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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

#371

Post by threeseed »

Ygg2 wrote: post #368
threeseed wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> With a PC you still have case fans running because even with modern motherboards they don't support switching them off at low temperature What do you mean? Most motherboards support sending 0W to fans at given temps. You just install the motherboard software.

The motherboard software that is Windows only.

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

#372

Post by wtallis »

Retric wrote: post #365
sudosysgen wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how it works. A 70ms pipeline stall means a ~90ms frame which means that your 1% framerate low is going to be reduced. Adaptive refresh rate means that only frame rate matters. You can't miss a frame, you can only have a frame take longer, and that's measured perfectly well by 1% or 0.1% low frame rates. Also I don't see why an M series CPU is going to be any better at feeding the (asynchrous, multiple fra…

Yes occasional 90ms stall reduces 1% frame rates, but less than how annoying it is. A 10 minute test at 120 FPS is 10 * 60 * 120 ~= 72,000 frames. Your 1% lows is an average of ~720 frames but so what if of 300 them are at 60 FPS you’re going to have trouble noticing. While if you’re almost rock solid at 120FPS a dozen 70ms stalls it’s really obvious that something is wrong but the calculated 1% low’s may actually lo…

> While if you’re almost rock solid at 120FPS a dozen 70ms stalls it’s really obvious that something is wrong but the calculated 1% low’s may actually look better.

I think this is an instance of the coordinated omission problem: you cannot simply measure the latency of the frames that were completed, but instead have to consider the frames that should have been delivered during a stall. Looking at frame time percentiles means a stall only penalizes your metric with one bad frame, when it should be penalized for missing several frames and showing the user an increasingly stale image for several average-frametimes.

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

#373

Post by thot_experiment »

zarzavat wrote: post #367
astrange wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where can you get these drivers that exist but just aren't signed?

You can’t because Nvidia gave up and stopped developing drivers for macOS. The OS won’t let you install unsigned drivers.

I know I'm a crazy person, but the idea of having a computer that actually won't let me run whatever I want on it is so nuts.

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

#374

Post by tomnipotent »

threeseed wrote: post #339
tomnipotent wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cool the CPU you really need to be running AIO or dedicated water coolers There is no shortage of silent air coolers, such as the NH-D15, that are 20-30 dBA and undetectable unless the only noise in the room. It's usually stock case fans that are the culprit.

If you're running a PC with a dedicated GPU then you will have minimum 6 extra fans. 3 for the GPU and 3 for the case. The latter are pretty noisy and constantly run.

Sure, loud fans are loud but anyone that cares about noise is not using OEM fans, and picking up something from Noctua/Arctic. It's also common to upgrade to 140mm fans which further reduces noise.

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

#375

Post by astrange »

zarzavat wrote: post #367
astrange wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where can you get these drivers that exist but just aren't signed?

You can’t because Nvidia gave up and stopped developing drivers for macOS. The OS won’t let you install unsigned drivers.

If that was the only barrier you could sign them yourself. They stopped a long time before that though.

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

#376

Post by nateb2022 »

CPUs are intentionally engineered for a target market. When engineering the M2, Apple had a certain market in mind, and design and performance trade-offs were made accordingly. As others have noted, power efficiency seems to be a big priority. The M2 Ultra has a TDP of 60W. The i9-13900K has a base consumption of 125W, and draws up to 253W under stress. So do the math. Intel achieves 32% better single-core performance and 41% better multi-core performance (Cinebench) for 422% of Apple's power consumption. If there's something impressive here, it's that Apple is able to do so much with so little. If Apple wanted to, they could probably conjoin two M2 Ultra's and soundly beat the i9-13900K by a considerable margin and still use about half the same power to do so. The real question is why any consumer would need that much compute, and the target market for such a niche is probably very small which is why Apple didn't do that

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

#377

Post by Toutouxc »

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.

> even with modern motherboards they don't support switching them off at low temperature

I have a ASUS TUF GAMING B550M-PLUS WIFI II motherboard in my desktop set to do exactly that, under I think 48 °C it stops the case fans. No Windows software required, it’s all in the MB’s BIOS.

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

#378

Post by sudosysgen »

Retric wrote: post #365
sudosysgen wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how it works. A 70ms pipeline stall means a ~90ms frame which means that your 1% framerate low is going to be reduced. Adaptive refresh rate means that only frame rate matters. You can't miss a frame, you can only have a frame take longer, and that's measured perfectly well by 1% or 0.1% low frame rates. Also I don't see why an M series CPU is going to be any better at feeding the (asynchrous, multiple fra…

Yes occasional 90ms stall reduces 1% frame rates, but less than how annoying it is. A 10 minute test at 120 FPS is 10 * 60 * 120 ~= 72,000 frames. Your 1% lows is an average of ~720 frames but so what if of 300 them are at 60 FPS you’re going to have trouble noticing. While if you’re almost rock solid at 120FPS a dozen 70ms stalls it’s really obvious that something is wrong but the calculated 1% low’s may actually lo…

This is a completely misguided analysis. First of all, there is nothing in the M series architecture that's going to avoid pipeline stalls, let aloe huge 70ms graphics pipeline stalls. As I've explained above, games keep multiple frame pipelines in flight at once, so you don't have these kind of issues unless there is a scheduling or I/O issue. There is no advantage here.

The only advantage is that the transfer from GPU to CPU is faster in terms of latency. This doesn't cause pipeline stalls, because as I've explained above, frames are kept in flight, so latency is not critical. At the same time, modern CPU-GPU interconnects have similar bandwidth to RAM.

Additionally, you're not the first person to have thought about frame pacing. Dozens of reviewers have full frame pacing graphs with the frame times of every frame, as well as 0.1% lows, and we simply don't see what you're describing. 100ms+ frames are not a problem on modern games and modern hardware, and when they are, it's because of some blocking read to storage or to some scheduling issue, not because of CPU/GPU speed.

The impact of link speed on 0.1% low framerates has already been investigated, and it's minimal, and there isn't even an advantage here.

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

#379

Post by sudosysgen »

wtallis wrote: post #372
Retric wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes occasional 90ms stall reduces 1% frame rates, but less than how annoying it is. A 10 minute test at 120 FPS is 10 * 60 * 120 ~= 72,000 frames. Your 1% lows is an average of ~720 frames but so what if of 300 them are at 60 FPS you’re going to have trouble noticing. While if you’re almost rock solid at 120FPS a dozen 70ms stalls it’s really obvious that something is wrong but the calculated 1% low’s may actually lo…

> While if you’re almost rock solid at 120FPS a dozen 70ms stalls it’s really obvious that something is wrong but the calculated 1% low’s may actually look better. I think this is an instance of the coordinated omission problem: you cannot simply measure the latency of the frames that were completed, but instead have to consider the frames that should have been delivered during a stall. Looking at frame time percenti…

This isn't actually true. Looking at aveeages will in fact reflect correctly on average frame staleness over a sampling period. A single frame that's 5x too long or 4 frames that are 2x too long have the same impact on the average delta of frame staleness on the total sum.

Think of it like Little's law in queing theory , it's better to simply just look at different percentiles, like 99 or 99.9th. The average framerate correctly indicates the average staleness.

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

#380

Post by [deleted] »

sudosysgen wrote: post #378
Retric wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes occasional 90ms stall reduces 1% frame rates, but less than how annoying it is. A 10 minute test at 120 FPS is 10 * 60 * 120 ~= 72,000 frames. Your 1% lows is an average of ~720 frames but so what if of 300 them are at 60 FPS you’re going to have trouble noticing. While if you’re almost rock solid at 120FPS a dozen 70ms stalls it’s really obvious that something is wrong but the calculated 1% low’s may actually lo…

This is a completely misguided analysis. First of all, there is nothing in the M series architecture that's going to avoid pipeline stalls, let aloe huge 70ms graphics pipeline stalls. As I've explained above, games keep multiple frame pipelines in flight at once, so you don't have these kind of issues unless there is a scheduling or I/O issue. There is no advantage here. The only advantage is that the transfer from…

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