, particularly around fonts. Again, might be app specific. Main culprit is Slack. Restarting the app doesn't fix it, rebooting does though.

There's probably more that I'm forgetting. Honestly, this is a bit depressing. The M1 is a beast. If I worked on Apple's hardware team I'd be pretty peeved, because they've achieved something amazing and cruddy software is compromising the entire experience.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#174

Post by sudosysgen »

p1necone wrote: post #168
sudosysgen wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, if you care about GPU performance you have to compare it to a dGPU. The M1 Max GPU by itself can draw 65-70W, which makes it more power hungry than an RTX 3060 Max-Q, which is slightly more powerful (despite 8nm vs 5nm), which is a GPU you'd expect in a 1000$ computer.

The one advantage of the M1 Max's GPU is more memory.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#175

Post by azinman2 »

littlestymaar wrote: post #165
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…

> 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…

Many parts of the world don't have stable electricity, reducing electricity usage reduces costs and overall emissions in to the planet, and as you approach much longer periods you massively increase convenience.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#176

Post by ulfw »

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…

It's a laptop with integrated graphics, not a desktop with high-end high-wattage discrete graphics. Astounding how far they've come and that's version 1.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#177

Post by susodapop »

rc_mob wrote: post #159

Did I get the worst M1 Max in the world? In my one month with this computer so far -- its been problematic. It has this fun issue where it freezes up for a couple seconds randomly when watching youtube. Its frozen for a few seconds in other situations also. One time it just rebooted completely right in the middle of using it. Add to that I've never gotten more that 4 hours out of this battery. Personally I'm kind of…

If you haven't already, speak to Apple about replacement under warranty. Those numbers aren't justified by anything apart from hardcore video editing 100% of the time on battery.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#178

Post by jensensbutton »

azinman2 wrote: post #175
littlestymaar wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Many parts of the world don't have stable electricity, reducing electricity usage reduces costs and overall emissions in to the planet, and as you approach much longer periods you massively increase convenience.

Those parts of the world aren't generally spending multiple thousands of American dollars on a laptop.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#179

Post by menmob »

sudosysgen wrote: post #167
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.

But that’s system memory. Not GPU memory. M1 shares that memory, so it’s addressable by both directly, but with ryzen (and almost every other consumer platform) the cpu and gpu memory are separate.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#180

Post by brrrrrm »

homerowilson wrote: post #92
matja wrote: 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…

If you swap out “code” in the url for “raw” you get the raw text itself without a need to use sed

https://jott.live/raw/blas_test.cc

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