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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

#201

Post by MBCook »

florakel wrote: post #122
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?

The took the giant overkill design meant to hold a hot Intel chip and possibly multiple big GPUs, and put a M2 Ultra in it.

It’s overcooled. There is no way it’s thermally limited. It’s got to have headroom for days.

I’m very curious where this idea I keep seeing in the comments that Apple refuses to run chips at full speed for cooling reasons comes from.

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

#202

Post by gruez »

acdha wrote: post #98
partiallypro wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most consumers don't care about wattage on a desktop, and when you compare the prices they are similar and it loses.

Many people do care - many Americans have subsidized low power but that’s not globally true and even if your power is free a hot CPU means you’re listening to fan noise and heating up the room. In a cold winter that’s not bad but I knew people who had to do things like leave their office doors open for cooling.

>many Americans have subsidized low power

Source?

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

#203

Post by betaby »

llm_nerd wrote: post #182
theevilsharpie wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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+.

Perhaps, but those would be the very different PCs. Also while exist, 500W+ desktops are rare, and their performance are not comparable to Mac Minis.

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

#204

Post by waboremo »

burmanm wrote: post #169
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.

Is it? Why? 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.

You should care because you're paying for that energy use lol

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

#205

Post by numpad0 »

mcny wrote: post #191
numpad0 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 addi…

I was one told that memory and bus bandwidth often creates disparity between benchmark and application performances in ARM CPUs. That was years ago and supposedly don’t apply to custom designs like M2, but maybe both Intel and AMD are still advantageous in that region?

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

#206

Post by kitsunesoba »

jeroenhd wrote: post #178
kitsunesoba wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

With the M2 Ultra prices, it'd be cheaper to buy a 4090 than to go the Apple route. With the M2 pro you'll probably still be better off with a 4080 unless you really need more than 16GB of VRAM. I don't know the M2's efficiency for things like machine learning, but the M1's machine learning performance seemed to have been beaten 4-5x by the 3060Ti so I'm pretty sure "more VRAM" is all it's got going for it in ML task…

Well yeah, the market here would be people who already have a reasonably powerful Mac and would rather have that fill their gaming needs instead of having to build or buy a separate dedicated device for that.

But what I was really getting at is the trouble that game studios have been encountering lately when porting PS5 and Xbox titles to Windows, which is that these games are so reliant on those consoles' 16GB shared memory pool that they perform terribly on PCs. The impact is double, because not only are most GPUs in usage right now anemic when it comes to VRAM (even my last-gen high end 3080 Ti comes up short at only 12GB), traditional PCs also have to copy data between RAM and VRAM. Significant re-architecting for the Windows port is required to work around this.

M-series Macs are much more similar to current gen consoles with their shared memory pool, which in theory could make porting from console to Mac (at least when targeting Macs with 16GB+ of RAM) more straightforward than porting to Windows. While some work would need to be done to support Metal, the two most popular engines already do much of that legwork and the work that remains can be shared across multiple titles.

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

#207

Post by sgtnoodle »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #168
tehnub wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

AIOs aren't a great option for users who want to set it and forget it. Even the best ones lose fluid to sublimation and/or start leaking after a few years, which is why there's still a market for coolers like the NH-D15.

I went with the NH-D15 when I built my 5950x desktop. I've never fiddled with liquid cooling, and having to locate a radiator seemed like a pain. I very much hope not to need to touch it again for a decade. After tweaking the fan profile, it's silent most of the time. Of course, it does make it kind of a pain to remove my GPU because it's so bulky; I need to use a shim to reach the PCI-E latch.

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

#208

Post by automatic6131 »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #165
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…

IMO driving down power consumption should still be a goal even for desktop machines. It means that the overwhelming majority of users get cooler, quieter, less bulky machines, while the fringe who need raw power at all costs can overclock to the moon if they really want to. This also pushes more "desktop like" performance to both ultraportable and reasonably portable laptops, allowing these machines to fully replace…

>while the fringe who need raw power at all costs can overclock to the moon if they really want to.

This is actually the case! The 7950X and 13900K come in non-X and non-K variants, which have vastly reduced power footprints and overall consumption, and you can even take your X or K variant and... Enforce that exact same power envelope in BIOS, for minimal loss in performance. But the purchasers of desktop X and K SKUs are the overclocking fringe (by and large). I will admit though, a lot of laptops are sold with with i|r7|9 +HX variants that shouldn't be purchased because big number means easier upsell.

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

#209

Post by rched »

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.

This article strangely cites the cost of the Mac Pro with M2 Ultra. You can get the same M2 Ultra in a Mac Studio starting at $4000.

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

#210

Post by kitsunesoba »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #207
kitsunesoba wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AIOs aren't a great option for users who want to set it and forget it. Even the best ones lose fluid to sublimation and/or start leaking after a few years, which is why there's still a market for coolers like the NH-D15.

I went with the NH-D15 when I built my 5950x desktop. I've never fiddled with liquid cooling, and having to locate a radiator seemed like a pain. I very much hope not to need to touch it again for a decade. After tweaking the fan profile, it's silent most of the time. Of course, it does make it kind of a pain to remove my GPU because it's so bulky; I need to use a shim to reach the PCI-E latch.

> I need to use a shim to reach the PCI-E latch.

Similar here, there's not much room left when you've got a NH-D15 and EVGA 3080 Ti FTW3 installed.

This is more of an inadequacy on the part of motherboard manufacturers, though. PCI-E latches don't have to be terrible… look at the system Apple uses in their 2019 and 2023 Mac Pro towers for example which remain accessible regardless of what you have installed.

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