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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

#191

Post by mcny »

numpad0 wrote: post #174
jeroenhd wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's GPU performance is what makes me sceptical about their gaming related advertising. Sure, you can do 1080p gaming with the highest SKU, but you're paying through the nose if you bought an M2 to play games. It seems strange to me for Apple to advertise something they haven't exactly mastered yet on stage. Maybe they have some kind of optimization up their sleeves that will roll out later? I can imagine Apple co…

Apple consistently advertised gaming performance without any substance to it.

I thought the whole idea of M2 was “exceptional product given the power consumption”.

I don’t mind that it has nothing to show for all the talk once you throw out the need to basically sip power (like a notebook computer).

Is this something inherent with ARM though? Why can’t there be ARM based desktop and server computers that need a kilowatt of power at peak? Like how much more performance can you get for each additional watt of power? (I don’t know. I’m genuinely asking.)

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

#192

Post by numpad0 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #67
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.

Wait, a $7000 computer doesn’t come with a discrete GPU?

Or memory slots, or dual/quad socket capability, or compatibility with the GPU card for previous gen Mac Pro. You get one multicore ARM SoC with 192GB of on-package L4 cache and integrated graphics, and that’s it.

While 192GB of RAM is more than I would need, for people looking to use 1.5TB of RAM and a pair of NVIDIA GPU they had from previous model, they’d have to go elsewhere.

Which leaves me wondering; how much engineering at Apple are happening on Mac?

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

#193

Post by the8472 »

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.

> best of class NVIDIA discrete GPU offering

Those are nvidia's best consumer GPUs. I think the cheese grater falls into the pro segment. In that segment nvidia has the A6000s with 48GB VRAM and 91 SP TFlops compared to the 4090's 24GB and 73 SP TFlops. But that costs as much as the Mac Pro alone. And even bigger options (segmented for server/datacenter use) are available.

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

#194

Post by brailsafe »

zamalek wrote: post #170
Demmme wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Apple has a huge advantage price / performance wise My 7950x machine cost, excluding the enthusiast GPU, $3000. That's less than half the cost of the M2 Ultra.

You spent $3000 before gpu on a custom PC!?

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

#195

Post by MBCook »

KerrAvon wrote: post #31
gumby wrote: post #19

Poorly written, resulting in what could look like a bias. The article mentions that apple has focused on single core performance while the x86 processors in question are designed for multi core use cases. This reflects two different markets being addressed and the sad state (small amount) of multicore code today. Also it’s silly to claim that the M2 Ultra is so expensive — you can get the same performance from a 3K “…

haven’t read the article, but there are no single threaded use cases on Apple platforms that Apple cares about, so I’d take any claim that Apple is optimizing for single threaded performance with an enormous bag of salt

> but there are no single threaded use cases on Apple platforms that Apple cares about

I don’t see how that could be true. A huge amount of software tasks are basically single threaded.

Remember since Apple does everything soup-to-nuts they have a ton of performance data from their computers to know what real user workloads look like so they can optimize the hardware + the software for them.

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

#197

Post by whywhywhywhy »

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.

4090 is what it should be compared to, that's the equivalent card you'd be looking at for those workflows.

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

#198

Post by MBCook »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #29
murmansk wrote: post #5

Ahhaha, Intel's TDP is 2-4 times bigger under full load (and I guess ~10-15x under moderate load) while having negligible perf advantage over M2. The author can not be serious.

> Intel's TDP is 2-4 times bigger under full load Never been a problem, even when Intel TDP was 20x worse than today. EDIT: the author forgot that the tested system is an M2 Ultra a desktop class system with a TDP of 90 watts The i9-13900T and i7-13700T come in at a max turbo power of just 106W which is just 1.2x

> The i9-13900T and i7-13700T come in at a max turbo power of just 106W

Now add in the GPU. Because the Apple number combined both.

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

#199

Post by MBCook »

locustous wrote: post #86
daneel_w wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed? Do you live in some alternate reality? > "... the difference of a few 10s of watts doesn't really make any difference, unless you have numbers to back up your very strong claim." We have a billion power-hungry PCs running on the planet. Power-efficiency matters for economy and for environment, because power isn't free and only a tiny speck of the world runs on clean energy. It always mattered.

Most of those systems sit at idle, when they are on at all. Idle power is not the same as TDP. The idle difference is not so great that it's a big deal.

Do you have a source showing idle numbers? I’ve never seen a comparison. The ones I’ve seen are always about max power.

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

#200

Post by zamalek »

brailsafe wrote: post #194
zamalek wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple has a huge advantage price / performance wise My 7950x machine cost, excluding the enthusiast GPU, $3000. That's less than half the cost of the M2 Ultra.

You spent $3000 before gpu on a custom PC!?

It was the height of the pandemic and shortages. I guess it could be a lot cheaper today.
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