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Apple M1 Ultra

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Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#581

Post by madars »

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…

Won't there be a Pluton-based anti-cheating solution? Seems like a natural opportunity for Microsoft.

Edit: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/01/pluto... says

> Microsoft already used Pluton to secure Xbox Ones and Azure Sphere microcontrollers against attacks that involve people with physical access opening device cases and performing hardware hacks that bypass security protections. Such hacks are usually carried out by device owners who want to run unauthorized games or programs for cheating.

So initially you could have Pluton-only servers and down the line non-Pluton hardware will simply be obsolete.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#582

Post by kube-system »

fomine3 wrote: post #542
oneplane wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Note that Geforce RTX on cloud is prohibited by Nvidia.

How do they functionally do that? I googled and found this?: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/rtx-server-gaming/

Honestly asking because I’m kind of out of the nvidia loop at the moment.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#583

Post by ja27 »

wil421 wrote: post #493
zdw wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nVidia missed the boat in releasing a bunch of "replace the whole laptop logic board" chips that died in the 2008-2012 timeframe and annoyed a whole host of OEMs: https://www.techpowerup.com/64683/nvidia-admits-to-selling-f... Apple specifically: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203254

My 2011 MPB 15” suffered from the Nvidia GPU issue. It was so bad my computer wouldn’t boot properly and the Apple Geniuses kept denying the claim because it couldn’t finish a test. Anyway, it was still my longest lived Laptop. My Sony VAIOs were great but I liked that Mac better.

By 2011 it was AMD(ATI) not Nvidia. I had one that failed but Apple did the replacement for free.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#584

Post by oneplane »

kllrnohj wrote: post #537
oneplane wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For the market this is aimed at, performance per watt is really irrelevant. Performance per dollar or just outright performance are far more important the vast majority of the time. That's how we ended up with 125w+ CPUs and 300w GPUs in the first place.

There are dedicated ML cards from Nvidia for that, far most powerful than a 3090, so that is indeed true. But PPW is never irrelevant when someone is doing things at scale, so the question becomes: who is doing this for money but somehow not at scale?

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#585

Post by forrestthewoods »

ricardobeat wrote: post #424
forrestthewoods wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That’s cool. I am not the vast majority of developers. I am me. I use a desktop for high-end game development. I don’t give a shit about web development or laptop development. I care about compiling large C++ projects as fast as possible.

I agree that most developers are web/mobile developers who use a laptop. That’s great. I am an increasingly niche developer.

The root comment was a comparison against Threadripper. Normal developers should not waste money on a Threadripper. If someone is a niche developer that warrants a Threadripper then pointing out that most developers don’t need a Threadripper is a waste of time.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#586

Post by oneplane »

fomine3 wrote: post #542
oneplane wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Note that Geforce RTX on cloud is prohibited by Nvidia.

Yep, that's true. You have to use the DC SKUs which (IIRC) aren't the same silicon either. Worse: some of the server SKUs are restricted for market segmentation where your ML and hashing performance is bad but video is good (and the other way around).

The silly thing about it is that most of the special engines can now be flashed into an FPGA which is becoming more common in the big clouds so special offload engines aren't that big of a deal when they are missing. So in some cases you can have your cake and eat it too; massive parallel processing and specialised processing in the same server box without resorting to special tricks (as long as it's not suddenly getting blocked in future software updates).

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#587

Post by Gigachad »

hobobaggins wrote: post #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 d…

The Mac studio seems targeted at pro users doing things like video editing and CAD. The M1 regular is good but its insufficient in a lot of ways. It can only power one video output, it's capped at 16GB memory, and if you try to do anything sufficiently demanding like gaming, it really shows its limits.

If you are doing CAD, things like fluid/particle physics simulations can really slam the CPU. The M1 Ultra isn't marketed to the normal user just doing some web browsing. Its the top tier chip for people who find the M1 insufficient.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#588

Post by fomine3 »

kube-system wrote: post #582
fomine3 wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that Geforce RTX on cloud is prohibited by Nvidia.

How do they functionally do that? I googled and found this?: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/rtx-server-gaming/ Honestly asking because I’m kind of out of the nvidia loop at the moment.

They disallow such usage for "GeForce" by proprietary driver's EULA, and they limit open source driver performance (IIRC they require signed binary blob).

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#589

Post by Melatonic »

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…

I am sure it has great GPU performance for what it is but comparing it to a top Nvidia chip just seems ridiculous on Apples part. Apple I think is going to have trouble conquering back the semi pro workstation market they abandoned not that many years ago if they do not start offering M1 chips along with Nvidia GPUs.

Once again we get a Mac Semi-Pro Mini (seems like the Studio is more like a replacement for the Trashcan) that their marketing implies is maybe as good as a Mac Pro but is obviously not. It does look a lot better this time around - at least it has more ports :-D

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#590

Post by marcan_42 »

mhh__ wrote: post #215
marcan_42 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 1st gen 16 core Threadripper is barely faster than an M1 Pro/Max at kernel builds, so a 64 core TR3 should handily double the M1 Ultra performance. But you know, I'm still happy to double my current build perf in a small box I can stick in my closet. Ordered one :-)

How many threads are actually getting utilized in those kernel builds? I don't work on the kernel enough to have intuition in mind but people make wildly optimistic assumptions about how compilation stresses processors. Also 1st gen threadrippers are getting on a bit now, surely. It's a ~6 year old microarchitecture.

All of them. The CPU graph is pegged for most of the compilation.
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