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

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

#181

Post by jerrygenser » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 7:55 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

7950X was released September, 2022. It's quite literally last year's chip and given that AMD release cycle is typically about 2 years, we're roughly halfway between last release and 9000 series release.

You might be getting it confused with the Non-X versions that were released earlier in 2023 -- those are basically the same chip but power limited and maybe slightly worse selections of silicon. Of those Non-X versions it was 7600, 7700, 7900 but non-X of 7950 was released. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Ryzen_processors

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

#182

Post by llm_nerd » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 7:55 PM UTC

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.

I believe they're saying they keep it powered off because it uses a magnitude more power.

And it's an entirely believable statement. A Mac Mini uses between 5w - 20w. Many PCs idle at >50W, and under use hit 500W+.

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

#183

Post by jerrygenser » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 7:59 PM UTC

pdpi wrote: post #177

spiderfarmer wrote: post #126

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.

> Desktop pcs requiring a ludicrous amount of power and cooling is absolutely problematic. High-end PSUs now overlap with smaller space heaters on power output. My living room is usually 3-4 degrees hotter around my desk than it is by the dining table.I'm looking to upgrade my gaming PC, and getting the power budget under control is surprisingly challenging.

For your gaming PC you likely don't even need a current gen chip. You are probably fine with a 5600 for most games unless you NEED high FPS on certain games and have a monitor with 244hz refresh rate (or you won't even get the frames) Gaming is mostly about GPU (if you're casual gamer and want to run 1440p) but if you do need cpu and high refresh rate then you're likely hardcore FPS or RTS games and you're running at 1080P anyway and then in that situation don't need a high end GPU.

I have a AMD 7700X and I run it on Eco Mode which is approx 65W TDP instead of the 105W TDP it wants to run at.

For my general use (including cpu intensive operations) this makes absolutely no perceivable difference. I ran some benchmarks out of curiosity and I take about a 5% haircut for a massive power and heat savings.

What Intel and AMD did with the chips was essentially sell consumers a default overclocked chip that will run to the max of the thermal headroom that your fan will allow and sit there. They did this to be competitive with each other in benchmarks for marketing.

Most consumers should run these chips in some sort of eco mode since the performance per watt has severe diminishing returns and they are actually quite power efficient as long as you don't run it on the default factory overclocked settings.

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

#184

Post by 411111111111111 » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 7:59 PM UTC

doctorpangloss wrote: post #150

rbanffy wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Why do you think NVIDIA doesn't "just add" "more memory"? To its $40,000 H100s, which top out at "just" 80GB? The answer isn't price segmentation.

Yes, it's not price segmentation, it's planned obsolescence.

The 3080 series would be fine for likely beyond the 50x0 series gpu-wise, but current games are already starting to stutter unless you downgrade textures because of its limited VRAM

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

#185

Post by wtallis » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 8:01 PM UTC

jerrygenser wrote: post #181

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…

> 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. 7950X was released September, 2022. It's quite literally last year's chip and given that AMD release cycle is typically about 2 years, we're roughly halfway between la…

I think he was getting the 7950X confused with the 7950X3D, the latter of which was released in late February.

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

#186

Post by incrudible » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 8:02 PM UTC

sunflowerfly wrote: post #133

microtonal wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

One differentiator is the amount of memory available. Apple's shared pool of memory means the GPU has potentially up to 96gb of ram at its disposal, where discrete GPU's are often limited to 8, 12, 16, etc. They mentioned in the keynote that the M2 can handle many tasks discrete GPUs cannot simply because they run out of ram.

$15,000 will buy you an A100 with 80GB of RAM at 2TB/s that will annihilate the biggest Apple chip.

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

#187

Post by MBCook » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 8:04 PM UTC

incrudible wrote: post #180

acdha wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A dedicated GPU with more die area and its own large fan will run both cooler and quieter when its power limit is reduced to match the performance of the Apple chip.

More watts in = more heat out.

It doesn’t matter if the cooling solution gets the chops’s surface temperature lower if it’s heating the room twice as fast.

Chip surface temperature is not a useful metric for this purpose.

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

#188

Post by jerrygenser » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 8:05 PM UTC

BaculumMeumEst wrote: post #130

spiderfarmer wrote: post #126

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.

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, t…

In general both on my own benchmarks and from what I've read/seen youtube videos, it's about a 5% performance loss multithreaded with full core saturation and 0-1% performance haircut on single threaded -- since on single threaded you are generating lower enough heat not to go near the high end.

For me this was going from 105W to 65W on my 7700X and my results were similar.

Not sure how it would look or work with Intel though.

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

#189

Post by mark_l_watson » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 8:10 PM UTC

I don’t feel comfortable with these comparisons because I think Apple designs their SoCs specifically for the software they expect to be most used on their devices. I noticed, for example, that an older iPadPro with an A series SoC compiled Swift code in Playground twice as fast as my then current beefy Intel MacBook Pro. Similar design for running specific neural network architectures, handling their displays, etc.

A few days ago I was thinking of getting a beefy Mac Studio for deep learning since M1 and M2 are now fairly well supported. I didn’t because this felt like swimming up river, using something not as it was designed to be used. (I decided to use $10 or $50/month Google Colab instead).

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

#190

Post by skippyboxedhero » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 8:10 PM UTC

mrangle wrote: post #44

Definitely have to adjust for TDP. The new gen Intel processors match the M2 performance for $100-150. TDP is triple but still relatively low. There isn't really anything available from non-niche retailers that approaches the TDP of Apple chips. And what does tends to be a binned just to be sold as mobile. Better to buy the standard chip and limit clock speed. What also shocks me is more expensive chips that offer in…

Yes, there is. AMD has desktop chips with the same TDP as Mac laptops. The latest series of AMD chips are more powerful and more power-efficient.

I think power efficiency by itself is a laudable goal, but the idea that other chipmakers don't optimize this doesn't make sense...you have to if you are building a laptop. A lot of the desktop chips are ludicrously overtuned, even AMD's chips, but the laptop chips have to be power-efficient due to the limitations on cooling.

I would look in particular at the AMD APUs that are being used in handheld devices. Unlike Mac's chips, which promised much but delivered little, they are actually delivering desktop GPU-tier (in the range of 1050/1060) performance in a 20W package and under.