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Apple M1 Ultra

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Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#591
post #493
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.

I pulled the logic board out and baked it in the oven and it lasted another 7 months before needing another bake. By then I moved onto a newer macbook.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#592
post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember last time Apple put out these weird relative performance charts, and we all thought they were hiding something? The M1 announcement. They turned out to be pretty accurate. So I’ll wait and see real benchmarks, but it wouldn’t surprise me if this does have incredible performance.

Their GPU claims weren’t accurate though. The M1 max doesn’t have real world performance anything like the 3070 as claimed.

For what its worth, they were comparing the M1 max to nvidia's mobile 3070, which is a completely different card than the desktop 3070.

My understanding was that it was a reasonable comparison in some benchmarks, though when plugged in to power the mobile 3070 still had more headroom.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#593

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.

Plus they are running out of M1 superlatives. They’ll have to go to M2 to avoid launching M1 Plaid.

M1 Series One

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#594
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…

Too bad that historically Apple has not given any attention to Mac gaming.

Once they are confident of their graphics advantage I think they will enter the console market against Microsoft and Sony with Apple tv console

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1000 bucks for 45 mins work? Maybe 1.5hrs tops? I didn't realise their wage was >500 an hour?

To be fair here, there is more to it than just assembly. You have to spec out the parts, ensuring compatibility. Manage multiple orders and deliveries. Assemble it. Install drivers/configuration specific packages. All of these things are easier today than ten or twenty years ago - but assigning it to a random mid-level engineer and I'd set my project management gamble on half a day for the busiest, most focused engin…

Given that the last time I put together a PC computer was 2006, it'd probably take me DAYS to spec out a machine because of all the rabbit holes I'd be exploring, esp with all the advances in computer tech.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#596
My concern is cooling. Any reason to believe that this new chip will run cool and not be drowned in thermal paste when installed? My Intel i7 Macbook Pro loves to idle at 65 C, and some light browsing will kick that up to 80 C, which worries me.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

Could be worth tracking what you did and make a new set of instructions, and trying to reproduce with a fresh install.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#598
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My workstation has a 3990x. Our "world" build is slightly faster on my M1 Max. https://twitter.com/kiratpandya/status/1457438725680480257 The 3990x runs a bit faster on the initial compile stage but the linking is single threaded and the M1 Max catches up at that point. I expect the M1 Ultra to crush the 3990x on compile time.

Are both cases compiling to the same target architecture? If not, you may well be comparing the relative performance of different compiler backends instead of comparing the performance of your CPUs. (+ now I see it's rust: how parallel is your build, really?)

> now I see it's rust: how parallel is your build, really?

Not the OP but I install a lot of Rust projects with Cargo and recently did some benchmarking on DigitalOcean's compute-optimized VMs. Going from 8 cores to 32 cores was a little disappointing:

Bat (~40 crates): 68s -> 61s

Nushell (486 crates): 157s -> 106s

Compilation starts out highly parallel and then quickly drops down to a small number of cores.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#599
post #583
post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am certain AMD like most responsible vendors (Seagate) also worked with Apple to correct the issue. Nvidia's issue was that it told all of the laptop vendors to just deal with it. It's why they are hated by other vendors and AMD/Intel worked hard to keep them from creating x86 cpus.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#600

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]…

Doesn't "electricity bill" dominate server/DL/nining datacenter workload costs these days - so perf/W is what really counts? The long-prophecised ARM apocalypse may finally be at hand.
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