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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

#111

Post by acdha »

0zemp3c wrote: post #104
acdha wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They certainly are. Being able to pay for the extra power doesn’t mean you like fan noise, not to mention the people who are doing things like video production in a trailer where overheating is a concern. I used to support scientists who didn’t appreciate the heat 4 workstations made in their shared offices, either.

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

#112

Post by cjbprime »

Reasons to still prefer an M2 for a HEDT situation, despite the article claims:

* The latest Intel/AMD desktops only have two channels of DDR5, and if you put as little as 64GB RAM in them they can drop to DDR4 speeds (2DPC, dual-rank), less than 10% of M2 memory bandwidth.

* You can (surprisingly cheaply) buy an M2 with 192GB GPU VRAM, but you can't buy a DDR5 PC with the same amount. If we all start wanting to run LLMs locally that'll be a pretty big deal.

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

#113

Post by etempleton »

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…

That is kind of the thing. The whole Mac Studio only consumes ~200 watts.

It is what I find about this article to be disingenuous. Sure, by all means compare the M2 Ultra to the Intel 13900K and the Nvidia 4080, but at least mention that it is consuming a third of the power.

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

#114

Post by hulitu »

nickdothutton wrote: post #110
mnd999 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> They promised him a high clock, air cooled G5 but couldn't deliver.

Then how were IBM processors cooled ? IBM used also PowerPC

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

#115

Post by throw0101b »

tiffanyh wrote: post #101
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.

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

MKBHD put forward an interesting hypothesis in his last podcast: this generation Mac Pro has simply to get the refresh out the door. They took their existing designs (SoC/chips, cases) and simply mashed them together. Similarly to how they simply mashed the M-chips into existing laptop case designs first, and then optimized with Gen2.

Now that they have something, they can iterate on a more harmonious solution that allows for the advantages of each.

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

#117

Post by etempleton »

nickdothutton wrote: post #110
mnd999 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The bigger issue was that they couldn’t get the G5 to work in a laptop and this was killing Apple. Apple’s laptops have always been a cut above their PC counterparts in terms of design, but in those days it felt like Apple Laptops were from a different planet, except they were unreasonably slow in large part because they were stuck on the G4 processor for years. Switching to intel was a necessity for survival. IBM just couldn’t deliver or keep up with what Intel was doing.

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

#118

Post by liuliu »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #99
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.

For $7,000 there should be no caveats, it should be beating every measurable metric outright.

I don't know. Nowadays a top-of-the-spec Linux workstation without any cost on top (i.e. bare-components) is around ~10k. 5995WX in the graph wccf provided alone costs ~5k.

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

#120

Post by katbyte »

perrohunter wrote: post #106
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How does it work? You install a windows game via steam and then tell it to port?
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