Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always take such claims with a grain of salt anyways. It usualy on one specific benchmark. I wait for better benchmarks always instead of trusting the marketing
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.
Apple M1 Ultra
851–855 of 855 posts
Re: Apple M1 Ultra
#852Earlier 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…
I wasn’t a DVer, but they’ve always been available if you were willing to pay a scalper. The only thing that has changed is that more retailers find it appropriate to rip off their customers. It’s kinda like a liquor store I’ve done business with for years now wanting $3,800 for a bottle of 23yr PVW. MSRP is $299.99. Should the owner not be able to make extra profit on it, no, of course they should. But >12x MSRP is just predatory imho.
Re: Apple M1 Ultra
#853Earlier quoted context omitted.
GPU scaling is absolutely not linear in that way. nvidia gave up on that in recent generations as without software support to match, you had situations where double 1080s were 95% as fast as one 1080 with worse frame times. Might be nice for e.g. ML where you can effectively treat them as entirely independent GPUs but for games I would be surprised if this matches a high end GPU.
macOS will see it as one gpu.
The first benchmarks are in, and it's mostly a 40-50% improvement in the M1 Max, not 100%.
Re: Apple M1 Ultra
#854Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The "huge progress since then" was a year ago.
Your timeline is a little bit made up.
Re: Apple M1 Ultra
#855Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless the M1 Ultra is actually magic I don't think it is possible. My guess is they're putting a lot of weight on the phrase "relative power" and hoping you assume it means "relative to each other" and not "relative to their previous generation" (i.e. M1 Ultra -> M1 Max and RTX 3090 -> RTX 2080Ti) or "relative to the stock power profile". Put bluntly, if the M1 Ultra was capable of achieving performance parity with…
It's actually kinda magic but in the opposite way. The M1 Ultra is absolutely massive . 114 billion transistors. The 3090? A measely 28 billion. Now granted the M1 also has some CPU cores on there but even still, it seems safe to say that the M1 Ultra has more transistors spent on the GPU than a 3090 does. More transistors does often mean more faster when it comes to GPUs. But you'll all but certainly see the 3090 wi…
It is also worth noting that the M1 Ultra is an SoC so it'll have more than just CPU/GPU on it, by the looks of things it has some hefty amounts of cache, it'll also have a few IP blocks like a PCIe controller, memory controller, SSD controller (the current "SSDs" look to just be raw storage modules).
All told it likely still has somewhere in the region of 30-40 billion transistors for the GPU. Each GPU core being physically bigger than the 3090 is probably pretty good for some workflows and not so good for others. Generally GPUs benefit from having a huge number of tiny cores for processing in parallel, rather than a small number of massive cores.
Current benchmarks put it at roughly the performance of an RTX 3070, which is good for its power consumption, but not even close to the 3090. As I mentioned in the previous post, it just doesn't have the cores or memory bandwidth needed for the types of workloads that GPUs are built for (although unified memory being physically closer can help here ofc.), certainly not enough to make it a competitor for something like a 3090.
Edit: Oh also, for massively parallel workloads (like what GPUs do), more cores and better bandwidth to feed those cores will be one of the biggest performance drivers. You can get more performance by making those cores bigger (and therefore faster) but you need to crank the transistor count up a _lot_ to match the kinds of throughput that many tiny cores can do.