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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?

#51

Post by dkechag »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #46
wtallis wrote: 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.

Yeah, that's the main reason. Not sure why the ban, medium etc are much worse...

The second reason is I've never had a slashdot submission accepted and I saw that after posting this the page suggested I share it to increase chances of the editors picking it up, but I don't really use social media so I though hey why not HN.

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

#52

Post by omikun »

dkechag wrote: post #49
wtallis wrote: 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.

If you’re in the market for a 96 core cpu and you’re using Geekbench to guide your purchasing decision, the fault lies with you.

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

#53

Post by cozzyd »

ozfive wrote: post #25
barrkel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an owner of a 96 core 9995wx, nobody is buying one for desktop PC much less laptop level software. To justify the investment you need to have tasks that scale out, or loads of heterogeneous tasks to support concurrently.

What tasks are you running on your 96 core 9995wx?

Make -j97 presumably. Or MPI jobs.

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

#54

Post by FpUser »

Aurornis wrote: post #38
FpUser wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"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, a CPU with fewer cores and higher single threaded throughput would be faster for normal use cases." I design multithreaded backends that benefit from as many cores as possible while not being a champion in a single core task. I think this…

Maybe I’m misunderstand what you’re saying, but designing multithreaded backends is not a very common use case. Most computer use cases don’t involve software development at all.

Running those backends is very common. Just not in one's house / apartment

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

#56

Post by dkechag »

osti wrote: post #50
SOTGO wrote: 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. Th…

May I suggest the one I use (I wrote it), which also correlates well with SPEC & Geekbench 5, but also runs the benchmarks on all cores if you want to so you get both max single-thread and max multi-thread: https://github.com/dkechag/dkbench-docker . You basically run 'docker run -it --rm dkechag/dkbench'.

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

#57

Post by embedding-shape »

wmf wrote: post #45
embedding-shape wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 explain…

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

Yeah but that's the thing, the article is both in the headline and contents of the article comparing a CPU intended for high-end workstations with a consumer CPU meant for a laptop, and using software explicitly not designed for them. That's the issue here!

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

#58

Post by dagmx »

barrkel wrote: post #19
Aurornis wrote: 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,…

As an owner of a 96 core 9995wx, nobody is buying one for desktop PC much less laptop level software. To justify the investment you need to have tasks that scale out, or loads of heterogeneous tasks to support concurrently.

I’ll push back and say there are people who buy it for desktop but primarily for workstation like uses such as simulations.

A ton of my FX artist friends have specced out their home rigs with one or something in its orbit.

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

#60

Post by wang_li »

dkechag wrote: post #44
Aurornis wrote: 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, bu…

The only reason for a multicore benchmark is when the benchmark represents some common task that is not embarrassingly parallel. If your multicore benchmark is just a single threaded test run on a bunch of cores, it’s pointless. I can simply do math to find that result, max(single core performance multiplied by the number of cores, memory bandwidth divide by bandwidth required per thread).

A good benchmark will be something people actually do.

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