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Apple M1 Ultra

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Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#831

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What are you talking about? This is not for cloud datacenters trying to squeeze every bit of compute per resource. These machines are commonly used by professionals in industries like movie and music production. They don't care what the power bill is, it's insignificant compared to the cost of the employee using the hardware.

> "They don't care what the power bill is" Oh... They do. At least, they should. If a similar PC costs $500 less but you spend $700 more in electricity per year because of it, at the end of the year, your profits will show the difference.

As I said, these numbers are so insignificant that they don't matter. The cost of the employee and their productive is several magnitudes more.

I ran a visual effects company a decade ago. We bought the fastest machines we could because saving time for production was important. The power draw was never a factor; a few catered lunches alone would dwarf the power bill.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#832

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Most PC fans are 1-2w. Given the claims of "near silent", I think it's plenty safe to say these are not 5,000+ RPM rippers that are going to be in the 5-8W each range.

Given the M1 Ultra has a 2lb heavier heat sink just to dissipate the extra heat, not sure that’s a safe bet. There are other ways to reduce noise than just using lower RPM fans.

> There are other ways to reduce noise than just using lower RPM fans

No, not really. You can try adding sound dampening, like BeQuiet does, but it's not as effective as just having more lower RPM fans (although it does help with coil whine). But Apple has historically never used sound dampening, and this doesn't look like it changes that. With how "open" it is anyway (the entire back being just a bunch of holes), sound dampening wouldn't be all that effective.

I'm not really sure what you think the heavier heat sink has to do with either the fan RPM or the noise profile. The bigger heatsink is if anything evidence of larger, lower-RPM fans. They're using more surface area, so they can spread the air movement out over larger fan blades. Which means they don't need to use as high an RPM fan.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#833
post #498
post #215

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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.

Kernel has thousands of compilation units. Each of them is compiled by a separate compiler process. Only the linking at the end doesn't parallelise, however it should take a much smaller part of the time. The proportions change of course, if you develop kernel and do incremental builds lots of times. Then the linking stage might become a bottleneck. The above statement should also relate to most other C/C++ projects.

Kernel is C code though, which doesn’t require as much cpu to compile as say c++. It could be more IO bound. There should be a lot of more legit data available on this than my armchair speculations.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#834
post #821

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Not chips, servers. Apple has sold those before.

You mean the commercial failure of A/UX and X Server? Good luck with those against Linux/FreeBSD workloads.

The point is they have experience, not they were good at it, unlike with selling chips.

There are plenty of applications M1 is really good at, if Apple wanted to get into this space they could target , for example render farms.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty much the speed that Samsung advertises for the 980 Pro: https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/solid-st... And what WD advertises for the Black SN850: https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-b... And what Seagate advertises for the FireCuda 530: https://www.seagate.com/products/gaming-drives/pc-gaming/fir... And what Gigabyte advertises for the Gen4 7000s: https://www.gig…

I checked the first two and it’s 7,000 read / 5,000 write. Pretty sure Apple said read AND write, which would be a lot faster than those. I might go back and rewatch the keynote, but I still thinking we are arguing pointlessly as Apple has always overcharged for SSD and RAM upgrades vs the price you’d pay elsewhere. Thanks for the DV though even when what I stated was right! ;)

I have a 8TB M1 Max. It pretty consistently has a max write speed of ~7.3 GB/s and max read of ~5.4 GB/s. No idea why or how write is faster, but that's not a typo.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#836
post #760

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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…

What does "overpriced" mean, other than "more than you are willing to pay?"

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#837
post #771

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The 3090 claims are overstated. There are multiple competitors in that space, and all of them need the TDP. Performance per watt? I could see that being disrupted, but an iGPU in 2022 will be orders of magnitude less powerful than a dGPU, if wattage is ignored.

They are still a year+ ahead of 3090 on process node. Max was about equivalent to a 2080, so 2X max does line up with a 3090. A big difference is no ray tracing hardware, which takes up a lot of die space. Same process node and no ray tracing hardware and nvidia would come in at far less die space (3090 is 628.4 mm ^2, M1 ultra is 850mm^2). If Nvidia were on the same node and increased die space to match M1 (ignoring…

Having had my M1 MB pro from work freeze and stutter, I'm just not buying it. Your theory is great, never once expected this BS in practice.

For the record: I was the first M1 recipient (temporary 16gb MB, stock issues). I needed an Intel MBP because Rosetta ain't all that. I opted for, and was upgraded to, the 32gb M1 MBP. I chose M1 over Intel because it was unbelievably faster for the form-factor. My original comment does not concern laptops. My PC is orders of magnitude more powerful.

TDP is physics. You all might perceive Apple as perfect and infallible and all so lovely, but physics is physics.

I use AMD, not NVIDIA. And "what if" is irrelevant. It's like intentionally neutering Zen2 by comparing it to Intel single-core (as was done all the time). The reality is absolute, not relative. Comparing effective performance, not per-TDP, is what matters to the user. And my network/gpu/audio drops on both my 16gb M1 MB and 32gb M1 MBP under load.

Seriously not buying that "Apple can do nothing wrong" bias.

Take those #Ff6600-colored glasses off. The M1 has unbeatable value proposition in a pretty wide market, but Apple couldn't be further from a universally good machine.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#838

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we're seeing right now with Apple's M1 chips for desktop computing is on the same level of revolutionary as what the original iPhone did for mobile phones. The advancements in such a short period of time in the amount of computing power, low power usage, size, and heat usage of these chips is unbelievable and game-changing.

It really feels like this is all in the name of their AR/VR efforts. The killer device as far as I can think would be a simple headset that packs the capabilities of full-blown workstations. Apple Silicon seems like it could totally be on that track in some way.

I don't think so. I think it stemmed from Apple's desire to make their SoC fully in-house for their iPhones. They realized they were onto something, and took it to a whole new level by focusing on desktop-class performance.

This was probably further fueled by their soured relationship with Intel which was responsible for thermal issues on MBP's for years, poor performance increases across their entire Mac lineup, and poor cellular radio performance on some iPhone models -- forcing them to settle with Qualcomm and ditch Intel for mobile radios.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#839

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems safe to say prices right now are not the norm due to, you know, that whole war thing going on that is impacting one of the EU's primary power supplies. The 2021 EU average was otherwise $0.22/kWh.

yeah but let's how fast we have those "normal" prices again, maybe this is the new normal, who knows.

The war is a factor going forward, but we got notified of the price increases before the war started, they relate more to the piss poor planning of our rulers than any external factors. Unless the people in charge are going to suddenly start planning for the future this will be the new normal.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#840

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty much the speed that Samsung advertises for the 980 Pro: https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/solid-st... And what WD advertises for the Black SN850: https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-b... And what Seagate advertises for the FireCuda 530: https://www.seagate.com/products/gaming-drives/pc-gaming/fir... And what Gigabyte advertises for the Gen4 7000s: https://www.gig…

I checked the first two and it’s 7,000 read / 5,000 write. Pretty sure Apple said read AND write, which would be a lot faster than those. I might go back and rewatch the keynote, but I still thinking we are arguing pointlessly as Apple has always overcharged for SSD and RAM upgrades vs the price you’d pay elsewhere. Thanks for the DV though even when what I stated was right! ;)

Their website just specifies read speeds with no mention of write speeds. It's also "up to" and tested on the 8TB models. Assuming it's like other SSDs smaller capacities are usually slower.
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