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Apple M1 Ultra

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Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#841

Post by Macha »

SpelingBeeChamp wrote: post #836
Macha wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

* Higher than historical norms due to very unusual market conditions

* Much higher than MSRP, which was reduced compared to the previous generation because that attempt at raising prices killed market demand for said previous generation.

* No longer affordable by the traditional customer base but sustained by a new market with questionable longevity in its demand

Take your pick.

Sure, in a pure rational economic sense the market price has risen because supply has fallen at the same time a new market of buyers became very interested in the product, but we're talking consumer expectations and historical trends here, not the current price in a vacuum.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#842

Post by enedil »

Too wrote: post #833
enedil wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

C++ adds a few time-consuming stuff, like templates, however my belief was that what uses the most time is optimization passes, which won't be much faster for C. The actual benchmarks should be done however.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#843

Post by thfuran »

aaomidi wrote: post #21
superkuh wrote: post #5

It sounds like the chip is fast but I wonder, if like other M1 products, the computers built with it will be fairly restricted, like a console, in terms of the hardware they're able to use (not being able to boot off external HDDs, problems with thunderbolt 3 compatibility in peripherals, having to use abstraction layers to run most of the software world indirectly or have specific porting projects dedicated to M1, e…

> having to use abstraction layers to run most of the software world indirectly Nearly everything I use daily is built for M1 now. https://isapplesiliconready.com/ And honestly, if it's not, its a good indication that it's time to move away from that product as they don't care about a huge segment of their users.

Or it's actually a tiny segment of their users.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#844

Post by Melatonic »

scarface74 wrote: post #601
Melatonic wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sure it has great GPU performance for what it is but comparing it to a top Nvidia chip just seems ridiculous on Apples part. Apple I think is going to have trouble conquering back the semi pro workstation market they abandoned not that many years ago if they do not start offering M1 chips along with Nvidia GPUs. Once again we get a Mac Semi-Pro Mini (seems like the Studio is more like a replacement for the Trash…

Just a note: they explicitly said the Mac Pro is coming.

I'm interested to see if they shoot themselves in the foot and try to make it all M1 architecture or partner with AMD or Nvidia

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#845

Post by proverbialbunny »

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'…

If you want to get a bit more into significant numbers, Apple has the largest number of games for any platform and it has the largest number of gamers. They're mobile games, but on the M1 people can play them on their desktop.

What I think you mean is competitive gamers and AAA gamers do not play on Apple hardware. This is mostly true today ofc, but keep in mind that's actually not the majority of the gaming market. Apple is raking it in from its gaming market.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#846

Post by dwroberts »

zamalek wrote: post #739
TuringNYC wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can get off this GPU circus and simply go with purpose-built AI solutions. You can buy single tensor accelerators from Google: https://www.coral.ai/products/ You can buy a bunch of those integrated into a single PCI-E card. https://iot.asus.com/products/AI-accelerator/AI-Accelerator-... Cheap too. Some of these work with Mac. More of them work for PC, because the hardware interface is outside of Apple's thin vert…

These are devices for Tensorflow Lite which is more appropriate for IoT etc. not doing the intensive initial training of a complex model

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#847

Post by Bud »

nikau wrote: post #819
Bud wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those issues were all almost 20 years ago. If you think this is still a problem, you haven't used any recent Macs. The current MB Air and MB Pro both run very cool even under prolonged heavy loads. Apple's management of any and all heat issues has been far better than any competitors for a while now.

Haha what are you smoking, my 2018 macpro laptop was constantly throttling under heavy load, its thermal management was terrible

I didn't say that particular model was perfect. I said Apple has been doing far better than competitors. Which is true. I set up and used hundreds of Macs and hundreds of PCs in 2018 as part of my job. I am pretty confident as to which performed better overall thermally.

And of course, Apple has made huge progress since then (M1, better thermal designs, new fan designs which are quieter and more efficient) whereas PC makers have made basically zero progress.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#848

Post by 5etho »

Geee wrote: 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…

if it isn't marketing straight from the Apple HQ I will be wrong

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#849

Post by funny_falcon »

cehrlich wrote: post #56
alberth wrote: post #20

I'm cross posting a question I had from the Mac Studio thread (currently unanswered). ---- Mac Pro scale up? How is this going to scale up to a Mac Pro, especially related to RAM? The Ultra caps at 128 GB of RAM (which isn't much for video editing, especially given that the GPU uses the system RAM). Today's Mac Pro goes up to 1.5TB (and has dedicated video RAM above this). If the Mac Pro is say, 4 Ultra's stacked tog…

I think some of this can be guessed from the SoC codenames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apple_codenames M1 Max is Jade C-Die => 64GB M1 Ultra is Jade 2C-Die => 128GB There is a still unreleased SoC called Jade 4C-Die =>256GB So I think that's the most we'll see this generation, unless they somehow add (much slower) slotted RAM If they were to double the max RAM on M2 Pro/Max (Rhodes Chop / Rhodes 1C), which…

I believe using Optane as fast swap could be great way to increase RAM capacity. Not completely fair, but enough for most usages.

It is strange Apple didn't cooperate with Intel in this area.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#850

Post by jpetso »

upbeat_general wrote: post #471
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]…

I'm very skeptical of this because until the CUDA strangehold is gone, it will be a pain to develop on. Even if the frameworks themselves support M1's GPU, there are still lots and lots of CUDA kernels that won't run. I really hope I'm wrong (as someone who owns an M1 Pro chip) but I find it hard to imagine things changing significantly in the next ~2 years unless someone is able (legally and technically) to release…

Here's AMD's attempt: https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIPIFY

Naturally, the HIP tooling doesn't support M1 GPUs at this time. We'll see if anyone else tries.

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