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

Apple M1 Ultra

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 855 posts

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#331

Post by rocqua »

rowanG077 wrote: post #128
fastball wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The memory bandwidth of the M1 Max is 400 GB/s with 64GB of RAM, where as the memory bandwidth of Corsair's 6400MHz DDR5 32GB RAM module is 51GB/s per stick, or 102GB/s for the M1 Max equivalent.

51GB/s * 8 (octa-channel, not dual channel as you are calculating) is 408 GB/s. Basically the same as the M1 Max. It's not fair to use an off the shelf product since even if the RAM is slotted Apple wouldn't use an off the shelf product. Whether they use slotted RAM or not has nothing to do with performance. It's a design choice. For the mobile processors it makes total sense to save space. But for the Mac pro they m…

Is 8 channel RAM doable, are there downsides? If no to both, why don't high end x86 processors have it?

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#332

Post by rocqua »

_0w8t wrote: post #120
arcticbull wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the memory model is quite different - with the ultra-fast SSD and ultra-fast on-die RAM. You can get away with significantly less RAM for the same tasks, not just because of de-duplication but because data comes in so quickly from the SSD that paging isn't nearly the hit it is on say an Intel based Mac. I'd expect it to work more like a game console, streaming in content from the SSD to working memory on the fl…

Another thing to consider is memory compression. If Apple added dedicated hardware for that, it can effectively double the total memory with minimal performance hit.

Memory compression only works in certain scenarios. It requires your memory to actually have low entropy.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#334

Post by flatiron »

greenknight wrote: post #222
flatiron wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People care about performance per watt now. So they could compete. The real question is if they would support Linux. In our containerized world I can’t see their servers getting super big running macOS

The reason they dominate at PPW, is because they are on TSMCs 5nm process. No one else has made a cpu chip on this process yet. AMD are scheduled for later this year (they are currently using 7nm). It will be interesting to see the difference in performance and performance per watt, when both companies are on the same node.

Arm I believe helps a bit as well.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#336

Post by bee_rider »

iSnow wrote: post #35
cube2222 wrote: 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. They'll be running out of names for that thing. M1 Ultra II would be lame, so M1 Extreme? M1 Steve?

It seems kind of strange to have the "A" line go from smartphones to... iPads, and then have the "M" line go all the way from thin-and-lights proper workstations. Maybe they need a new letter. Call it the C1 -- "C" for compute, but also for Cupertino.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#337

Post by pphysch »

grork wrote: post #243
pphysch wrote: post #116

> This enables M1 Ultra to behave and be recognized by software as one chip, so developers don’t need to rewrite code to take advantage of its performance. There’s never been anything like it. Since when did the average developer care about how many sockets a mobo has...? Surely you still have to carefully pin processes and reason about memory access patterns if you want maximum performance.

I thought that to extract peak performance out of NUMA based systems, you had to get down-and-dirty with memory access & locality to ensure you don’t cross sockets for data thats stored in RAM attached to other CPUs. Or am I out of date on NUMA systems?

The big dies these days (M1 included) have non-uniform memory access baked in because they distribute the memory caches. If you want maximum performance, you will certainly want to be aware of which "performance core" you're running in.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#338

Post by xiphias2 »

ksubedi wrote: post #265
andrewxdiamond wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Knowing Apple, their version of "cloud" servers would probably be some sort of SDK that lets developers build applications on top of their hardware / software stack, and charge per usage. Kind of like Firebase, but with Apple's stack.

It will be a hard business decision for them, as at this point it's extremely hard to compete with Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Maybe they will buy up some cloud services provider, we'll see.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#339

Post by top_sigrid »

kristianp wrote: post #320

I wonder what clock rate the studio runs these chips at with the extra cooling. Frustrating that the marketing materials don't mention that.

This is a very little discussed question but one of the most interesting unknowns I think.

The pro and max come only in laptops, so the cooling difference should be quite significant, but also there is more chip and an interconnect to cool. Really looking forward to the in depth analysis of this.

Post reply on HN