Live data from Hacker News

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

wccftech.com

301–310 of 448 posts

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

#301
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Entirely stock, not even EXPO overclocking.

I saw that during shaders compile in RPCX3, pretty hard to see it otherwise.

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

#302
post #276

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 M2 just doesn't have a GPU capable of running these games.

As long as AAA games are published on the Xbox Series S and shipping with graphics settings they will have no problem when running natively on an M2 chip.

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

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but most of these comparisons are based on GPU performance (ie. games). For other workloads like machine learning, Tensor cores on NVIDIA GPUs will blow Apple Silicon GPUs out of the water. The M2 Ultra is 27 TFLOPS. The 4080't Tensor Cores are 48.7 TFLOPS in FP32, 194.9 TFLOPS in FP16, 389.9 TFLOPS in FP8 with FP16 accumulate. (IIRC on Apple Silicon GPUs FP16 performance is roughly the same as FP32.) (There i…

I think the exciting thing with Apple silicone and "AI" is inference, not training. Due to their unified memory, you can potentially have enormous local model inference. That's potentially much more expensive on a PC with a GPU having its own memory. Apple have an opportunity, if they 2-4x the memory on the entry level devices (not beyond the realms of possibility), to make local inference a thing available to all.

Multiple NVIDIA GPUs also have unified memory from an application perspective, one GPU has up to 80GBs right now. They also have a proper software stack. If NVIDIA saw any credible threat there, they could ramp that up, DRAM is not beholden to Apple.

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

#304

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 can work provided the drivers exist.

And those really weird PCI cards are what underpins many industries for which the Mac Pro is designed for e.g. video and audio production.

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

#305
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which we should because no one is using a Mac as a server.

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

#306

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…

[deleted]

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

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I always though NUC's are designed to be cheap, quiet, and small, not power efficient. I don't think they run on battery power.

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

#308
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But many of us don't want that performance to come in a large tower that requires fans to be constantly running.

I own a Mac Studio and PC 10980xe with 4090 and the latter has to live in a separate room because of the noise.

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

#309

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…

Lol, indeed, the Intel chip they use for comparaison is 320W: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-13900ks-c...

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

#310
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$15,000 will buy you an A100 with 80GB of RAM at 2TB/s that will annihilate the biggest Apple chip.

Sure, but then that’s the price of multiple entire laptops. Or 2 Mac Pros. Not sure what point you’re trying to make here.

It is also the performance of 4 Mac Pros. GP was talking about tasks that dedicated GPUs supposedly could not handle. Who is is running models needing 60+ GB of VRAM on their laptops?
Post reply on HN