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Apple M1 Ultra

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Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#351

Post by sudosysgen »

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.

Prebuilt 3090 builds can often be found for less than the cost of the corresponding parts.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#352

Post by pathartl »

LegitShady wrote: post #299
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]…

I always take such claims with a grain of salt anyways. It usualy on one specific benchmark. I wait for better benchmarks always instead of trusting the marketing

Even if their claims are accurate, it usually has the asterisk of *Only with Apple Metal 2. I honestly cannot understand why Apple decided they needed to write their own graphics API when the rest of the world is working hard to get away from the biggest proprietary graphics API.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#353

Post by paulmd »

guelo wrote: post #266
willcipriano wrote: post #87

Is it actually more powerful than a top of the line threadripper[0] or is that not a "personal computer" CPU by this definition? I feel like 64 cores would beat 20 on some workloads even if the 20 were way faster in single core performance. [0] https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3...

It's bad for competition that only Apple gets to use TSMC's 5nm process. Though what's really bad is that Intel and Samsung haven't been able to compete with TSMC.

AMD will be on TSMC N5P next year, which will give them node parity with Apple (who will be releasing A15 on N5P this year), and actually a small node lead over the current N5-based A14 products. So we will get to test the "it's all just node lead guys, nothing wrong with x86!!!" theory.

Don't worry though there will still be room to move the goalposts with "uhhh, but, Apple is designing for high IPC and low clocks, it's totally different and x86 could do it if they wanted to but, uhhh, they don't!".

(I'm personally of the somewhat-controversial opinion that x86 can't really be scaled in the same super-wide-core/super-deep-reorder-buffer fashion that ARM opens up and the IPC gap will persist as a result. The gap is very wide, higher than 3x in floating-point benchmarks, it isn't something that's going to be easy to close.)

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#354

Post by teilo »

olliej wrote: post #346
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 )

It's literally not.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#357

Post by outworlder »

olliej wrote: post #346
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 )

If 'gluing cores together' were this simple, every random desktop CPU would have 20 cores. That's not the case.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#358

Post by pathartl »

bee_rider wrote: post #342
marcan_42 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They would never do that

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#359

Post by _joel »

airstrike wrote: post #347
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

FSVO fun if you use Newegg

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#360

Post by kllrnohj »

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]…

The GPU claims on the M1 Pro & Max were, let's say, cherry picked to put it nicely. The M1 Ultra claims already look suspicious since the GPU graph tops out at ~120W & the CPU graph tops out at ~60W yet the M1 Studio is rated for 370W continuous power draw.

Since you mention ML specifically, looking at some benchmarks out there (like https://tlkh.dev/benchmarking-the-apple-m1-max#heading-gpu & https://wandb.ai/tcapelle/apple_m1_pro/reports/Deep-Learning... ), even if the M1 Ultra is 2x the performance of the M1 Max (so perfect scaling), it would still be far behind the 3090. Like completely different ballpark behind. But of course there is that price & power gap, but the primary strength of the M1 GPUs seems to really be from the essentially very large VRAM amount. So if your working set doesn't fit in an RTX GPU of your desired budget, then the M1 is a good option. If, however, you're not VRAM limited, then Nvidia still offers far more performance.

Well, assuming you can actually buy any of these, anyway. The M1 Ultra might win "by default" by simply being purchasable at all unlike pretty much every other GPU :/

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