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

wccftech.com

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

#321

Post by pas »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #298
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…

can someone recommend a concrete laptop then, please? I have been putting off the buying of a new one for years now. (I have an old XPS 13 and a P50 with an M1000M, so ... yeah, old dogs!)

I want to put Linux on it. So far I have been looking at the legion 5 pro, because a friend got one recently, and seems amazing, though haven't yet got my hands on it long enough to try it with an USB stick with a recent Ubuntu (with a recent kernel) to test the power management feature support.

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

#322

Post by LeoNatan25 »

threeseed wrote: post #308
Salgat wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t know what tower case you are using, or what cooling system you have set up, but in modern times, if you hear much noise from your cooling solution, you have chosen components poorly. From fans to pumps to dampened cases, you could have build a relatively silent system.

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

#323

Post by threeseed »

smoldesu wrote: post #316
threeseed wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Microsoft has implemented driver signing with Windows so not sure what the issue is.

And users can still use unsigned drivers provided they disable the option.

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

#324

Post by threeseed »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #322
threeseed wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t know what tower case you are using, or what cooling system you have set up, but in modern times, if you hear much noise from your cooling solution, you have chosen components poorly. From fans to pumps to dampened cases, you could have build a relatively silent system.

With a Mac Studio it isn't just relatively silent in almost cases it is silent.

With a PC you still have case fans running because even with modern motherboards they don't support switching them off at low temperature. You need to be running special Windows software.

And to cool the CPU you really need to be running AIO or dedicated water coolers which themselves will have 3 fans almost always running.

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

#325

Post by florakel »

MBCook wrote: post #201
florakel wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a fair point. Especially for the new Mac Pro they could have implemented a more robust thermal solution and clock the whole thing higher. That’s one advantage of a bigger chasis, isn’t it?

The took the giant overkill design meant to hold a hot Intel chip and possibly multiple big GPUs, and put a M2 Ultra in it. It’s overcooled . There is no way it’s thermally limited. It’s got to have headroom for days. I’m very curious where this idea I keep seeing in the comments that Apple refuses to run chips at full speed for cooling reasons comes from.

The current Mac Pro is kind of pointless. Before you got a powerful workstation (power consumption was irrelevant), now you get a Studio Mac in a new package. I feel they just launched it for “compliance” not because it is a great product. They hit a wall with scaling the M chip architecture. Building an even larger chip than the Ultra would be insane and going multi socket is not possible.

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

#326

Post by Arcuru »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #307
daviddever23box wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's easier to make something small and quiet if it's power efficient. It will need to dissipate less heat.

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

#327

Post by heelix »

zamalek wrote: post #159
spiderfarmer wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desktop pcs requiring a ludicrous amount of power and cooling is absolutely problematic. The amount of people willing to put up with big honking machines is dwindling.

> honking May I assume that you haven't used a desktop from some year equivalent to whatever Mac you use? Because modern desktops are far from "honking." I have a 7950x (the high core count desktop offering). AMD require (sans one brand) water-cooling for it. That means you get big quiet fans, which are far less "honking" than the tiny loud ones that are in laptops by necessity. In fact, due to the nice large radiato…

Doing the same thing. I ended up putting a 7950x into what was intended to be my next threadripper chassis and with stock settings the fans don't turn on. The only moving part would be the water pump, which is very quiet. Once in a while I get a gurgle from a bubble.

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

#328

Post by TylerE »

threeseed wrote: post #324
LeoNatan25 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know what tower case you are using, or what cooling system you have set up, but in modern times, if you hear much noise from your cooling solution, you have chosen components poorly. From fans to pumps to dampened cases, you could have build a relatively silent system.

With a Mac Studio it isn't just relatively silent in almost cases it is silent. With a PC you still have case fans running because even with modern motherboards they don't support switching them off at low temperature. You need to be running special Windows software. And to cool the CPU you really need to be running AIO or dedicated water coolers which themselves will have 3 fans almost always running.

The fans in a max studio never actually turn off… they’re just really really quiet, and I’ve never managed to actually make the fans come off idle, even maxing out all cores.

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

#329

Post by brucethemoose2 »

perrohunter wrote: post #106
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take anything from wccf with a grain of salt. And yeah, as others point out, this is Apples to oranges. x86 desktops are great at some things, M2 Ultras are great at others, and the overlap that really matters is pretty small... Like, you have to be crazy to buy an M SoC for gaming, or buy a Nvidia GPU for workloads that won't fit in VRAM.

I tested the new game porting kit on a Mac mini M2 and was surprised I was able to run Cyberpunk 2077 and it was running really well, I can imagine that more powerful M processors will be awesome, so the argument of games might go away soon

So can my old 14" RTX 2060 laptop, on a 4K TV.

I have seen the demos, but I am skeptical of the actual practicality or value proposition until a 3rd party publishes some frametime benchmarks, and games out in the wild get battle tested.

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

#330

Post by Nullabillity »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #257
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. The price of workstation-class machines also includes the cost of higher build-quality and stability, things like same-day support and service - at least the option for a long-term (5-6 year) warranty, and FRUs - you don't get that with consumer-grade computers - and those things matter when a machine is something you depend on pro…

$4k will buy you a hell of a lot of troubleshooting time before "same-day service" actually wins out.
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