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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

#291

Post by pjmlp »

ddingus wrote: post #273
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.

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…

If we forget about servers.

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

#292

Post by o1y32 »

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.

You have confused HN population with general US population

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

#293

Post by tester756 »

daneel_w wrote: post #93
locustous wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whataboutism.

Yea, sure you can argue for the sake of arguing

but yea it makes difference if the difference is

0.001% 0.01% 0.1% 1% 10% 1000%

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

#294

Post by capableweb »

redundantly wrote: post #71
ksec wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Workstation, by a lot of people's definition, are suppose to be the power hungry in exchange for absolute performance?

You're doing it too. You're assuming how someone would define a workstation, you're assuming that definition includes it being power hungry. A workstation can be a single core, 256MB RAM, 1 watt SBC. It can be a 96 core, 2TB RAM, 1 kw beast. It can be anything in between or even outside of that range. I'm not saying everyone cares about power consumption, but several people here seem to be saying that no one does, an…

> A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workstation

Generally, 1 low performance core with 256RAM is not enough for technical or scientific applications. Not many professions you could get away with those kind of specs really.

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

#295

Post by GeekyBear »

ddingus wrote: post #273
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.

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…

Also, consider how much a PC laptop has to throttle performance if you unplug it from the wall.

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

#296

Post by smoldesu »

smcleod wrote: post #219
smoldesu wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The absolute "best of class" Nvidia card is currently the 4090, which can be up to 30% faster than the 4080 in scaling workloads. What would be more interesting is to see how Nvidia's laptop cards fare here though - they're constrained to much lower wattage (80-120w) and would make for a much fairer fight against the ~200w M2 Ultra.

A decent 4090 GPU alone is over $3000 in Australia - that’s half the price of a Mac Studio with Ultra - just for the GPU. Then you’d be looking for a 24 core CPU, 64GB RAM, 1TB PCIe 5 SSD, mainboard with 6x thunderbolt ports, a silent cooling setup, high quality case that is both small and all the gear while running cool. and if you’re stuck with MS Windows - an Operating System.

Yeah, you gotta pay a premium if you want the highest performance on the market. If you're just looking to match the GPU performance of the M2 Ultra though, there are several gaming laptops that will run circles around it in Blender. Many are cheaper than the base model Mac Studio.

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

#297

Post by Retric »

sudosysgen wrote: post #233
Retric wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1% lows in a given benchmark isn’t really measuring stutter in practice, what you want is percentage of frames that don’t finish in time. If once a minute you miss 4 frames in a row that’s noticeable even if everything else is rock solid. The thing is people adjust their resolution/settings to reach acceptable FPS, thus it’s fairly GPU independent. What matters is rendering volatility as assets are loaded etc.

That metric is irrelevant now that we have adaptive refresh rates. You don't really "miss" a frame anymore. 1% low is now the correct metric.

If the pipeline stalls for 70ms it’s a problem even if in theory you don’t “miss” a frame you still aren’t getting new frames until rendering finishes.

All adaptive refresh rates do is avoiding unwanted delays after the frame finishes.

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

#298

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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…

> 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.

I don't get it.

The M2 is 15W. There are mobile Ryzen APUs with the same TDP. They're about the same speed; maybe the M2 is a little faster for single thread and the PC is a little faster for multi-thread, it's not that different. You can get a PC laptop which is under 3 lbs and has 14+ hours of battery life.

You can also get a PC laptop which is heavier and has a shorter battery life because they have no qualms about selling you what amounts to a desktop CPU which is then something like 30% faster for multi-thread. But nobody forces you to buy that one.

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

#299

Post by jsheard »

torginus wrote: post #286
kmeisthax wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They don't work at all, there are no discrete GPU drivers for ARM macOS. The cooling solution and 1250W(!) power supply they carried over from the 2019 model are kind of hilariously overkill now, I don't think there's anything you still can install into the PCIe slots which comes even remotely close to needing them.

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

#300

Post by daviddever23box »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #274
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…

Sure they do, same as mobile chipsets end up Intel NUCs. You're ignoring a whole category of devices.
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