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Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

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Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#111

Post by sam0x17 »

rudedogg wrote: post #95
sam0x17 wrote: post #65

Any indication on the gaming performance of these vs. a typical nvidia or AMD card? My husband is thinking of purchasing a mac but I've cautioned him that he won't be able to use his e-gpu like usual until someone hacks support to work for it again, and even then he'd be stuck with pretty old gen AMD cards at best.

Wow, I had no idea M1 doesn't support eGPUs. I was planning on buying an external enclosure for Apple Silicon when I upgraded; thanks for pointing that out.

Not only that, but you're stuck with cards from 5 years ago with current macbooks. It's a shame too because the plug and play support is better than the very best e-gpu plug and play on linux or windows.

I don't see Apple personally adding support any time soon, either. Clearly their play now is to make all hardware in house. The last thing they want is people connecting 3090s so they can have an M1 Max gaming rig. They only serve creators, and this has always been true. Damn waste if you ask me.

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#112

Post by HunterWare »

awill wrote: post #71
gradys wrote: post #59

M1 Pro Max is only $200 more. I'm tempted, but do we think it will be more power hungry under the same workload than the Pro?

The full-blown Max they talked about is an $800 upgrade. https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/16-inch It's combined with double RAM (32GB), double GPU (32-core). The $200 upgrade is called 'Max', but is still 16GB RAM, and 'only' 24 core GPU.

Nah, 200-400 more and memory size is an independent thing.

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#113

Post by Woden501 »

spaceisballer wrote: post #77

Lots of junk comments, but I guess that happens with Apple announcements. Laptops seem impressive to me, I want to see the real world use metrics. Pushing hard on the performance per watt type metric and no doubt they have a lot of power and use less power. Seems like they listened to the outcry of people regarding the Touch Bar and more ports. Seems like this should sell well.

Seems they may have finally noticed the hit from a decent number of the pro's using their products migrating to different platforms, and realized they needed to take a few steps back on the more radical innovations to put out a solid working machine. Hell I haven't wanted an Apple machine since the early days of the unibody when other manufacturers started releasing the same form-factor. This has me considering one for my next development machine depending on the price premium over the competition.

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#114

Post by jeswin »

_the_inflator wrote: post #58
ngngngng wrote: post #37

The benchmark to power consumption comparisons were very interesting. It seemed very un-Apple to be making such direct comparisons to competitors, especially when the Razer Blade Advanced had slightly better performance with far higher power consumption. I feel like typically Apple just says "Fastest we've ever made, it's so thin, so many nits, you'll love it" and leaves it at that. I'll be very curious to see those…

I think that Apple took a subtle, not so subtle stand: power consumption has to do with environmental impact.

Apple almost single-handedly made computing devices non-repairable or upgradable; across their own product line and the industry in general due to their outsized influence.

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#116

Post by vmception »

BitAstronaut wrote: post #75
vmception wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to wait for the comparisons this time. Maxing this baby out right now.

Honest question, what do you do where a $6,099 laptop is justifiable?

I skip getting a Starbuck's latte, and avoid adding extra guac at Chipotle.

I'm kidding, that stuff has no affect on anything.

Justifiable, as in "does this make practical sense", is not the word, because it doesn't. Justifiable, as in, "does it fit within my budget?" yes that's accurate. I don't have a short answer to why my personal budget is that flexible, but I do remember there was a point in my life where I would ask the same thing as you about other people. The reality is that you either have it or you don't. That being said, nothing I had been doing for money is really going to max this kind of machine out or improve my craft. But things that used to be computationally expensive won't be anymore. Large catalogues of 24 megapixel RAWs used to be computationally expensive. Now I won't even notice, even with larger files and larger videos, and can expand what I do there along with video processing, which is all just entertainment. But I can also do that while running a bunch of docker containers and VMs... within VMs, and not think about it.

This machine, for me, is the catalyst for greater consumptive spending though. I've held off on new cameras, new NASs, new local area networking, because my current laptop and devices would chug under larger files.

Hope there was something to glean from that context. But all I can really offer is "make, or simply have, more money", not really profound.

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#117

Post by klelatti »

bla3 wrote: post #82

This is about the processors, not the laptops, so commenting on the chips instead. They look great, but they look like they're the M1 design, just more of it. Which is plenty for a laptop! But it'll be interesting to see what they'll do for their desktops. Most of the additional chip area went into more GPUs and special-purpose video codec hardware. It's "just" two more cores than the vanilla M1, and some of the effi…

In this context the absence of the 27 inch iMac was interesting. If these SoC were not deemed to be 'right' for the bigger iMac then possibly a more CPU focused / developer focused SoC may be in the works for the iMac?

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#118

Post by bla3 »

fotta wrote: post #98
bla3 wrote: post #82

This is about the processors, not the laptops, so commenting on the chips instead. They look great, but they look like they're the M1 design, just more of it. Which is plenty for a laptop! But it'll be interesting to see what they'll do for their desktops. Most of the additional chip area went into more GPUs and special-purpose video codec hardware. It's "just" two more cores than the vanilla M1, and some of the effi…

I think the higher memory is also a huge win, with support for up to 64gb.

I thought the memory was one of the more interesting bits here.

My 2-year-old Intel MBP has 64 GB, and 8 GB of additional memory on the GPU. True, on the M1 Max you don't have to copy back and forth between CPU and GPU thanks to integrated memory, but the new MBP still has less total memory than my 2-year-old Intel MBP.

And it seems they just barely managed to get to 64 GiB. The whole processor chip is surrounded by memory chips. That's in part why I'm curious to see how they'll scale this. One idea would be to just have several M1 Max SoCs on a board, but that's going to be interesting to program. And getting to 1 TB of memory seems infeasible too.

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#119

Post by baybal2 »

bla3 wrote: post #82

This is about the processors, not the laptops, so commenting on the chips instead. They look great, but they look like they're the M1 design, just more of it. Which is plenty for a laptop! But it'll be interesting to see what they'll do for their desktops. Most of the additional chip area went into more GPUs and special-purpose video codec hardware. It's "just" two more cores than the vanilla M1, and some of the effi…

Actually no "extra" chip area in comparison to x86 based solution.

They just throw away so much of cruft from the die like PCIE PHYs, and x86 legacy I/O with large area analog circuitry.

Redundant complex DMA, and memory controller IPs are also thrown away.

Clock, and power rails on the SoC are also probably taking less space because of more shared circuitry.

Same with self-test, debug, fusing blocks, and other small tidbits.

Re: Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors

#120

Post by citilife »

Those power comparisons aren't really fair IMO. They're testing power consumption...

They're using a "msi prestige 14 evo (intel CPU)" vs an optimized laptop using an M1.

Further, where's AMD? They have a better power vs performance ratio.

I'm not sure it's as good or not, but that's a lot of cherry picking.

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