161–170 of 448 posts
All all the M2 variants just Apple going down the binning path because of yields?
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…
The article describes the M2 being blown out of the water by a 4080 and a 13900KS. That's about $2000 + RAM, motherboard, and power supply. Plus you can use the built in GPU in your CPU for acceleration things like transcodes.
You can get a pre-built gaming PC with a 4090 for about $4000, that'll crush the M2 in compute if you use any kind of GPU acceleration.
Of course the M2 has some other advantages (the unified memory and macOS) and some other disadvantages (you're stuck with the amount of RAM you pick at checkout, macOS, you have to sacrifice system RAM for GPU RAM) so it all depends on your use case.
I think the M2 still reigns supreme for mobile devices, though AMD is getting closer and closer with their mobile chips, but if you've got a machine hooked into the wall you'll have to pay some pretty excessive electricity rates for the M2 to become competitive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and also eliminates a lot of the need to copy data from RAM to VRAM, as both the GPU and the CPU can access the same memory. In return, this allows the GPU to match the performance of discrete GPUs that have a lot more cores. Plenty of PC hardware reviewers have done sensitivity analysis experiments to see how discrete GPU performance is affected by running with a slower or narrower PCIe link. The consensus is usua…
You can generally ignore FPS numbers as irrelevant outside of extremes, what people notice is stutter and that’s where PCIe link bandwidth matters.
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.
>big honking machines
Buy an all-in-one water cooler for the CPU https://pcpartpicker.com/product/2PFKHx/arctic-liquid-freeze...
It's easy to install and you have a quiet, well-cooled CPU.
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…
This also pushes more "desktop like" performance to both ultraportable and reasonably portable laptops, allowing these machines to fully replace desktops for the overwhelming majority without all of the caveats that come with "desktop replacement" laptops (workstation laptops, heavy duty gaming laptops, etc). A lot of people who previously wouldn't have seen laptops as capable of being their primary machines are doing exactly that with M1/M2 Pro MBPs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That being said, it's pretty obvious that Apple's mobile-style solution isn't really working out on the desktop side of things. The new iMac feels starkly pedestrian compared to the old ones, and the Mac Mini/Studio are both neat but not unprecedented. The M2 Ultra represents a lot of engineering effort going into flipping that status quo, but its still slipping behind by a considerable margin. Don't forget that a second "Ultra" style SOC with 4x M1 Maxes was supposedly cancelled for drawing too much power and being too hot. It's just not effective or efficient to force that much silicon that close together.
50% slower than the absolute best of class NVIDIA discrete GPU offering that consumes massively more wattage is hardly a damning statement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
>ludicrous amount of power and cooling >big honking machines Buy an all-in-one water cooler for the CPU https://pcpartpicker.com/product/2PFKHx/arctic-liquid-freeze... It's easy to install and you have a quiet, well-cooled CPU.
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.
My machine is entirely silent on normal operations (Zen 3 5600X and RX 6700). All the fans, on both GPU and CPU are stopped in desktop usage. And it doesn't obviously eat that much power (my monitor probably eats more).
The only moment I could hear them is if I play games. And then I have headset on, so I can't hear them.
I really couldn't care less if it ate twice the amount of power when playing games.
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…
How does that not matter on a fair comparison? It's a no brainer anyway to get more performance from desktop and non apple much cheaper due to apples pricing. Apple has a huge advantage price / performance wise with the cheap m based Mac book air. The comparison with a Mac book pro which costs 2-3k is slightly less so.
My 7950x machine cost, excluding the enthusiast GPU, $3000. That's less than half the cost of the M2 Ultra.