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Apple M1 Ultra

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Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#421

Post by Macha »

kllrnohj wrote: post #360
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/tcapel…

An M1 Ultra is $2000 incrementally over a M1 Max, so there is no price gap, even with the inflated prices 3090s actually go for today.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#422

Post by kllrnohj »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #345
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... .

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

Unless you're running a farm of these, the power cost differences is going to be largely unnoticeable. Like even in a country with very expensive power, you're talking a ~$0.10/USD per hour premium to have a 3090 at full bore. And that's assuming the M1 Ultra manages to achieve the same performance as the 3090, which is going to be extremely workload dependent going off of the existing M1 GPU results.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#423

Post by nightfly »

sorry_outta_gas wrote: post #406
FridgeSeal wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hahaha good luck getting your hands on a 30xx series card though. Here in Australia, 3090’s go for close to 3k on their own.

We've been buying tons of 3090s at work for about 1.6 USD- 2k USD without to much trouble

> tons

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#424

Post by ricardobeat »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #234
alwillis wrote: post #212

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…

The vast majority of developers today has a laptop as their main machine. Performance-per-watt is absolutely crucial there.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#425

Post by dmz73 »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #365
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... .

Hahaha good luck getting your hands on a 30xx series card though. Here in Australia, 3090’s go for close to 3k on their own.

And cheapest Mac Studio with M1 ultra is A$6000 so yes....

20-Core CPU 48-Core GPU 32-Core Neural Engine

    64GB unified memory
    1TB SSD storage¹
    Front: Two Thunderbolt 4 ports, one SDXC card slot
    Back: Four Thunderbolt 4 ports, two USB-A ports, one HDMI port, one 10Gb Ethernet port, one 3.5-mm headphone jack
A$6,099.00

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#426

Post by neetdeth »

altairprime wrote: post #391
bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of Apple's historic MO has been to not invest in areas they don't see themselves having a competitive advantage in. Now that they can make gaming happen with a very low wattage budget they may well try to enter that space in earnest.

The difference between an Apple TV and a Mac Mini is essentially how powerful of Apple silicon it has, whether it runs tvOS or macOS, and whether it has HDMI out or not. The Studio is a more compact form factor than any modern 4K gaming console. If they chose to ship something in that form factor with tvOS, HDMI, and an M1 Max/Ultra, it would be a very competitive console on the market — if game developers could be p…

This all makes sense, and in that context it’s unfortunate that Apple’s relationship with the largest game tools company, Epic, is... strained, to say the least.

They could always choose to remedy that with a generous buyout offer.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#427

Post by bouncing »

masklinn wrote: post #188
1123581321 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~15-20% faster if releases start this year, plus whatever optimizations learned from M1 in wide release such as perhaps tuning the silicon allocation given the various system. If next year, M2 or M3 (get it) will use Taiwan Semi's so-called 3nm, which should be a significant jump just like 7-5nm several years ago for the phones and iPads.

Hopefully one of the changes of the M2 design will be a better decorrelation of RAM and cores count. They’d need that anyway for a Mac Pro replacement (128GB wouldn’t cut it for everyone), but even for smaller config it’s frustrating being limited to 16G on the M1 and 32 on the Pro. Just because I need more RAM doesn’t mean I want the extra size and heat or whatever.

For my purposes, the biggest drawback of using an SoC is being constrained to just the unified memory.

Since I run a lot of memory intensive tasks but few CPU or GPU bound tasks, a regular m1 with way more memory would be ideal.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#428

Post by gameswithgo »

Geee wrote: post #307

This is insane. They claim that its GPU performance tops the RTX 3090, while using 200W less power. I happen to have this GPU on my PC and not only it costs over $3000, but its also very power-hungry and loud. Currently, you need this kind of GPU performance for high resolution VR gaming at 90 fps, but its just barely enough. This means that the GPU will run very loudly and heat up the room, and running games like HL…

unless it has its own gddr6 it won’t be anything like a 3090 for games

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#430

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

paulmd wrote: post #353
guelo wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

There is a third variable: Apple is putting ram much closer to the CPU than AMD. This has the advantage that you get lower latency (and slightly higher bandwidth), but the downside that you're currently limited to 128gb of ram, compared to 2tb for threadripper (4tb for epic). Amd's 3d cache that they're launching in a few months will be interesting since it lets the L3 go up a ton.
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