351–360 of 448 posts
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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.
And don’t forget cooling! All that extra power draw generates heat.
> And don’t forget cooling! All that extra power draw generates heat.
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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?
Although quantisation has now lowered the required memory, I wouldn’t be surprised if it comes in handy again in the near future.
But today that’s quite a niche use case.
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It's not just that it doesn't come with a discrete GPU. Apple Silicon doesn't support discrete GPUs to begin with. As far as I understand it—and this is just from watching Apple's presentations on the architecture—the lack of a discrete GPU is a big part of how the Apple Silicon machines achieve good performance per watt. Instead of having discrete RAM or a discrete GPU with its own VRAM, all of the RAM is accessible…
> and also eliminates a lot of the need to copy data from RAM to VRAM, as both the GPU and the CPU can access the same memory. In return, this allows the GPU to match the performance of discrete GPUs that have a lot more cores. Plenty of PC hardware reviewers have done sensitivity analysis experiments to see how discrete GPU performance is affected by running with a slower or narrower PCIe link. The consensus is usua…
It enables software to be designed differently ie by not having to ever copy things to VRAM.
The results speak for themselves (Apple is slower than some) but the context does matter: Apple has been talking about performance per watt since Steve Jobs showed a keynote slide announcing the transition from PowerPC. The cynical view is that Apple is intentionally misleading customers with their ambiguous graph axes. Another perspective is they’re simply demonstrating the metric they’ve optimized for in the first…
Do people really care about efficiency for plugged-in devices? There is the environmental factor, but there are people on 100% renewable a too...
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> 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 (wi…
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> A workstation can be a single core, 256MB RAM, 1 watt SBC. No. Words have meanings. Workstation does not mean that.
What does ”Workstation” mean then? What kind of ”work” is it meant for? Accounting? Writing? Programming? Video editing?
That's a relative thing, so "workstation" has continued to mean "computer that is on the upper end of the computing power spectrum".
So not writing, probably not accounting. Programming, sure, if the builds being done are computationally expensive. Video editing definitely, if you are going to be doing a lot of it, you will want the most powerful workstation your budget allows for.
Poorly written, resulting in what could look like a bias. The article mentions that apple has focused on single core performance while the x86 processors in question are designed for multi core use cases. This reflects two different markets being addressed and the sad state (small amount) of multicore code today. Also it’s silly to claim that the M2 Ultra is so expensive — you can get the same performance from a 3K “…
haven’t read the article, but there are no single threaded use cases on Apple platforms that Apple cares about, so I’d take any claim that Apple is optimizing for single threaded performance with an enormous bag of salt
Multithreaded performance is only good when you don't care about power use, but that's never true on a battery powered phone. It's actually more often the case that you optimize software by removing accidental excess concurrency than by adding it. Junior engineers love them some unstructured concurrency.
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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.…
At this point we are seeing the globalised fossil fuel market endgame in this country.
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Which we should because no one is using a Mac as a server.
They should (or equivalent product). ARMv8 processors are much more secure than x86 and will continue to improve in ARMv9.