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Apple M1 Ultra

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Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#271
post #4

Looks like all the people saying "just start fusing those M1 CPU's into bigger ones" were right, that's basically what they did here (fused two M1 Max'es together). And since the presenter mentioned the Mac Pro would come on another day, I wonder if they'll just do 4x M1 Max for that.

> I wonder if they'll just do 4x M1 Max for that. Unlikely, M1 Ultra is the last chip in the M1 family according to Apple [1]. "M1 Ultra completes the M1 family as the world’s most powerful and capable chip for a personal computer.”" [1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/03/apple-unveils-m1-ultr...

That doesn't necessarily rule out more powerful iterations that also launch under the M1 Ultra branding though.

(edit: per a sibling comment, if the internals like IRQ only really scale to 2 chiplets that pretty much would rule it out though.)

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#272
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The bandwidth of the soldered ram is much higher which makes it much faster for code that accesses a lot of RAM like video editors.

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Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#274
post #23
post #10

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

80% of the desktop market and 100% of cloud deployments won't care.

Desktop will care about noise of the fans.

Data centers are also pretty conscious of power consumption, more power means more cooling infra required and higher energy bill, while it is not the top priority it certainly is a significant factor in decision making.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#275
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My workstation has a 3990x. Our "world" build is slightly faster on my M1 Max. https://twitter.com/kiratpandya/status/1457438725680480257 The 3990x runs a bit faster on the initial compile stage but the linking is single threaded and the M1 Max catches up at that point. I expect the M1 Ultra to crush the 3990x on compile time.

Try mold.

We plan to move to it once MacOS support lands (for the laptops).

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#276
In some ways I wish this processor was available from a CPU chip seller. As a compute engine it gets a lot "right" (in my opinion) and would be fun to hack on.

That said, the idea that USB C/Thunderbolt is the new PCIe bus has some merit. I have yet to find someone who makes a peripheral card cage that is fed by USBC/TB but there are of course standalone GPUs.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#277
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that Threadripper in anything like the "same power envelope"?

If I'm reading the graph in the press release right, M1 Ultra will have a TDP of 60W, right? A 3990X has a TDP of 280W. I know TDP != power draw, and that everyone calculates TDP differently, but looking purely at orders of magnitude, no, it's not even close.

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Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As more developers move to ARM architecture by buying Macbooks (I did it last year the first time in my life), ARM cloud will grow very fast, and Apple needs growth, so they can't afford not to do it in a few years (probably with M2 architecture they are already thinking of it). Regarding the exact timeline: I don't know :)

They’d have to go all-in on supporting third party OSs like Linux first. Sure, there are projects to bring linux to the M1, but enterprises that buy commercial server hardware will demand 1st party support

The major Linux providers already offer 1st party supported Linux on AWS. Both RHEL and Ubuntu instances offer support contracts from their respective companies, as well as Amazon Linux from AWS themselves. It is already here and a big force there. You can provision ElastiCache and RDS Graviton instances too.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t support your argument when we’re talking about a massive processor like a threadripper vs. a M1 Ultra. The performance per watt isn’t in the same universe and that matters.

> The performance per watt isn’t in the same universe and that matters. I couldn’t give less of a shit about performance-per-watt. The ONLY metric I care about is performance-per-dollar. A Mac Studio and Threadripper are both boxes that sit on/under my desk. I don’t work from a laptop. I don’t care about energy usage. I even don’t really care about noise. My Threadripper is fine. I would not trade less power for less…

This is what some folks miss.

One hour of my time is more expensive than an entire month of a computer electricity bill.

Some people just want tasks to perform as fast as possible regardless of power consumption or portability.

Life's short and time is finite.

Every second adds up for repetitive tasks.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#280

I wonder how long it will be until a CPU as capable as this one will be the required baseline for ordinary apps. Is there any hope that the upgrade treadmill will stop any time soon?

There will always be apps that use all the power you throw at them. Raytracing scales pretty much linearly with the core count. Compression does too.

But your everyday apps like your browser have been fast for at least a decade.

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