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Apple M1 Ultra

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Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#481

Post by paulmd »

altcognito wrote: post #476
paulmd wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wattage doesn't really tell you how difficult it is to cool a part anymore. 11th-gen Intel is really easy to cool despite readily going to 200W+. Zen3 is hard to cool even at 60W. Thermal density plays a huge role, the size of the chips is going down faster than the wattage, so thermal density is going up every generation even if you keep the same number of transistors. And everyone is still putting more transistors…

The Zen 3 stock coolers work pretty well. I've never had a problem. Looking it up though I do see a lot of concerns with the heat they generate. I can only conclude I don't push my chip very hard (which, honestly, I probably don't) I've been happy with the AMDs I purchased over the past 4 years, we'll see how they hold up and how this next gen comes out. I did see that the recent Intels are quite competitive which is…

yup, the correct answer here is people need to stop being worried about the thermals as a metric in themselves, and look at the performance their chip is generating. If your chip is running at 90C, but you're hitting 100 ScoreMarks, and attaching a 5hp chiller to it lets you hit 105 ScoreMarks, that's not really worth it.

Yeah, longevity, blah blah, but laptop chips are designed to sit above 90C under load, it's fine.

Just saying that "how hard it is to cool" doesn't solely depend on power consumption anymore. Heat density is making that harder and harder, even if power consumption stays the same.

What does improve though is how much heat it pumps into your room. Yeah, a Rocket Lake at 200W might be roughly as hard to cool as an AMD at 90W or whatever... but one is still putting 200W into your room and the other is still putting 90W. Temperatures are not the same thing as power dissipation either. I don't like having my gaming PC running in my room during the summer, and I'm actually looking at maybe running cables through the walls to have it in the basement instead. I also have a 5700G and some NUCs that are much lower power that I prefer to use for surfing and shitposting.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#482

Post by kitsunesoba »

kllrnohj wrote: post #386
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 gaming performance of the existing M1 GPUs is, well, crap (like far behind the other laptop competition, to say nothing of desktop GPUs). The Ultra probably isn't changing that, since it's very unlikely to be a hardware problem and instead a software ecosystem & incentives problem.

I don’t think the performance is that bad. On a whim I tried running WoW on a 16” M1 Pro MBP and it consistently got FPS higher than the refresh rate (120hz) with the game rendering at 1x scale and most effects maxed out. Granted, that’s not as good as what you’d get with a mobile RTX 3080 or something, but it’s nothing to sneeze at for a laptop that doesn’t get scorching hot and doesn’t sound like a leaf blower when being pushed.

I could definitely see the Max and Ultra with a beefier cooling system (like the Studio’s) having pretty respectable performance.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#483

Post by t3rabytes »

flipgimble wrote: post #442
miohtama wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has now too much money and is running out of core business areas. Expect more investing in non-Apple areas like gaming, cars, etc. Though every video game company on the planet hates them because of App Store terms.

"every video game company" = Epic Games, and mostly because they don't like to pay overhead for their Fortnite loot boxes that most parents wish they could have some control over. I don't have allegiance to either company mostly because they don't care about me, just my money.

Epic doesn’t do lootboxes, next.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#484

Post by bastardoperator »

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.

I bought two on ebay no problem

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#485

Post by martinald »

arcticbull wrote: post #80
dagmx wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few points to make... - the shared CPU+GPU RAM doesn't necessarily mean the GPU has to eat up system RAM when in use, because it can share addressing. So whereas the current Mac pro would require two copies of data (CPU+GPU) the new Mac studio can have one. Theoretically. - they do have very significant video decoder blocks. That means that you may use less RAM than without since you can keep frames compressed in f…

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…

I agree, I got a 8GB mac mini (was really just curious to see the M1 in action and the 16GB model was backordered badly) and it performs extremely well memory wise. I often use 12GB+ and I never notice unless I check activity monitor.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#486

Post by kitsunesoba »

OOPMan wrote: post #461
idonotknowwhy wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Valve can port proton to mac

That would not help. The reason proton works so well is because Linux on x86 and Windows on x86....are both on x86. Proton on ARM Mac's would involve Rosetta and while that does a surprisingly good job of running x86 on ARM I'm not sure it's up to the job of running games at high speed...

Games seem playable running through Microsoft’s inferior x86 compatibility layer in a Windows ARM VM on M1 Pro/Max, so I don’t see how running games through Rosetta would be any worse.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#487

Post by tenuousemphasis »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #441
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…

I wonder how it compares for crypto mining, and if that group would be buying these up

Poorly compared to an ASIC which has the SHA-256 algorithm encoded as hardware circuits. Maybe better than GPUs when it comes to mining Ethereum or others where ASICs aren't as prevalent.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#488

Post by mehmetoguzderin »

apohn wrote: post #396
kllrnohj wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The 3090 also can do fp16 and the M1 series only supports fp32, so the M1 series of chips basically needs more RAM for the same batch sizes. So it isn't an Oranges to Oranges comparison. Back when that M1 MAX vs 3090 blog post was released, I ran those same tests on the M1 Pro (16GB), Google Colab Pro, and free GPUs (RTX4000, RTX5000) on the Paperspace Pro plan. To make a long story short, I don't think buying any M1…

> The 3090 also can do fp16 and the M1 series only supports fp32

Apple Silicon (including base M1) actually has great FP16 support at the hardware level, including conversions. So it is wrong to say it only supports FP32.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#490

Post by oneplane »

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…

Yeah, there are a lot more parameters here than just 'there are two chips and one is the bestestst', like the availability you pointed out.

There is raw performance, but there is also performance per watt, availability and scalability (which is both good and bad - M1 is available, but there is no M1 Ultra cloud available). If you want a multi-use setup, an RTX makes more sense than most other options, if you can get one and at a reasonable price. If you want a Mac, the M1U is going to give you the best GPU. In pretty much all other setups there are so many other variables it's hard to recommend anything.

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