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

341–350 of 855 posts

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#341

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

whoisburbansky wrote: post #301
polyrand wrote: post #258

I think the GPU claims are interesting. According to the graph's footer, the M1 Ultra was compared to an RTX 3090. If the performance/wattage claims are correct, I'm wondering if the Mac Studio could become an "affordable" personal machine learning workstation (which also won't make the electricity bill skyrocket). If Pytorch becomes stable and easy to use on Apple Silicon [0][1], it could be an appealing choice. [0]…

Cursory look gives you a ~$3500 price tag for a gaming PC with a 3090 [1], vs. at least $4k for a Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra. Roughly the same ballpark, but I wouldn't call the M1 Ultra more affordable given those numbers. 1. https://techguided.com/best-rtx-3090-gaming-pc/#:~:text=With... .

> Cursory look gives you a ~$3500 price tag for a gaming PC with a 3090

That 3500 is for a DIY build. So, sure, you can always save on labor and hassle, but prebuilt 3090 rigs commonly cost over 4k. And if you don't want to buy from Amazon because of their notorious history of mixing components from different suppliers and reselling used returns, oof, good luck even getting one.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#342

Post by bee_rider »

marcan_42 wrote: post #172
kasperni wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

I've been saying 4x M1 Max is not a thing and never will be a thing ever since the week I got my M1 Max and saw that the IRQ controller was only instantiated to support 2 dies, but everyone kept parroting that nonsense the Bloomberg reporter said about a 4-die version regardless... Turns out I was right. The Mac Pro chip will be a different thing/die.

Could they do a multi-socket board for the Mac Pro?

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#343

Post by Teknoman117 »

e4e78a06 wrote: post #324
Teknoman117 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something is seriously fishy about those geekbench results. 24-core scores 20k, 32-core scores 22.3k, and 64-core score 25k. Something isn't scaling there.

Many GB5 (and real world) tasks are memory bandwidth bottlenecked, which greatly favors M1 Max because it has over double a Threadripper's memory bandwidth.

Sort of. The CPU complex of the M1 Max can achieve ~200 GB/s, you can only hit the 400 GB/s mark by getting the GPU involved.

At the same time the Threadrippers also have a gargantuan amount of cache that can be accessed at several hundred gigabytes per second per core. Obviously not as nice as being able to hit DRAM at that speed.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#344

Post by pphysch »

aidenn0 wrote: post #213
AdrianB1 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CPU as in core or socket? These days most CPUs are "many-CPU-cores-in-1-socket" and having X CPU cores over 1 or 2 sockets make a small difference, but software does not care about sockets.

Plenty of enterprise software is licensed on a per-socket basis.

And if they read this press release they will probably try to switch to per-core licensing.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#345

Post by gjsman-1000 »

whoisburbansky wrote: post #301
polyrand wrote: post #258

I think the GPU claims are interesting. According to the graph's footer, the M1 Ultra was compared to an RTX 3090. If the performance/wattage claims are correct, I'm wondering if the Mac Studio could become an "affordable" personal machine learning workstation (which also won't make the electricity bill skyrocket). If Pytorch becomes stable and easy to use on Apple Silicon [0][1], it could be an appealing choice. [0]…

Cursory look gives you a ~$3500 price tag for a gaming PC with a 3090 [1], vs. at least $4k for a Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra. Roughly the same ballpark, but I wouldn't call the M1 Ultra more affordable given those numbers. 1. https://techguided.com/best-rtx-3090-gaming-pc/#:~:text=With... .

They are also absolutely massive and probably much more expensive long-term because of the massively increased electricity usage.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#346

Post by olliej »

xedrac wrote: post #302

While I'm not on the Apple train, I love how they are pushing AMD, Intel and NVidia out of complacency. No more of these little tiny incremental improvements to milk the industry. Bring your BEST to the table or get left behind!

I’m find the slow drip of M1 extensions to be kind of ehn - like the tick part of the old intel cycle, only in this case it’s literally just gluing more of the same cores together (obviously work is involved, but not at the level of an architecture rev)

(edit: calm down people, I recognize it's impressive, but it's just not as fun an announcement as an architecture rev, which I was hoping for after a year :D )

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#347

Post by airstrike »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #341
whoisburbansky wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cursory look gives you a ~$3500 price tag for a gaming PC with a 3090 [1], vs. at least $4k for a Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra. Roughly the same ballpark, but I wouldn't call the M1 Ultra more affordable given those numbers. 1. https://techguided.com/best-rtx-3090-gaming-pc/#:~:text=With... .

> Cursory look gives you a ~$3500 price tag for a gaming PC with a 3090 That 3500 is for a DIY build. So, sure, you can always save on labor and hassle, but prebuilt 3090 rigs commonly cost over 4k. And if you don't want to buy from Amazon because of their notorious history of mixing components from different suppliers and reselling used returns, oof, good luck even getting one.

You mean I get to save AND have fun building my own PC?

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#348

Post by Aaargh20318 »

paulmd wrote: post #271
kasperni wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

Probably not on the same design as the current M1 series, at least not for the Mac Pro. The current x86 pro supports up to 1.5TB of RAM. I don’t think they will be able to match that using a SoC with integrated RAM. There will probably be a different CPU design for the Pro with an external memory bus.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#349

Post by e4e78a06 »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #343
e4e78a06 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many GB5 (and real world) tasks are memory bandwidth bottlenecked, which greatly favors M1 Max because it has over double a Threadripper's memory bandwidth.

Sort of. The CPU complex of the M1 Max can achieve ~200 GB/s, you can only hit the 400 GB/s mark by getting the GPU involved. At the same time the Threadrippers also have a gargantuan amount of cache that can be accessed at several hundred gigabytes per second per core. Obviously not as nice as being able to hit DRAM at that speed.

That cache is not uniform time access. It costs over 100ns to cross the IO die to access another die's L3, almost as much as going to main memory. In practice you have to treat it as 8 separate 32 MB L3 caches.

Also, not everything fits into cache.

Post reply on HN