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MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

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Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#851

Post by qwytw »

hajile wrote: post #741
gumby wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now that they've caught up with Intel and AMD... I'm an enormous fan of the M series. But there is an interesting consequence of a couple of fundamental design decisions. The M series has huge memory bandwidth but look at its focus on I/O. It reminds me of one of the design decisions of the Alto (memory bus was 3/2 the screen refresh rate, a mind-boggling decision for its time). The fact that the M1 can go in an ip…

Apple's CPUs do very well in sustained performance. They fit 8 high-performance CPUs and 2 efficiency cores into a 40w peak power envelope while hitting peak clockspeeds (that 40w includes all the IO, mostly idling GPU, idling NPU, SSD controller, etc). Based on M2, their new chip should be 3.4-3.5GHz with 4 efficiency cores that get 30-40% better IPC all within that same power envelope. AMD puts 96 cores into a 360w…

Yes but people buying current gen Mac Pros probably value upgradability and want/need discrete GPUs. Just try to imagine how much would Apple charge for 256GB based on M1/M2 pricing.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#852

Post by deanc »

sandstrom wrote: post #584

Will this computer finally support daisy-chaining? Also known as Multi-Stream Transport (MST), it's from the DisplayPort 1.2 spec. It's the ability to connecting two displays via one cable. Any 5+ year old PC has support for it. But your $3,000 Macbook Pro doesn't.

As an alternative to this, you can grab a thunderbolt dock. You can input 2/3 monitors into this, and all your other peripherals - then one cable into your macbook.

My Caldigit TS4 charges my macbook at 90W, has 2 x 27" monitors running at 120hz (i could go higher but i can't perceive the difference so i'll save the bandwidth), has 2 external drives and can read my SD card to import photos. The thing has so many ports and if you have lots of peripherals it doesn't matter how many ports your laptop has as you'll not want to bother plugging them in and out if you move around a lot (I do). I can't rate the TS4 highly enough.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#853

Post by linsomniac »

ZiiS wrote: post #315

Whilst I am utterly impressed with my M1 Pro; they are comparing to the "fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro" which is 4 years old when Intel was struggling anyway. Not at all representative of what they could have done with the latest Intel or AMD silicon.

They do also give, further down the page, some comparison with the M1 MAX, saying 20% faster (except for memory bandwidth which is twice as fast at 200GB/sec).

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#854

Post by BirAdam »

myself248 wrote: post #83
moonchrome wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking about throwing some last gen parts into an old tower/PSU I have to build a desktop for inlaws since they are stuck on a 10year old hand down laptop. This is a good package at that price (599$) - power consumption is likely nothing, MacOS included in price, small and quiet - will comfortably browse the internet, play videos, etc. for the next 5+ years. I won't be able to repair it out of warranty so tha…

Shame I can't buy an M2 Max on an ATX mobo.

It would be cool to get the SoC on a socket like the Pentium II was, and then have some NVMe slots, PCIe slots, and more I/O ports. This would also be better for the planet if it was a standard feature of each Macintosh and just the SoC got replaced. Unfortunately, Apple's Macintosh line doesn't work that way. The first Macs were all-in-one designs, the 90s saw some heterogeneity, and then the Macintosh line came back to an all-in-one design (except for the MacPro line and the G4 Cube). Today, the G4 Cube is like something out of an alternate universe. Not only was it upgradable, it was also incredibly easy to "open up".

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#855

Post by verst »

I just ordered the M2 Pro Mac Mini that was also released. The Mac Studio was a bit excessive for my music production hobby needs, but I do need the extra cores of the M2 Pro models. Really thrilled they released this.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#856

Post by vanilla-latte »

ganoushoreilly wrote: post #764
vanilla-latte wrote: post #740

One advantage that I have with the M1 Pro 32 GB RAM over my gaming desktop is that I'm able to run large ML models such as Bloom, Whisper, and Stable Diffusion with reasonable performance.

Out of curiosity what are your desktop specs? I have stable diffusion running quite well on a few different systems of varying spec. That said, it's great to be able to take it on the road with you.

My dev desktop has the following: - Ryzen 5950x - 16 GB RAM - 1070 8 GB

The limiting factor was the VRAM. The M1 has the ability to use more VRAM than your typical gaming GPU because of the shared RAM.

I see this as a big advantage.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#858

Post by optymizer »

pleb_nz wrote: post #485
optymizer wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardware is indeed great. The software experience is getting worse imo, particularly when upgrading. It used to be rock solid for me. The m1 worked without any issues for 2 months. I upgraded yesterday to macOS Ventura: * Upgrade finished but laptop froze. Hard reset. * On first boot, the new System Settings failed to load icons, then froze. Trying to quit it froze the OS. Hard reset. * I left the laptop plugged…

And why can't my mac remember what screen applications were on when I unlock the screen. Everytime, unlock, drag them back to right screens, resize them. If someone has a fuc for this I'm an ears, but seems to me it should work out if the box.

Actually, I've noticed that if I plug in the displays after I log in, the windows do get repositioned based on the screen they were previously on. I haven't looked into it at all though.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#859

Post by optymizer »

gigatexal wrote: post #170
optymizer wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardware is indeed great. The software experience is getting worse imo, particularly when upgrading. It used to be rock solid for me. The m1 worked without any issues for 2 months. I upgraded yesterday to macOS Ventura: * Upgrade finished but laptop froze. Hard reset. * On first boot, the new System Settings failed to load icons, then froze. Trying to quit it froze the OS. Hard reset. * I left the laptop plugged…

Yup. Software is why I am on Linux on a thinkpad. It’s fast enough. And I control everything.

I can't even resume my Ubuntu ThinkPad from suspend without the nVidia driver going absolutely off the rails. I'm generally happy with the laptop, but it's got basic issues that Macbooks solved decades ago. The touchpad is noticeably worse.

Re: MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max

#860

Post by pdabbadabba »

comboy wrote: post #367
judge2020 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of dedicated DisplayPort ports is fairly disappointing to me since their implementation is just "native DisplayPort output over USB‑C" and it doesn't support MST, so you can only do one displayport signal per port, even with a thunderbolt 4 hub with some bidirectional USB-C Displayport cables.

Check out DisplayLink. I'm using multiple monitors with M1 macbook air which officially only supports single external display. Works great so far. I agree with your point though.

I'm not sure the downvoting is warranted. For what it's worth, I use display link every day (with an M2 MacBook Air) and it's fine. The refresh rate really suffers when driving two 4k monitors (as well as the built-in panel), but I've found it to be a reasonable workaround.

Of course, it's also helpful to know that others have had worse experiences.

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