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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

#281

Post by wtallis »

ilyt wrote: post #240
sgtnoodle wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My 120W 7800X3D only managed to heat that monster to 70C. I should probably bump the thermal profile to spin to max only around 80C...

How much did you have to crank up the voltages on the 7800X3D to get it to 120W? I can't get mine much past 85W at stock voltage and clocks, even with the memory running at DDR5-6000.

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

#282

Post by GeekyBear »

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…

> So it's not unreasonable to assume that the M2 just doesn't have a GPU capable of running these games

Without including comparison data on native games? It's entirely unreasonable.

For instance, The native version of the DirectX 12 game "The Medium" was shown running side by side with the emulated version at WWDC, and the native version had double the frame rate.

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

#283

Post by llm_nerd »

veselin wrote: post #128

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 core is probably in the same ballpark as Zen 4 core, likely a tiny bit below.

The 7950x is running at 5.7Ghz when only a single thread is saturated. The M2 Ultra caps its cores at 3.5Ghz. A 62% higher clock speed, at a monster power profile, to barely beat it isn't evidence of a core advantage.

>24 M2 cores manage to beat 16 Zen 4 cores also at lower power

The M2 ultra has 16 real cores, with 8 additional efficiency cores that are very low performance. And of course the M2 Ultra could pretty handily trounce the 7950x because the latter has to dramatically scale back the clock speed, as the power profile of all 16 cores at 5.7Ghz would melt the chip. And of course the 7950x has hyper-threading and hardware for mini-versions of 16 more cores, so in a way it has more cores than the Apple chip.

>This doesn't account for the AVX512 of Zen4.

AVX512 is used by a tiny, minuscule fraction of computers ever in their history of existence. It is the most absolute non-factor going.

I mean...in an ideal world Apple would get the GPU off the core. It limits their core and power profile, and takes up a huge amount of die space. They could then individually mega-size the GPU and the CPU. They could investigate mega interconnects like nvidia's latest instead of trying to jam everything together.

Was Apple correct to call it the most powerful chip? Certainly not. And there is a huge price penalty. But they're hugely, ridiculously powerful machines that will never leave the user wanting.

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

#284

Post by dijit »

croes wrote: post #212
redundantly wrote: post #62

The comments here are strange. So many people making claims that power utilization doesn't matter. Perhaps not to them, but it does for many. Energy prices are getting higher and higher in many parts of the country, heck in the world. Devices that consume more power generate more heat. So now one is likely using more electricity to keep their home or office cool and comfortable. Noise matters for many people using wo…

How much electricity can you pay for the price of a computer with an M2 Ultra?

Pedantically, sysadmins always counted the power consumption (or, compute density) when upgrading servers, and would even do early upgrades as a cost saving measure.

Power costs (in datacenters at least) were high enough that buying the €10,000 server that sucked 200w more was worth less than the €15,000 machine that didnt suck that extra 200w.

So electricity prices can be more than a negligible amount on the total.

Where that line is depends on your personal situation.

I live in southern sweden and they hide the total price of power here, but aggregated my cost per watt is 5sek/kWh (roughly €0.45).

So a worst case for me at 200w with 24hrs of usage is about €800/y

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

#285

Post by markhahn »

redundantly wrote: post #62

The comments here are strange. So many people making claims that power utilization doesn't matter. Perhaps not to them, but it does for many. Energy prices are getting higher and higher in many parts of the country, heck in the world. Devices that consume more power generate more heat. So now one is likely using more electricity to keep their home or office cool and comfortable. Noise matters for many people using wo…

Task energy is a more reasonable argument than whinging about how some people care so much about power.

Everyone cares about power, at a fairly similar level - maybe 2-4x differences, but not 10x. And most of the ones who care underestimate how rarely their machine is actually fully busy.

Idle power is probably more interesting than even task power, for anything other than an unusually busy server or cloud hypervisor.

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

#286

Post by torginus »

kmeisthax wrote: post #275
aunty_helen wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

GPUs won't work at all? Can't you even use them for ML/compute stuff?

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

#287

Post by goosedragons »

rbanffy wrote: post #260
jeroenhd wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you buy anything labeled as "workstation", you're paying twice the price already. 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 an…

> If you buy anything labeled as "workstation", you're paying twice the price already. We are not comparing MacPros to low-end desktops. > 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. Yes, but the gaming PC will not as well built as the workstation-grade machine. And pretty much any GPU you can install on a gaming PC you can in…

AFAIK the 2023 Mac Pro doesn't support PCIe GPUs for the same reason AS Macs don't support eGPUs. It has PCIe slots you can use for other things like capture cards or whatever but not GPUs.

RAM was something you could upgrade with the 2019 Mac Pro and something you could get a lot of. 1.5TB worth. The new Mac Pro caps out at 192GB which is barely better than consumer AMD/Intel systems at the moment.

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

#288

Post by tester756 »

waboremo wrote: post #230
burmanm wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the end that sum it takes energy during gaming is meaningless. I spend more on coffee while playing than to electricity.

Right, and you could have afforded better/more coffee with the savings costs to consuming less power. Which is the point: energy costs are not 0. These costs vary depending on which devices you play on, regardless of games. Someone playing the same games as you on PS5 rather than a gaming PC, is going to save enough money to then buy another indie game per month or more coffees in that month than you. Note: this isn'…

Depends what's the trade off

Can additional performance allow me to do more while e.g gaming?

Like doing some stuff in the background, having VMs, IDEs, Dockers running?

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

#289

Post by hotstickyballs »

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.

Power isn’t just the stuff coming out of the wall, it’s also the heat you have to dissipate.

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

#290

Post by Salgat »

avidphantasm wrote: post #262
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…

Yeah, my reaction the whole time to reading OP is, “now do performance per Watt…”

Intel and AMD sell laptop chips with comparable performance per watt to M2 laptops. If you're buying an M2 Ultra desktop computer, your primary concern is performance period, not performance per watt.
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