Apple M1 Ultra • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#791

Post by crmd » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 6:10 PM UTC

kingaillas wrote: post #788

the_af wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one plays games on a Mac. My wife does (I play games on Linux). I have friends who own Macs who reluctantly dual boot to Windows just to play some games -- they would completely ditch Windows if they could just play every game on Mac. I see there are Mac games on Steam. All of this points to the situation being more nuanced than "no one plays games on Mac".

I interpret these sorts of statements to be short for "a statistically insignificant number of people play games on macos (or linux)" rather than the literal case where as long as a single person does, it is false. According to the steam hardware survey, Windows is 95%, Macos is 4%, and Linux is 1%. And to dig deeper you'd need to see what games that 5% of the non-Windows is playing - are they simpler games that don'…

You’re right but i think there’s an immensely valuable lesson here for people who communicate with engineers as part of their job: be mindful of casual precision mistakes. “no one” and “a statistically insignificant number of” are colloquial synonyms to civilians, but they are black and white to engineers, especially software people. They are the difference for example between a safe code path and a edge case bug. In my experience, people who use casual imprecision in technical conversations are sometimes seen as inexperienced or not fully understanding a problem, which may actually not be the case. Learning to speak with precision without being pedantic is an excellent soft skill that can be developed over time.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#792

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 6:15 PM UTC

Macha wrote: post #760

jsjohnst wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of those listed are WAY above MSRP! MSRP is $1,499 in the U.S. and £1,399 in the U.K.

The question was if they were available, not if they were available at MSRP (thanks downvoters, the comment even called out the price was inflated...). My understanding is that until recently in the US you basically had to buy from scalpers as the stocks had none at any price unless you stalked for restocks. They're overpriced for sure, and that's the only reason the M1U pricing looks equivalent rather than exorbitan…

[deleted]

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#793

Post by manigandham » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 6:15 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #757

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.

> performance per watt is really irrelevant. Watts are dollars that you'll continue spending over the system life. It matters because you can only draw so many amps per rack and there will be a point when, in order to get more capacity, you'll need to build another datacenter.

The market is not data center use.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#794

Post by Geee » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 6:51 PM UTC

wyager wrote: post #617

Geee wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't see display resolution (or the model of HMD) mentioned in the video. I'm using Varjo Aero, which has 2880x2720 per eye, which is almost quapruple (per eye) compared to Valve Index. I think this resolution is enough for a good VR experience; pixels are almost invisible, and even small text is readable. However, HL Alyx doesn't run at 90 fps on full resolution.

That HMD looks pretty badass. Didn't realize hardware support for eye tracking/foveation already existed. Does any software support it? That would fix your perf issue.

Yes, that would probably fix it, but there's no software support yet in any games, afaik. It works only in desktop mode.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#795

Post by Geee » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 6:53 PM UTC

ralfd wrote: post #782

Geee wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that its just a couple of years ahead of the mainstream curve. My thinking is that Apple probably wants to make a very high resolution VR headset (similar or close to Varjo Aero), and it seems that with their new chips, they might be able to pull it off.

How is the foveated rendering? Is it noticeable?

There's no software support for foveated rendering in any games yet, afaik. It works in desktop mode and it's fast enough to be unnoticeable.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#796

Post by pathartl » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 7:14 PM UTC

restlake wrote: post #420

pathartl wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would never do that

They have done this previously for dual socket Xeons. Historical precedence doesn’t necessarily hold here, but in fact, it’s been done on the “cheese graters” previously

They've moved on to chiplet design. Don't disregard their clear direction to SoC's with non-upgradeable RAM, GPU, CPU.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#797

Post by pathartl » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 7:15 PM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #454

pathartl wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would never do that

The Mac Pro (and the high-end Powermacs that preceded it) were always available in a dual socket incarnation, right up to the trashcan Mac.

The trashcan Mac Pro was announced almost 9 years ago. Apple today is a very different company. They've moved onto chiplet designed SoC's with little to no care about upgradability.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#798

Post by pathartl » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 7:18 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #744

pathartl wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if their claims are accurate, it usually has the asterisk of *Only with Apple Metal 2. I honestly cannot understand why Apple decided they needed to write their own graphics API when the rest of the world is working hard to get away from the biggest proprietary graphics API.

Because when they wrote the API no real standard existed to suit their needs.

Yes, and instead of writing an open standard or adapting Vulkan when it came around, they instead decided to double down on proprietary and moved to Metal 2.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#799

Post by thfuran » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 7:26 PM UTC

slmjkdbtl wrote: post #293

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?

As long as Asahi Linux is in good working order by the time the M3 Plus Ultra: Max Quantum Pro releases, I'll get one despite the name.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#800

Post by dddddddan » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 7:42 PM UTC

contingencies wrote: post #121

Spooky23 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large businesses do. I bet in some places you could get grant/loan incentives to replace a PC fleet with these things. Back in the Pentium-4 days, iirc I was able to get almost $250k in grants and $1.5M in subsidized loans to do accelerated refresh of a PC fleet and small datacenter, all through a utility's peak load reduction program.

I don't deny such things happen but it's illogical. If you have 20 people on desktops a small fraction of them will use more energy for microwaving lunch, making coffee or on air conditioning than they will save in aggregate on this nominal reduction in power draw.

How is it nominal? The current MacPro (which most of the target market would already be using) has a power supply that is >1kW. It's insane that this this is faster than the existing MacPro with a tiny power draw in comparison.