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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

#271

Post by GeekyBear »

pornel wrote: post #266
GeekyBear wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple's GPU performance is what makes me sceptical about their gaming related advertising. The issue is that people compare games running under emulated x86 and emulated graphics APIs, when making claims about what the SOC is capable of. There's nothing wrong with knowing how well the SOC performs when emulating games, but if you claim to be talking about what the SOC can do, then include the performance of native…

Apple's x86 emulation is otherwise very impressive, and not many games are bottlenecked on the CPU, especially at high resolutions. Bigger overhead for AAA games is likely due to emulation of DirectX or Vulkan on Metal, but that's just Apple's stubborn choice to have it that way. In the end, none of that matters. I won't be playing Cyberpunk at 14fps, without RTX, and comforting myself that the SoC could do maybe 28f…

> Bigger overhead for AAA games is likely due to emulation of DirectX or Vulkan on Metal, but that's just Apple's stubborn choice to have it that way.

This is a weird take. None of he major gaming platforms use the same graphics API.

Microsoft has DirectX on Windows and XBox, Apple has Metal on iOS and Macs, Sony has Gnmx on Playstation.

It's like saying Android gaming is terrible because they didn't use DirectX.

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

#272

Post by phonon »

cjbprime wrote: post #112

Reasons to still prefer an M2 for a HEDT situation, despite the article claims: * The latest Intel/AMD desktops only have two channels of DDR5, and if you put as little as 64GB RAM in them they can drop to DDR4 speeds (2DPC, dual-rank), less than 10% of M2 memory bandwidth. * You can (surprisingly cheaply) buy an M2 with 192GB GPU VRAM, but you can't buy a DDR5 PC with the same amount. If we all start wanting to run…

> can't buy a DDR5 PC with the same amount.

Should be available soon.

https://www.techpowerup.com/306005/asus-teases-192-gb-ddr5-m...

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

#273

Post by ddingus »

aunty_helen wrote: post #265
daviddever23box wrote: post #241

I watched the first three Mad Max films last night, in one sitting...while there is certainly an argument for absolute performance over time, it's becoming a lot more difficult to justify the power consumption of the current Intel (and, to a lesser degree, AMD) offerings, especially for sustained personal productivity and burst compilation tasks. We cannot speak of performance without the per-watt quotient. Battery l…

The ultra isn’t in laptops. The ultra in the Mac Pro starts at 7 grand, if you’re going to pay a 4 grand premium, is 200$ of extra power over its lifetime really that important? I have a m2 Max, the battery life is awe inspiring. M2 ultra doesn’t best the competition for its use case.

It is not the dollars per watt that matters to many users.

What matters more than people may realize is battery runtime. The Apple hardware just spanks x86 hardware, unless that hardware is fitted with a big battery, and or a secondary one.

I typically run Lenovo hardware, and on my faster machine, I got a very large battery and could get 6 solid hours. And that is at a nice 3Ghz speed too.

My current machine (i5) is far slower than the M1 and that hot running Lenovo. (i7) It has two batteries that can yield 5 to 7 hours.

Those machines are heavier, slower, bigger, and just feel crappy compared to the M1 Air I have been using.

And that thing is crazy good. Battery life is longer, sometimes by a considerable amount. It is great hardware, fast, easy to use, light, you name it.

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

#274

Post by jay_kyburz »

daviddever23box wrote: post #241

I watched the first three Mad Max films last night, in one sitting...while there is certainly an argument for absolute performance over time, it's becoming a lot more difficult to justify the power consumption of the current Intel (and, to a lesser degree, AMD) offerings, especially for sustained personal productivity and burst compilation tasks. We cannot speak of performance without the per-watt quotient. Battery l…

If the chips are designed to sacrifice performance for power usage, then they have no place in a computer without a battery.

Apple should assume that desktop machines have an unlimited power source, and that users want a maximum speed. That the users time is more expensive than the electricity being fed into the computer.

Laptops, sure, sacrifice power to extend the battery. Apple does an excellent job here.

The only reason you would buy one of these desktop machines is because you want to be in the Apple ecosystem.

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

#275

Post by kmeisthax »

aunty_helen wrote: post #265
daviddever23box wrote: post #241

I watched the first three Mad Max films last night, in one sitting...while there is certainly an argument for absolute performance over time, it's becoming a lot more difficult to justify the power consumption of the current Intel (and, to a lesser degree, AMD) offerings, especially for sustained personal productivity and burst compilation tasks. We cannot speak of performance without the per-watt quotient. Battery l…

The ultra isn’t in laptops. The ultra in the Mac Pro starts at 7 grand, if you’re going to pay a 4 grand premium, is 200$ of extra power over its lifetime really that important? I have a m2 Max, the battery life is awe inspiring. M2 ultra doesn’t best the competition for its use case.

Don't waste your money on the Pro, you can get an M2 Ultra in a Mac Studio for $4000. The only reason to buy the Pro is if you have a bunch of really weird PCIe cards[0].

As for the desktop use case... sure, you aren't going to care about the $200 of saved power draw, but not having a very loud and hot machine at your desk has to count for something, right?

[0] GPUs won't work, their memory access is locked out in hardware and Apple removed the MPX connectors that powered the Intel GPU modules.

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

#276

Post by cmovq »

GeekyBear wrote: post #252
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's GPU performance is what makes me sceptical about their gaming related advertising. The issue is that people compare games running under emulated x86 and emulated graphics APIs, when making claims about what the SOC is capable of. There's nothing wrong with knowing how well the SOC performs when emulating games, but if you claim to be talking about what the SOC can do, then include the performance of native…

The CPU is rarely a bottleneck for AAA games, so unless the x86 emulation is particularly terrible (Rosetta isn't) it shouldn't be the issue.

WINE on Linux is able to match the performance of games on Windows, so the DirectX translation layer shouldn't be a problem either.

So it's not unreasonable to assume that the M2 just doesn't have a GPU capable of running these games. And it's really not that surprising that an integrated GPU doesn't match the performance of a dedicated GPU.

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

#277

Post by saagarjha »

GeekyBear wrote: post #258
mcny wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thought the whole idea of M2 was “exceptional product given the power consumption”. When running native code. Look at the performance of Microsoft's ARM Surface Pro when running emulated code. > My frustration with this computer wasn’t a workload thing. It didn’t start out fast and gradually slow down as I opened more things and started more processes. It was peppered with glitches and freezes from start to finis…

Why are you bringing up Microsoft’s translator here? I don’t see why it is relevant?

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

#278

Post by lost_tourist »

daviddever23box wrote: post #241

I watched the first three Mad Max films last night, in one sitting...while there is certainly an argument for absolute performance over time, it's becoming a lot more difficult to justify the power consumption of the current Intel (and, to a lesser degree, AMD) offerings, especially for sustained personal productivity and burst compilation tasks. We cannot speak of performance without the per-watt quotient. Battery l…

99% of the time I'm hooked up to a power source so battery life isn't nearly as important to me as the $$/performance ratio of the laptop.

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

#279

Post by TradingPlaces »

wmf wrote: post #149
TradingPlaces wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article does not say if it’s a Mac Studio or Mac Pro. I think that matters. My understanding is that there is no TDP on Apple Silicon, and that it has a lot of runway in a less constrained thermal environment like the new Mac Pro vs Mac Studio. While I’m still surprised they didn’t put a second Ultra in the Mac Pro, I’m betting there’s a wider delta than people imagine between the two form factors.

The Mac Studio doesn't throttle so there is no extra headroom for the Mac Pro.

We’ll find out next week

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

#280

Post by dijit »

cmovq wrote: post #276
GeekyBear wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple's GPU performance is what makes me sceptical about their gaming related advertising. The issue is that people compare games running under emulated x86 and emulated graphics APIs, when making claims about what the SOC is capable of. There's nothing wrong with knowing how well the SOC performs when emulating games, but if you claim to be talking about what the SOC can do, then include the performance of native…

The CPU is rarely a bottleneck for AAA games, so unless the x86 emulation is particularly terrible (Rosetta isn't) it shouldn't be the issue. WINE on Linux is able to match the performance of games on Windows, so the DirectX translation layer shouldn't be a problem either. So it's not unreasonable to assume that the M2 just doesn't have a GPU capable of running these games. And it's really not that surprising that an…

> The CPU is rarely a bottleneck for AAA games

I mean… No?

CPU bottleneck is super common, especially on slightly older engine bases like source or unreal.

I think you are assuming big AAA games at 4k, which puts an especially big strain on the GPU.

Maybe I’ve been developing games too long, but we are constantly fighting CPU bottlenecks.

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