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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

#151

Post by peppermint_gum »

hulitu wrote: post #114
nickdothutton wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

IBM version of G5, POWER4 and POWER5, was clocked a bit lower than G5, and their servers and workstations had extremely loud fans.

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

#152

Post by wmf »

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…

AFAIK none of the desktop Macs are thermally limited.

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

#153

Post by wtallis »

theevilsharpie wrote: post #145
birdyrooster wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> My Mac uses almost an order of magnitude less power than the PC and I keep the PC powered off. Either you are not measuring power consumption correctly, or there is something very wrong with your PC.

Or it's an AMD desktop. Their chiplet design really isn't good for idle power.

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

#154

Post by kitsunesoba »

rbanffy wrote: post #138
veselin wrote: post #128

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 ac…

> The M2 GPU is in the same league as a 300$ mid-range nVidia card It still has the advantage of a much larger memory pool. I did a quick comparison exercise - I priced two workstations with similar configurations, one from Dell, the other from Apple. While there are x86 (and ARM) machines that'll blow the biggest M2 out of the water, the prices, as far as Apple can go, aren't much different. https://twitter.com/0xDE…

> It still has the advantage of a much larger memory pool.

I wonder if given roughly equal power to the GPUs in current gen consoles (PS5/XBSX), it'd yield some advantage in porting console games since those consoles also have a large shared pool of memory (16GB), and neither AMD nor Nvidia want to give up using VRAM as an upsell.

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

#155

Post by unusualmonkey »

redundantly wrote: post #62

The comments here are strange. So many people making claims that power utilization doesn't matter. Perhaps not to them, but it does for many. Energy prices are getting higher and higher in many parts of the country, heck in the world. Devices that consume more power generate more heat. So now one is likely using more electricity to keep their home or office cool and comfortable. Noise matters for many people using wo…

If power utilization matters, then a more 'efficient' device, that takes longer might actually use more power overall - esp. when you factor in the lighting, Aircon etc that might be needed by the human operator who is waiting for the workstation to finish computation.

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

#156

Post by arpanetus »

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.

It's interesting. I assumed at least their power consumption should have been much better/lower than an avg orthodox desktop setup of current days.

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

#157

Post by unusualmonkey »

satysin wrote: post #143
olyjohn wrote: post #8

Queue the "But power consumption..." as though it makes fuckall difference on a workstation.

Perhaps not to you but to me it matters a lot. I live in a country where it gets very hot in the summer. I prefer to keep my environment cool without needing AC. Unfortunately I have found that is not possible to do with my beefy Dell workstation that consumes in the 1kW range thanks to the Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU. It isn't just a feeling but a hard fact that my thermostat can confirm that running my Intel workstati…

Have you tuned your workstation for power efficiency?

Dropping cpu and GPU frequencies even a few % might have a significant impact.

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

#159

Post by zamalek »

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.

> honking

May I assume that you haven't used a desktop from some year equivalent to whatever Mac you use? Because modern desktops are far from "honking."

I have a 7950x (the high core count desktop offering). AMD require (sans one brand) water-cooling for it. That means you get big quiet fans, which are far less "honking" than the tiny loud ones that are in laptops by necessity. In fact, due to the nice large radiators that liquid coolers have the fans don't spin at all the majority of the time.

When I do need power, it's on-tap.

My 6900xt is big honking during gaming, but you can get real quiet $300 GPUs. Or just use the integrated graphics and enjoy the quiet liquid cooling.

> big

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-ITX

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

#160

Post by wmf »

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…

The computer identifiers on the claimed "M2 Ultra" devices claim to be Macbook Pro 14" devices

I think you're confusing Mac14,14 which is the internal designation for the Mac Studio with a MacBook Pro 14". The leak if anyone's interested: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/21305974?baseli...

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