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Apple M1 Ultra

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Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#721

Post by goosedragons »

momothereal wrote: post #479
unicornfinder wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention if you build your own PC you can upgrade the parts as and when, unlike with the new Mac where you'll eventually just be replacing the whole thing.

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.

You can still buy DDR3 new for not that much? 16GB is about $50 from numerous brands on Amazon at the moment. I bought some for an old laptop a couple months ago.

To do CPU upgrades you eventually have to replace the motherboard but you can keep using whatever your GPU/storage/other parts is. Sometimes that also means a RAM upgrade but it's still better than the literal nothing of modern Macs.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#722

Post by Symmetry »

zdw wrote: post #450
joshspankit wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watching the keynote I was almost thinking that Nvidia missed the boat when they chose not to sign whatever they had to to make OSX drivers. Thank you for recalibrating me to actual reality and not Apple Reality (tm)

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

Nvidia switched to lead free solder while retaining the same potting material. This led to a mismatch in thermal expansion coefficients which caused strain with repeated thermal cycles and eventually some of the solder bumps just broke. You could use a toaster to melt the solder again and reconnect them but that didn't fix the underlying problem.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#723

Post by kllrnohj »

oneplane wrote: post #584
kllrnohj wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

These aren't rack mount products aimed at cloud providers, they are essentially mini workstations. What are you calling "at scale" for this? You're basically always pairing one of these machines to one physical person sitting at it whose time is being paid for as well (even for a solo creator, time is still money). It's a terrible tradeoff to save pennies per hour on power to turn around and pay the person dollars more per hour waiting on results.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#724

Post by kllrnohj »

blitzar wrote: post #662
oneplane wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The cost of powering my 3090 for a year is now more than the cost (RRP) of a 3090.

Where do you live that power is anywhere close to that expensive? And are you overclocking your 3090?

Even assuming literal 24hr/day usage at a higher, "factory overclocked" 450w sustained, at a fairly high $0.30/kWh that's $1200/yr. Less than half the retail price of a 3090. And you can easily drop the power limit slider on a 3090 to take it down to 300-350w, likely without significantly impacting your workload performance. Not to mention in most countries the power cost is much less than $0.30/kWh.

At a more "realistic" 8 hours a day with local power pricing I'd have to run my 3090 for nearly 10 years just to reach the $2000 upgrade price an M1 Ultra costs over the base model M1 Max.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#725

Post by kllrnohj »

freemint wrote: post #677
fivea wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be fair that $2000 also gets you +32GB RAM, +512GB storage, and +10 CPU cores. Even though it's not an apples to apples comparison, keep in mind that a 1x32GB DIMM sells for less than 150$, and you can buy 1TB SSDs for less than 100$.

HBM2 is a tad more expensive, but yes.

Apple doesn't use HBM2, so not really relevant

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#726

Post by tambourine_man »

kllrnohj wrote: post #718
threeseed wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPU performance matters (Game performance, ML training perf) No one plays games on a Mac. And it has nothing to do with GPU performance but rather the fact that the audience simply isn't interested in gaming on it and so there is no economic incentive to target them. So the GPU performance that matters to Mac users and is relevant to Apple is not games but rather content creation, production etc.

M1's blender rendering performance also wasn't very good, though. Assuming the scene was small enough to fit in the smaller VRAM of competitive consumer GPUs anyway. Video content creation specifically is where it mostly achieves what the graphs indicate, and that's mostly a "well yeah, video decoder ASICs are really efficient. I'll take things we already knew for $100, Alex"

Blender didn’t even run on metal until a few months ago. It’s on beta now and the performance has increased substantially.

If the software is optimized, the graphics hold up fine.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#728

Post by mst »

Transisto wrote: post #683

Interesting how so many of their benchmarks are based on the number of 8k stream they can playback or edit at once but OSX doesn't support outputting to 8K resolution. Most likely crippled until Apple come up with their own 8K monitors.

The new Studio Display appears to be 5K so it wouldn't surprise me if the second generation of that will be 8K,

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#729

Post by mst »

MaxLeiter wrote: post #512
Flankk wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't want to repair, they want to replace. What people really want is a modular computer, the way things used to be. Right to repair is going to force legislation for schematics, at best. Even then I don't think it's going to happen. Like it or not, Apple builds integrated products now. You are the old man grumbling about the iMac not including a floppy drive.

I'm not complaining; I generally agree with you. But (I believe) for people to invest in Macs for servers they need to be able to fix and replace them faster than dealing with Apple would allow.

Given the hyperscalers' tendency to just leave failed machines in place in the rack because it's not worth the money to even swap it out, for specifically cloud type stuff the price point and density may be more relevant than the repairability.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#730

Post by zamalek »

kllrnohj wrote: post #718
threeseed wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPU performance matters (Game performance, ML training perf) No one plays games on a Mac. And it has nothing to do with GPU performance but rather the fact that the audience simply isn't interested in gaming on it and so there is no economic incentive to target them. So the GPU performance that matters to Mac users and is relevant to Apple is not games but rather content creation, production etc.

M1's blender rendering performance also wasn't very good, though. Assuming the scene was small enough to fit in the smaller VRAM of competitive consumer GPUs anyway. Video content creation specifically is where it mostly achieves what the graphs indicate, and that's mostly a "well yeah, video decoder ASICs are really efficient. I'll take things we already knew for $100, Alex"

The other elephant in the room is OptiX. Are Apple seriously indicating that they can outperform that with a iGPU?
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