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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

#411

Post by LeoNatan25 »

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.

You seems to live in the 90s or early 00s, sorry. Consumer fan technology has come a long way since those days. Case sound dampening has also come a long way, so the little noise that fans do make, it gets pretty well dampened inside the case.

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

#412

Post by LeoNatan25 »

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 Mac Studio in particular is a terrible example to use here. At least the first iteration of it. It has a fan that is constantly spinning, and it’s a cheap fan, so it creates a very annoying whine sound at low RPMs:

https://www.macrumors.com/2022/05/09/mysterious-noise-sparks...

Hopefully, Apple has solved this issue with the second iteration.

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

#413

Post by [deleted] »

GeekyBear wrote: post #407
saagarjha wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you bringing up Microsoft’s translator here? I don’t see why it is relevant?

> Apple consistently advertised gaming performance without any substance to it. > Why are you bringing up Microsoft’s translator here? I don’t see why it is relevant? It should be pretty obvious that emulating x86 slows performance, regardless of whose ARM OS we're discussing.

[deleted]

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

#414

Post by sudosysgen »

Retric wrote: post #389
sudosysgen wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that the 5x outlier may be qualitatively worse is something that you pin down using percentiles, which is what everyone does, either 1% or 0.1% low. The argument about time-weighted frame staleness is not mathematically valid.

There’s nothing inherently mathematically special about 1% or 0.1%, you can also use 0.0042% or 0.00069% which highlights this kind of extreme outliers more. Benchmarking sites use 1% or 0.1% because they better highlight the commodity PC hardware rather than the games bugs and architecture.

That's not true. You can't use 0.0042% because then you don't have enough frames to be statistically significant without running for a very long time. It's also true that a frame pacing issue that is so rare that it isn't even impacting the 0.1% frame time isn't going to be noticeable, really.

These benchmarks are controlled for game bugs and architecture by simply averaging over ~40-50 games, on repeatable loops.

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

#415

Post by sudosysgen »

Retric wrote: post #388
sudosysgen wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 100ms+ frames are not a problem on modern games and modern hardware, and when they are There’s a multitude of such bugs which ship with modern titles. Benchmarking sites don’t use the release day build of 2077 for very good reasons.

That's a problem with release day video games being unfinished buggy messes, not something that's going to change with hardware.

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

#416

Post by alphabettsy »

yyyk wrote: post #213
llm_nerd wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe they're saying they keep it powered off because it uses a magnitude more power. And it's an entirely believable statement. A Mac Mini uses between 5w - 20w. Many PCs idle at >50W, and under use hit 500W+.

That's not a fair comparison. We should be comparing Mac Mini to NUCs if power consumption is the relevant factor. Plenty of NUCs are rated for 15w.

And those NUCs don’t match the performance.

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

#417

Post by alphabettsy »

pocketarc wrote: post #384
nateb2022 wrote: post #376

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 performanc…

The M2 Ultra comes on a $7000 workstation; it's not exactly consumer-level hardware. What you're saying is absolutely true - they could just double it up (like they do from the normal to the Pro, and from the Pro to the Ultra). And I hope they do, for an M3 Ultra. It'd be great if they pushed it even harder and showed Intel/AMD that they can beat them at both the low end and the high end, with plenty of power consump…

It’s comes on a $4000 workstation, the Studio, but point stands.

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

#418

Post by blep-arsh »

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.

If I understand correctly, accesses to address ranges mapped to the GPU have to be aligned on Apple Silicon due to the PCie controller requiring nGnRE mapping mode for external devices. There's a proof-of-concept AMD GPU driver patch for Linux that kinda makes this work but it's an incredible hack, the performance isn't great and applications still need to be reviewed and patched.

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

#419

Post by garbagecoder »

incrudible wrote: post #176
garbagecoder wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My M1 Pro is about 33% as fast as a box with a 3060 in it on PyTorch and obviously it is way more efficient and doesn't require a special power supply, which is just taken for granted as something you have to do with a PC. The best case this article can make is that if you need to play the latest game or do intense ML stuff you probably want NVIDIA, but that's the same as it ever was.

It also costs a lot more. For the money you can get a laptop with a 4080m and reduce its power limit and probably get the same or better efficiency, but with room to the top if you need it.

And I like it more, so I am willing to pay more. The implicit notion that I’m getting the same thing for less just isn’t true.

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

#420

Post by mrangle »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #190
mrangle wrote: post #44

Definitely have to adjust for TDP. The new gen Intel processors match the M2 performance for $100-150. TDP is triple but still relatively low. There isn't really anything available from non-niche retailers that approaches the TDP of Apple chips. And what does tends to be a binned just to be sold as mobile. Better to buy the standard chip and limit clock speed. What also shocks me is more expensive chips that offer in…

Yes, there is. AMD has desktop chips with the same TDP as Mac laptops. The latest series of AMD chips are more powerful and more power-efficient. I think power efficiency by itself is a laudable goal, but the idea that other chipmakers don't optimize this doesn't make sense...you have to if you are building a laptop. A lot of the desktop chips are ludicrously overtuned, even AMD's chips, but the laptop chips have to…

I know that there are chips with TDPs in this range. My point was that they aren't readily available to consumers as a component. Obviously, I wasn't talking about purchasing pre-built devices. Anyone can buy a mobile device, laptop, or Alibaba router / pc with 10-20 watt TDP chips. The context was for stand alone chip purchases.

Would you point out where it is trivial to purchase a new AMD chip under 30 watts TDP? I'd sincerely be interested and the question isn't asked rhetorically.

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