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Apple M1 Ultra

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101–110 of 855 posts

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#102
post #76

At what point Apple will put those chips in their servers or sell server chips? It only makes sense for them to take this architecture to the cloud deployments

They likely won't re-visit the Xserve, IMO. No reason to. They can't sell them at a premium compared to peers and its outside their area of expertise.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#103
post #65
post #20

I'm cross posting a question I had from the Mac Studio thread (currently unanswered). ---- Mac Pro scale up? How is this going to scale up to a Mac Pro, especially related to RAM? The Ultra caps at 128 GB of RAM (which isn't much for video editing, especially given that the GPU uses the system RAM). Today's Mac Pro goes up to 1.5TB (and has dedicated video RAM above this). If the Mac Pro is say, 4 Ultra's stacked tog…

The Mac Pro will have replaceable RAM. It will use the RAM soldered onto the CPU as cache. You’ll most likely also be able to buy dedicated GPUs/ML booster addon Cards and the likes for it. It’s the most likely thing to happen or they won’t release another Mac Pro.

Why would they use soldered RAM as cache? It's not like it's faster then replaceable RAM. Unless they go HBM2 but I doubt that.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#104

Desktop marketing seems to be getting desperate. Few people use the apps they show in the Mac Studio benchmarks. Fewer still care that their chips use less power... if they did, they would stay on their phones.

[deleted]

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#105
post #63

Would be interesting to get more info on the neural engine. On one hand, I find it fascinating that major manufacturers are now putting neural architectures into mainstream hardware. On the other hand I wonder what exactly it can do. To what degree are you tied into a specific neural architecture (eg recurrent vs convolutional), what APIs are available for training it, if it's even meant to be used that way (not just…

They're doing quite a lot of work here:

https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/

https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/create-ml/

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/createml

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#106
post #20

I'm cross posting a question I had from the Mac Studio thread (currently unanswered). ---- Mac Pro scale up? How is this going to scale up to a Mac Pro, especially related to RAM? The Ultra caps at 128 GB of RAM (which isn't much for video editing, especially given that the GPU uses the system RAM). Today's Mac Pro goes up to 1.5TB (and has dedicated video RAM above this). If the Mac Pro is say, 4 Ultra's stacked tog…

The pro is most likely going to have ram and PCIe slots.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#107
post #15

Are the neural engines actually used for anything, to anyone's knowledge? Edit: Apparently in iPhones, they are used for FaceID.

I think the most important use of the neural engines so far is for the internal camera postprocessing. Better camera postprocessing is the reason why people buy new iPhones.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#108
post #10

And overnight, Intel's Ice Lake is again way behind.

Ice Lake shipped in 2019. The current generation is Alder Lake, which is slightly ahead of the M1 in single-threaded performance according to most benchmarks.

And massively behind in terms of power consuption

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#109
post #15

Are the neural engines actually used for anything, to anyone's knowledge? Edit: Apparently in iPhones, they are used for FaceID.

Neural Engines may be used in CoreML models. I don't know it can be used with Apple's BNNS library [1]. You can use with TensorFlow Lite with coreML delegate as well [2]. And some tried to reverse engineer it and used it for model training [3].

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/accelerate/bnns

[2] https://www.tensorflow.org/lite/performance/coreml_delegate

[3] https://github.com/geohot/tinygrad#ane-support-broken

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#110

Apple have some serious chip design abilities. Imagine if they entered the server market, with this architecture it could be very successful.

They tried that before and flopped.

The server market is different. Companies buy servers from the low bidder. Apple has never really played in that market.

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