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Does Apple‘s M5 Max Really “Destroy” a 96-Core Threadripper?

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Re: Does Apple‘s M5 Max Really “Destroy” a 96-Core Threadripper?

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phoronix is terrible in terms of clickbait and deliberate ragebait, and its comment section is a toxic cesspool, but its benchmarks generally seem sound. What issues have you observed with their benchmark suite?

What clickbait and ragebait? Example?

Off the top of my head -- any systemd-related article.

Re: Does Apple‘s M5 Max Really “Destroy” a 96-Core Threadripper?

#42
post #5

GeekBench probably made the right choice to optimize for more realistic real-world workloads than for the more specific workloads that benefit from really high core counts. GeekBench is supposed to be a proxy for common use case performance. High core count CPUs are only useful for specific workloads and should not be purchased as general purpose fast CPUs. Unless you’re doing specific tasks that scale by core count,…

GeekBench being questionable aside, these results have me stoked to see what an M5 Ultra looks like performance-wise!

Re: Does Apple‘s M5 Max Really “Destroy” a 96-Core Threadripper?

#43

[flagged]

Phoronix is terrible in terms of clickbait and deliberate ragebait, and its comment section is a toxic cesspool, but its benchmarks generally seem sound. What issues have you observed with their benchmark suite?

Where the definition of 'benchmarks' is actually slapping an OS, then proceeding to run the so called Phoronix Test Suite promptly followed by an apples to oranges comparison...

My favourites were the comparisons of FreeBSD and Linux coming to the conclusion that FreeBSD is slower. Until you look under the hood and see that both are tested in a configuration with a desktop environment.

Or the good old ZFS tests that were coming up with nonsensical results because of gross misconfiguration and/or total lack of understanding how the FS works...

But hey, the click/ragebait is on point in both these cases!

Re: Does Apple‘s M5 Max Really “Destroy” a 96-Core Threadripper?

#44
post #5

GeekBench probably made the right choice to optimize for more realistic real-world workloads than for the more specific workloads that benefit from really high core counts. GeekBench is supposed to be a proxy for common use case performance. High core count CPUs are only useful for specific workloads and should not be purchased as general purpose fast CPUs. Unless you’re doing specific tasks that scale by core count,…

Not sure you opened the blog post. The scaling is atrocious, even for tasks that should be extremely parallelizable. The Geekbench "Text Processing" benchmark supposedly processes 190 markdown files, and yet it tops at just 1.34x the single-thread performance when you have 4 cores, and it drops with more cores! I admit my expertise is algorithms & optimization so I may get more easily incensed by inept developers, but this is crazy... It is not realistic in any way, unless we assume the "real world" is just js beginners scribbling code for a website...

Re: Does Apple‘s M5 Max Really “Destroy” a 96-Core Threadripper?

#45
post #5

GeekBench probably made the right choice to optimize for more realistic real-world workloads than for the more specific workloads that benefit from really high core counts. GeekBench is supposed to be a proxy for common use case performance. High core count CPUs are only useful for specific workloads and should not be purchased as general purpose fast CPUs. Unless you’re doing specific tasks that scale by core count,…

Buried in the middle of that article: > Furthermore, many of the suite’s multi-threaded subtests scale efficiently only to roughly 8 – 32 threads, which leaves much of such CPUs' parallel capacity idle, but which creates an almost perfect environment for Apple's CPUs that feature a relatively modest number of cores Invalidates the entire comparison really, and should have canned the article if they had any integrity.

AMD has 16 cores, Apple has 18, Qualcomm has 18, Nvidia N1X has 20, and Intel has 24. All else being equal you actually want as few cores as you can get away with because that's less likely to be limited by Amdahl's Law. Arguably Intel/Nvidia CPUs are poorly designed and benchmarks have no obligation to accommodate them.

(I'm not counting high-end workstation/server CPUs because, as others in this thread have explained, Geekbench isn't intended for them.)

Re: Does Apple‘s M5 Max Really “Destroy” a 96-Core Threadripper?

#46
post #7

You're seriously posting to HN a link to your Slashdot post linking to your year-old blog post complaining about Geekbench 6's multi-threaded test without ever mentioning Amdahl's Law? Pretending that everything a CPU does is an embarrassingly parallel problem is heinous benchmarking malpractice. Yes, Geekbench 6 has its flaws, and limitations. All benchmarks do. Geekbench 6 has valid uses, and its limitations are de…

Possibly the underlying reason for the indirection is because that particular domain is banned on HN; check https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dev.to with showdead turned on.

Re: Does Apple‘s M5 Max Really “Destroy” a 96-Core Threadripper?

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phoronix is terrible in terms of clickbait and deliberate ragebait, and its comment section is a toxic cesspool, but its benchmarks generally seem sound. What issues have you observed with their benchmark suite?

What clickbait and ragebait? Example?

Some examples:

> sudo-rs Breaks Historical Norms With Now Enabling Password Feedback By Default

"Let's tell you exactly how to feel about this, commenters"

> Linux 7.0 Officially Concluding The Rust Experiment

"...by declaring it successful, but if we said that in the headline it wouldn't be clickbait"

(In fairness, LWN did this too, but by accident rather than to provoke clicks.)

> GNOME Mutter Now "Completely Drops The Whole X11 Backend"

> systemd 260 Dropping System V Service Script Support

"And has dozens of other features and improvements, but let's cherry-pick the one we want you to yell about in our comments section."

> The Linux Kernel Looks To 'Bite The Bullet' In Enabling Microsoft C Extensions

"Oh no, look at the poor kernel developers reluctantly dealing with Microsoft extensions...that they deliberately sought out and used because they prefer them over standard C, not being forced by any external factor."

They know their comments section, they know what gets them posting, and they optimize for provoking comment.

Re: Does Apple‘s M5 Max Really “Destroy” a 96-Core Threadripper?

#48
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean so does HN

HN is minimalist, not horrible. And the content is good!

Well this particular comment thread isn't "good". If you think so, then maybe you should try reddit.

Re: Does Apple‘s M5 Max Really “Destroy” a 96-Core Threadripper?

#49
post #7

You're seriously posting to HN a link to your Slashdot post linking to your year-old blog post complaining about Geekbench 6's multi-threaded test without ever mentioning Amdahl's Law? Pretending that everything a CPU does is an embarrassingly parallel problem is heinous benchmarking malpractice. Yes, Geekbench 6 has its flaws, and limitations. All benchmarks do. Geekbench 6 has valid uses, and its limitations are de…

From your post I can tell you did not read the "year-old blog post". It starts with the scaling, but goes further and explains a lot. I am a software engineer specializing in algorithms and optimization, Amdahl's law is part of the usual training I give our junior developers. It has nothing to do with Geekbench 6 being a surprisingly bad benchmark, especially for big CPUs.

Re: Does Apple‘s M5 Max Really “Destroy” a 96-Core Threadripper?

#50
post #4

Anyone who treats Geekbench as a meaningful benchmark (i.e. not without a huge disclaimer or with other more meaningful datapoints) is not to be trusted. You can only really trust it for inter-generational comparisons within a single architecture.

Not true. Geekbench, especially single threaded benchmark, is probably the best we got, it has a bunch of workloads, unlike many other benchmarks like cinebench for example. And they publish all the results on their website, so you can dig into each individual workload and find the ones that apply to you.

And like the other poster mentioned, it correlates well with SPEC, so it's basically a easily accessible SPEC. These days the only benchmark I use to quickly judge some CPU is geekbench.

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