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Apple M1 Ultra

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571–580 of 855 posts

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#571

Curious about the naming here, terms like "pro" "pro max" "max", "ultra" (hopefully there's no "pro ultra" and "ultra max" in the future) is very confusing and hard to know which one is more powerful than which, or if it's a power-level relationship. Is this on purpose or it's just bad naming? Is there example of good naming for this kind of situation?

It probably is on purpose. They all sound positive, full of goodness and speeds and synergies for today’s hip intelligentsia (which could be you!). You didn't settle for a MacBook with a harvested midrange chip, no, that’s a pro under your fingertips. What does that mean? Doesn’t matter, it makes you feel good.

It works for them because most of their products have only one or maybe two choices. It would never fly for white box sales, but Apple is not in that market.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shocks me how much payroll and cap-ex is spent on the M1 and how little is invested in getting TensorFlow/Pytorch to work on it. I could 10x my M1 purchases for our business if we could reliably run TensorFlow on it. Seems pretty shortsighted. The GPU claims wouldnt even need to be on parity with NVIDIA, it would just need to offer a vertically integrated alternative to having to use EC2.

> reliably run TensorFlow What reliability issues are you having with TensorFlow on M1 Macs?

We've followed five different instructional and documentation pages to make it happen and none seem to consistently install. Throw in a corporate system where you need IT for root access to make changes and it is game over. So i've got an M1-max fully loaded and cant get TF running on it.

Now i've got a team of data scientists in a fully MBP shop and we're holding off upgrades to M1 until this all gets resolved.

On my personal M1, I managed to make it work, but its hard to know the layers of changes made and what exactly allowed it to work.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#573
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

640GB should be enough for anyone.

Bill said it 40 years ago and here we are with 2 orders of prefix more of memory. I wonder if in next 40 years we'll get to 640 peta bytes

Finally, enough RAM for Microsoft Teams!

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it's hetrogeneity, system integration, pipeline width and instruction set as well.

Well, that’s a relief then, all any data center needs to run these days is Apple’s wide-ranging suite of in house services, such as applache, dovewin, pOSXgres, and SAPple.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#575
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would 80% of "the desktop market"—whatever that means—care about Ice Lake to begin with, or any high end chip at all?

What they definitely won't care is Apple hardware at Apple prices, specially outside first world countries.

Ya but they never have, and it seems a bit irrelevant in the context of this particular product. I'd see that being relevant if it was supposed to be a product with extremely broad appeal, but it isn't that even for first world countries.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#576

I wonder how long it will be until a CPU as capable as this one will be the required baseline for ordinary apps. Is there any hope that the upgrade treadmill will stop any time soon?

There will always be apps that use all the power you throw at them. Raytracing scales pretty much linearly with the core count. Compression does too. But your everyday apps like your browser have been fast for at least a decade.

Yes, but your current browser is probably not very fast on a Nehalem. That is what they are lamenting. Will a M1 Ultra one day be too slow to run Calculator?

Answer: Just wait for some genius to figure out how to run Electron inside Electron, and port Calculator to it.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#577
What are people doing with these CPUs on a desktop? I'm just watching videos, surfing, and doing some programming -- on a 5 year old Ryzen with 32GB and it seems perfectly fine. For my productivity needs, performance is mostly about I/O speed and so switching to SSD and then NVME was the biggest boost for me (Linux at work).

When I get home, it's all about the GPU on my gaming PC (Windows). It's just that CPU just doesn't seem to be a huge bottleneck for me on the desktop anymore. Are Mac's different somehow where they need more CPU?

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#578
post #477

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Wait, you can get a 3090?

Yeah. They've been in stock for months here (though the retailers are charging the inflated prices too), e.g. https://www.computeruniverse.net/en/c/hardware-components/nv...

I mean at that price…yeah it’s “in stock” but it sure as hell ain’t available

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#580

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 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. And that is expected, a lot has to be reserved for USB devices.

Yeah can’t say I’ve ever seen a computer rated for the exact amount it’ll be drawn at. They have to leave room.
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