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Apple M1 Ultra

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Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#641

Post by makeitdouble »

delusional wrote: post #308
dheera wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> USB C/Thunderbolt is the new PCIe bus Oh please hell no. I have to unplug and plug my USB-C camera at least once a day because it gets de-enumerated very randomly. Using the best cables I can get my hands on. File transfers to/from USB-C hard drives suddenly stop mid-transfer and corrupt the file system. Don't ask me why, I'm just reporting my experiences, this is the reality of my life that UX researchers don't se…

You have a very exotic configuration if you plugged your webcam and thumb drives into PCIe slots.

Webcam are often positioned as cheapish accessories so PCIe is exotic, but for internal drives (parent's comment wasn't about "thumb" drives) it's pretty mainstream: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=pcie+drive

TBH, even a thumb drive would have me pissed if it disconnected at random times. That's what I hated about using the SD slot of MacBooks to host a semi-permanent drive.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#642

Post by dehrmann »

iSnow wrote: post #35
cube2222 wrote: post #4

Looks like all the people saying "just start fusing those M1 CPU's into bigger ones" were right, that's basically what they did here (fused two M1 Max'es together). And since the presenter mentioned the Mac Pro would come on another day, I wonder if they'll just do 4x M1 Max for that.

>I wonder if they'll just do 4x M1 Max for that. They'll be running out of names for that thing. M1 Ultra II would be lame, so M1 Extreme? M1 Steve?

Plus Ultra would at have historical precedent.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#643

Post by makeitdouble »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #298
dheera wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> USB C/Thunderbolt is the new PCIe bus Oh please hell no. I have to unplug and plug my USB-C camera at least once a day because it gets de-enumerated very randomly. Using the best cables I can get my hands on. File transfers to/from USB-C hard drives suddenly stop mid-transfer and corrupt the file system. Don't ask me why, I'm just reporting my experiences, this is the reality of my life that UX researchers don't se…

Friendly reminder that USB-C is a form factor, and thunderbolt is the actual transfer protocol. Sounds like you're listing the common complaints with usb-3 over usb-c peripherals, which are not a suitable replacement for PCIe. Thunderbolt is something different, more powerful & more reliable.

Thunderbolt is more reliable, but still weirdly unstable on the software support sometimes. I don't get why we still have external monitor detection issues on macs at this day and age for instance.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#644

Post by pjmlp »

hajile wrote: post #611
outworlder wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Apple is the world's biggest and most profitable gaming company. For every AAA gamer, there are a hundred casual gamers (one reason why Nintendo consoles run circles around Sony and Microsoft). Apple has invested billions into their gaming division. The big thing they need right now is a new version of Metal that gets feature parity with Vulkan or DX. Also of note, there are very persistent rumors of an upcoming VR h…

In what concerns developer productivitiy, it is Vulkan that needs to get feature parity with Metal.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#645

Post by momothereal »

fivea wrote: post #638
momothereal wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believed that until I realized I couldn't individually upgrade my CPU or RAM because I have a mobo with LGA1150 socket and only supports DDR3 (and it's only 6 years old). So eventually you still have to "replace everything" to upgrade a PC.

> I believed that until I realized I couldn't individually upgrade my CPU or RAM because I have a mobo with LGA1150 socket and only supports DDR3 (and it's only 6 years old). DDR4 was released in 2014, which would suggest you purchased your mobo two full years after DDR3 was already deemed legacy technology and being phased out. Also LGA1150 was succeeded by LGA1151 in 2015, which means you bought your mobo one full…

Yes, they entered the market around those years, but what does that change? DDR3 and LGA1150 were not deemed "legacy" the day DDR4 and LGA1151 motherboards entered the market. They were 2-3x the price, and DDR3 dominated RAM sales until at least 2017. In fact, the reason DDR4 took so long to enter the market was incompatibility with existing hardware, and higher costs to upgrade. [1] I didn't go out of my way to buy "legacy hardware" because they weren't, at the time.

Point being, PC-building makes it easier to replace and repair individual components, but in time, upgrading to newer generations means spending over 50% of the original cost on motherboard, CPU, PSU, RAM. Not too different than dropping $3K on a new Mac.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20101219085440/http://www.xbitla...

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#646

Post by gilgoomesh »

batiudrami wrote: post #496
mwint wrote: 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.

On raw Metal performance, yes it does get the same performance. The benchmarks showed this.

The problem was the implication that you'd get 3070 gaming performance. That was never going to be true because of the un-optimisation tax for games on Mac.

There doesn't exist a AAA game built for Metal and the Mac. The closest are games like World of Warcraft, Divinity Original Sin 2 – and even they are just "good ports" not originally designed for Mac (and are far from AAA graphics). This is why on Intel Macs, games under Bootcamp always ran 30%-50% faster, even though the hardware was the same.

Games on M1 Max run as you'd expect – about 30% slower than a 3070 for the same old reasons (and some new ones, like not being compiled for Apple Silicon at all). The GPU is about the same speed as a 3070 and it's doing what you'd expect, given the 30% unoptimization-tax workload.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#647

Post by fivea »

momothereal wrote: post #645
fivea wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believed that until I realized I couldn't individually upgrade my CPU or RAM because I have a mobo with LGA1150 socket and only supports DDR3 (and it's only 6 years old). DDR4 was released in 2014, which would suggest you purchased your mobo two full years after DDR3 was already deemed legacy technology and being phased out. Also LGA1150 was succeeded by LGA1151 in 2015, which means you bought your mobo one full…

Yes, they entered the market around those years, but what does that change? DDR3 and LGA1150 were not deemed "legacy" the day DDR4 and LGA1151 motherboards entered the market. They were 2-3x the price, and DDR3 dominated RAM sales until at least 2017. In fact, the reason DDR4 took so long to enter the market was incompatibility with existing hardware, and higher costs to upgrade. [1] I didn't go out of my way to buy…

> Yes, they entered the market around those years, but what does that change?

It means the hardware was purchased after it started to be discontinued.

It's hardly a reasonable take, and makes little sense, to complain how you can't upgrade hardware that was already being discontinued before you bought it.

> DDR3 and LGA1150 were not deemed "legacy" the day DDR4 and LGA1151 motherboards entered the market.

I googled for LGA1150 before I posted the message, and one of the first search results is a post on Linux tech tips dating way back to 2015 on whether LGA1150 was already dead.

And you purchased the Mobo one year after that.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#648

Post by momothereal »

fivea wrote: post #647
momothereal wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they entered the market around those years, but what does that change? DDR3 and LGA1150 were not deemed "legacy" the day DDR4 and LGA1151 motherboards entered the market. They were 2-3x the price, and DDR3 dominated RAM sales until at least 2017. In fact, the reason DDR4 took so long to enter the market was incompatibility with existing hardware, and higher costs to upgrade. [1] I didn't go out of my way to buy…

> Yes, they entered the market around those years, but what does that change? It means the hardware was purchased after it started to be discontinued. It's hardly a reasonable take, and makes little sense, to complain how you can't upgrade hardware that was already being discontinued before you bought it. > DDR3 and LGA1150 were not deemed "legacy" the day DDR4 and LGA1151 motherboards entered the market. I googled f…

I think you are forgetting the context of my replies. I'm not saying it's unreasonable to have to upgrade discontinued hardware, even if you have to do it all at once. My take is that it's not too different from having to replace a Mac when the new generation comes in (which is usually every ~5 years for Apple, not too far from my own system's lifetime). Being able to upgrade individual parts through generations is a pipe dream.

Also, we must have a different interpretation of "discontinued", because DDR3 and LGA1150 were still produced, sold, and dominated sales for way long after I bought that system. At the time (and for the next 1-2 years), consumer DDR4 was a luxury component that most no existing hardware supported.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#649

Post by 64bittechie »

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#650

Post by ohgodplsno »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #482
kllrnohj wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

WoW isn't exactly the pinnacle of demanding performance. It's like saying you can run counter strike at 200FPS: congrats, so can everyone else, without paying $2000
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