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Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

wccftech.com

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Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#101

Post by tiffanyh »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #94

One of my biggest gripes about Macs is that their thermal engineers refuse to get off their high horses and build real cooling solutions that don't artifically limit the capabilities of an objectively performance-competitive CPU. I don't care if it consumes 200 W of power. I don't care if the chassis needs to be thicker to accommodate a larger heatsink. I don't care if you need to run the fans at 100%. Just let me us…

I was expecting the MacPro (M-series) to be exactly that.

A high wattage, highly cooled proc.

But nope, they did what you described.

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#102

Post by oneplane »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #94

One of my biggest gripes about Macs is that their thermal engineers refuse to get off their high horses and build real cooling solutions that don't artifically limit the capabilities of an objectively performance-competitive CPU. I don't care if it consumes 200 W of power. I don't care if the chassis needs to be thicker to accommodate a larger heatsink. I don't care if you need to run the fans at 100%. Just let me us…

> I don't care if

That's the thing: they aren't building it just for you. We can speculate about their internal requirements documents, but what's for sure is that they calculate a projected market adoption based on various factors like cost, market segmentation, power draw, heat transfer, noise etc. If it turns out that they project a bigger profit with a lower power limit than technically possible, that's what they'll do.

Personally, it would be nice of this were to apply to any CPU, GPU, SoC and even VRM and DC-DC regulators; let me worry about the dissipation, just pump out as many cycles as possible. But that's not really something that covers any significant market that Apple (or most multinationals) is targeting.

What I find much more surprising is that all of their M1/M2 deployments seem to be far fewer bin-limited; normally you'd get a crapton of SKUs for a SoC because they are so hard to manufacture, but Apple seems to get away with only 15 to 20. Perhaps this is also why there are much clearer power limits on most of their devices.

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#103

Post by scarface_74 »

jitl wrote: post #26
scarface_74 wrote: post #6

This and the introduction of the new slower less expandable - at least with respect to GPUs and memory - is indicative that it was a mistake for Apple to completely transition to ARM and should have kept high end options on Intel until they had a better GPU story to tell. They already had the Mac Studio, they could have kept the Mac Pro on Intel.

3rd party GPUs don’t mesh with the Metal strategy. Apple dropped and deprecated OpenGL a long time ago - and they’re the only one building metal GPUs

The Intel Mac Pro supported third party GPUs and there were Thunderbolt based officially supported GPUs for later Intel Macs. Apple made a big deal about them. This was after their transition to Metal

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#104

Post by 0zemp3c »

acdha wrote: post #98
partiallypro wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most consumers don't care about wattage on a desktop, and when you compare the prices they are similar and it loses.

Many people do care - many Americans have subsidized low power but that’s not globally true and even if your power is free a hot CPU means you’re listening to fan noise and heating up the room. In a cold winter that’s not bad but I knew people who had to do things like leave their office doors open for cooling.

the people you describe aren't buying $7k desktops

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#106

Post by perrohunter »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #88
adastra22 wrote: post #2

50% slower than the absolute best of class NVIDIA discrete GPU offering that consumes massively more wattage is hardly a damning statement.

Take anything from wccf with a grain of salt. And yeah, as others point out, this is Apples to oranges. x86 desktops are great at some things, M2 Ultras are great at others, and the overlap that really matters is pretty small... Like, you have to be crazy to buy an M SoC for gaming, or buy a Nvidia GPU for workloads that won't fit in VRAM.

I tested the new game porting kit on a Mac mini M2 and was surprised I was able to run Cyberpunk 2077 and it was running really well, I can imagine that more powerful M processors will be awesome, so the argument of games might go away soon

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#107

Post by IneffablePigeon »

kayson wrote: post #47
mrcwinn wrote: post #37

The results speak for themselves (Apple is slower than some) but the context does matter: Apple has been talking about performance per watt since Steve Jobs showed a keynote slide announcing the transition from PowerPC. The cynical view is that Apple is intentionally misleading customers with their ambiguous graph axes. Another perspective is they’re simply demonstrating the metric they’ve optimized for in the first…

Do people really care about efficiency for plugged-in devices? There is the environmental factor, but there are people on 100% renewable a too...

I bought an m series device to replace my windows desktop mostly for efficiency reasons. It saves me hundreds a year in electricity costs at the moment (quite literally, I calculated it beforehand and checked real usage afterwards). It also means my office is now silent and cool. It’s a big QoL improvement for me.

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#108

Post by mnd999 »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #94

One of my biggest gripes about Macs is that their thermal engineers refuse to get off their high horses and build real cooling solutions that don't artifically limit the capabilities of an objectively performance-competitive CPU. I don't care if it consumes 200 W of power. I don't care if the chassis needs to be thicker to accommodate a larger heatsink. I don't care if you need to run the fans at 100%. Just let me us…

They used to, the G5 Macs had impressive cooling.

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#109

Post by chongli »

nightski wrote: post #91
throwaway5959 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does when you multiply it across millions of CPUs. Saving 100 watts across 3 million CPUs (300 megawatts) is enough to shut down the equivalent of power plants.

I'm all for efficiency but if we are to progress as a civilization we need to find a way to not have power hold us back. We can get to a point where we have nearly unlimited power with minimal impact on the environment around us. That needs to happen as soon as possible.

There are an estimated 3 billion people in the world who still rely on solid fuel (wood, coal, peat moss) to cook food and generate heat [1]. We are extremely far away from being able to use 100% electricity to meet two basic needs for the whole population. From that perspective power-plant-scale computing is an incredible luxury.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/resrep27829.23.pdf

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#110

Post by nickdothutton »

mnd999 wrote: post #108
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #94

One of my biggest gripes about Macs is that their thermal engineers refuse to get off their high horses and build real cooling solutions that don't artifically limit the capabilities of an objectively performance-competitive CPU. I don't care if it consumes 200 W of power. I don't care if the chassis needs to be thicker to accommodate a larger heatsink. I don't care if you need to run the fans at 100%. Just let me us…

They used to, the G5 Macs had impressive cooling.

I wasnt a G5 owner, waited for the Intel switch, but I gather the G5 water cooling had a very high failure rate and this was at least a large part of why Jobs dropped IBM/MOT/PPC int he end. They promised him a high clock, air cooled G5 but couldn't deliver.
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