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

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

#121

Post by microtonal »

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.

Maybe, but most of these comparisons are based on GPU performance (ie. games). For other workloads like machine learning, Tensor cores on NVIDIA GPUs will blow Apple Silicon GPUs out of the water. The M2 Ultra is 27 TFLOPS. The 4080't Tensor Cores are 48.7 TFLOPS in FP32, 194.9 TFLOPS in FP16, 389.9 TFLOPS in FP8 with FP16 accumulate. (IIRC on Apple Silicon GPUs FP16 performance is roughly the same as FP32.)

(There is the Neural Engine which supports lower precision, but it limited in various ways.)

Regardless, the strides that Apple has been making are impressive.

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

#122

Post by florakel »

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…

It’s a fair point. Especially for the new Mac Pro they could have implemented a more robust thermal solution and clock the whole thing higher. That’s one advantage of a bigger chasis, isn’t it?

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

#123

Post by llm_nerd »

The M2 has been a bit underwhelming in general through all of its iterations: Apple jumped into such a lead with the M1 [1], so it was disappointing when they slowly iterated while Intel and AMD have made enormous strides catching up. Everyone keeps citing TDP, but given that we're talking about desktops that just isn't a huge factor.

Having said that, the 7950X was released late February, and the 13900KS was released in mid January. Both of this year. Both are their premiere available chips right now in the segment. Referring to them like they're last year's junk is rather silly.

[1] Though fun fact with the M1, I remember super disappointing Geekbench results leaking before its release. People do know how low trust the site is, right? The computer identifiers on the claimed "M2 Ultra" devices claim to be Macbook Pro 14" devices....which aren't getting M2 Ultras for obvious reasons. In all likelihood someone is making guesses and posting nonsense.

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

#124

Post by gumby »

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.

Yeah, I did too. The use case for the Mac Pro is even more limited than what you would expect (it's not like there are a lot of supported PCI boards). It's hard to think of many users who would choose it over a Studio. I doubt Apple will make any money on the Pro.

They could use this version as a stepping stone to a future faster device. But I suspect this form factor is a dead end for the Apple customer base. Maybe it exists for bragging (i.e. marketing) rights, the same reason Honda funds a Formula 1 team.

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

#125

Post by birdyrooster »

llm_nerd wrote: post #123

The M2 has been a bit underwhelming in general through all of its iterations: Apple jumped into such a lead with the M1 [1], so it was disappointing when they slowly iterated while Intel and AMD have made enormous strides catching up. Everyone keeps citing TDP, but given that we're talking about desktops that just isn't a huge factor. Having said that, the 7950X was released late February, and the 13900KS was release…

With power in city downtowns (eg San Jose) at $0.50+/kWh it’s definitely becoming a huge factor. My Mac uses almost an order of magnitude less power than the PC and I keep the PC powered off.

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

#126

Post by spiderfarmer »

llm_nerd wrote: post #123

The M2 has been a bit underwhelming in general through all of its iterations: Apple jumped into such a lead with the M1 [1], so it was disappointing when they slowly iterated while Intel and AMD have made enormous strides catching up. Everyone keeps citing TDP, but given that we're talking about desktops that just isn't a huge factor. Having said that, the 7950X was released late February, and the 13900KS was release…

Desktop pcs requiring a ludicrous amount of power and cooling is absolutely problematic. The amount of people willing to put up with big honking machines is dwindling.

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

#127

Post by microtonal »

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.

First, a Mac Studio with M1 Ultra is $3999.

Second, people don't buy Macs only for performance. They also buy Macs for macOS, for integration between devices, for a system that is cool and quiet, for hardware acceleration of ProRes, for on-device privacy-preserving machine learning. Being a bit slower than competing AMD and Intel systems is acceptable, because you get so many other desirable properties in return.

I'd definitely consider a Mac Studio with an M2 Max or M2 Ultra, if I didn't want something portable. I would never buy a machine with a competing machine with an Intel or AMD machine, because I don't want to deal with Windows or desktop Linux.

Other people have another set of priorities and that is fine.

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

#128

Post by veselin »

I find the article quite informative. Yes, M2 and the other chips are completely different products with different goals. If one wants to say that something completely trumps the other, it will be wrong.

But here is what is visible:

The M2 core is probably in the same ballpark as Zen 4 core, likely a tiny bit below. That may become very tiny if Zen 4 core runs at lower frequency to equalize the power. This doesn't account for the AVX512 of Zen4.

24 M2 cores manage to beat 16 Zen 4 cores also at lower power, but these are different products. Zen 4 does scale to far more cores, 96 in an EPYC chip. AMD and Intel have far more investments in interconnects and multi-die chips to do these things.

The M2 GPU is in the same league as a 300$ mid-range nVidia card. It is not competitive at all - Apple produces the largest chip it can manufacture to go against a high margin smaller chip that nVidia orders.

Again all of this doesn't mean each product is not good on its own.

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

#129

Post by nordsieck »

smoldesu wrote: post #4
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.

The absolute "best of class" Nvidia card is currently the 4090, which can be up to 30% faster than the 4080 in scaling workloads. What would be more interesting is to see how Nvidia's laptop cards fare here though - they're constrained to much lower wattage (80-120w) and would make for a much fairer fight against the ~200w M2 Ultra.

> What would be more interesting is to see how Nvidia's laptop cards fare here though - they're constrained to much lower wattage (80-120w) and would make for a much fairer fight against the ~200w M2 Ultra.

Doesn't look like Apple offers Ultra in a laptop - just the Basic, Pro, and Max.

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

#130

Post by BaculumMeumEst »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #126
llm_nerd wrote: post #123

The M2 has been a bit underwhelming in general through all of its iterations: Apple jumped into such a lead with the M1 [1], so it was disappointing when they slowly iterated while Intel and AMD have made enormous strides catching up. Everyone keeps citing TDP, but given that we're talking about desktops that just isn't a huge factor. Having said that, the 7950X was released late February, and the 13900KS was release…

Desktop pcs requiring a ludicrous amount of power and cooling is absolutely problematic. The amount of people willing to put up with big honking machines is dwindling.

AMD and Intel are jacking up the default power settings to absurd levels because it gives marketing bigger numbers to to throw around.

You can drastically reduce the power you supply to desktop chips with BIOS settings. You'll generate far less heat, can use a smaller power supply and form factor, while still getting great performance.

If Intel/AMD get to a level where their chips rival M1/M2 while power throttled, things get interesting.

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