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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

#311

Post by jayd16 »

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…

Your use case is watching a movie? Wouldn't this just hit the hardware decoder on any of these chips?

I guess I don't understand why you would want the ultra if you still prioritize TDP over performance.

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

#312

Post by alpaca128 »

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?

Where I live the electricity prices are about to rise by 90%. It's not the first significant price increase in recent years.

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

#313

Post by xattt »

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…

> The only reason to buy the Pro is if you have a bunch of really weird PCIe cards

They’re telegraphing the use case for future SOCs.

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

#314

Post by incrudible »

MBCook wrote: post #187
incrudible wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A dedicated GPU with more die area and its own large fan will run both cooler and quieter when its power limit is reduced to match the performance of the Apple chip.

More watts in = more heat out. It doesn’t matter if the cooling solution gets the chops’s surface temperature lower if it’s heating the room twice as fast. Chip surface temperature is not a useful metric for this purpose.

The die area matters in terms of how much performance you can still get out of it when lowering the power to match up with the (not actually) more efficient integrated chip.

If Apple clocked their GPU to match the performance of a comparable dedicated chip, it would be just as inefficient, noisy and hot. Except they can not do even do that. They turned a limitation of the design into a supposed feature.

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

#315

Post by ddingus »

GeekyBear wrote: post #295
ddingus wrote: post #273

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…

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

Yes! That is often significant. Sometimes worse than half performance, or it will suck the battery dry fast enough to seriously increase battery life decay.

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

#316

Post by smoldesu »

threeseed wrote: post #304
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 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.

> provided the drivers exist.

Provided Apple signs 'em :p

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

#317

Post by ddingus »

pjmlp wrote: post #291
ddingus wrote: post #273

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.

Sure. When talking about desktop, personal computing, servers are not really a discussion.

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

#318

Post by sneak »

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…

TFA is about the M2 Ultra chip - it is not available in any system that is battery powered. They are in the Max Studio and Mac Pro only.

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

#319

Post by alpaca128 »

nightski wrote: post #91
throwaway5959 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does when you multiply it across millions of CPUs. Saving 100 watts across 3 million CPUs (300 megawatts) is enough to shut down the equivalent of power plants.

I'm all for efficiency but if we are to progress as a civilization we need to find a way to not have power hold us back. We can get to a point where we have nearly unlimited power with minimal impact on the environment around us. That needs to happen as soon as possible.

> That needs to happen as soon as possible.

But it won't happen before all M2/3 Macs will be obsolete. Having goals like that is great but until we reach that point efficiency is still important.

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

#320

Post by charlie0 »

One thing I haven't seen mentioned is thermal throttling. Performance per watt absolutely matters if you're working in a place where the temp is 75deg or hotter. Those powerful Wintel laptops will certainly throttle down. The M architecture has a lot more headroom in this regard.
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