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Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

tlkh.dev

151–160 of 217 posts

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#151
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I'm worried that they may have played their trump cards already, so to speak. I wonder if future perf gains will come, game console-style, from areas besides general purpose computation -- specialized instructions / cores for specialized tasks. Imagine an entire core optimized for Safari and its Javascript engine. Their next chip is called the "M1 Marathon Edition" and you get 36 hours of real-world battery lif…

> I'm worried that they may have played their trump cards already, so to speak. I'm not. Let them all scramble and pull out the big guns to try to compete. That's capitalism at it's finest, which isn't exactly what we've been seeing in the CPU space for the prior decades. We got lucky that AMD caught Intel with their pants down recently (if only because it strengthens AMD and makes them a better competitor), but a du…

    > And maybe they have a behind the scenes collab with 
    > Slack and select other app makers so that they can 
    > be a part of the "Marathon" program too.

    RIP the general purpose computer. :( 
Haha. I was truly truly not thinking along any such lines.

Since heterogenuous cores are now a mainstream thing, with a mixture of full-throttle and performance-minded cores on a single die, and the performance cores may be hitting a wall until we get to smaller processes, perhaps the next frontier could be efficiency.

Remember how some software proudly displayed those "optimized for MMX" or "optimized for 3DNow!" badges back in the day? What if there was something like that for apps that optimized for those efficiency cores, and what if the efficiency cores met them halfway by implementing some app-friendly stuff in hardware? Sort of like how some common Javascript string ops have dedicated CPU hardware dedicated to them now.

Anyway, yeah. I'm probably just re-inventing CISC all over again, badly.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing. Like that's the rhetoric--holy shit your laptop is doing this. Apple hasn't even released the Pro desktop stuff yet.

I doubt that they can make another giant performance leap. I wager that most of their gains are from being a node ahead of the competition (5nm vs 7nm TSMC) and placing RAM on package for much fatter bandwidth. I am, however, very interested in seeing what the competition does in response.

They got something like 15% increase in integer performance, up to 37% increase some benchmarks, and 8% overall performance increase.

Zen 2 was a must-have upgrade over Zen+ and it was a 10% IPC increase.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#153
post #139
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M1 Max 32 core GPU is ~1/8 the performance of the 3090. 4x the core count should put it half of 3090 performance, not double.

Dumb question here: Can you get more performance from the same number of cores by giving them more power?

Not a dumb question at all. You can to an extent, but the returns diminish quickly. It isn't linear.

This fact however makes "performance per watt" comparisons misleading between different processors designed for different environments (e.g. M1 vs AMD Desktop). It takes a more power to get that much extra perf, conversely and the more under-appreciate part IMO reducing the speed a little can save a ton of power/heat if the chip is currently running at the higher power portion of the curve.

On a desktop machine most people would want them to tune for performance at quite a substantial power efficiency cost so of course a desktop chip most probably is less power efficient per unit of compute. You don't need to power it with a battery after all and there's heaps more cooling capacity in a bigger form factor so why optimise for that?

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine how much better it will be with the native build: https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/live-111-apple-silicon-suppo...

The main issue with that is a looot of plugins I rely on day to day still haven't been updated with native support, so they wouldn't be usable while running Live native. I really don't understand the hold up since some of my plugins were updated almost immediately after the original M1 was released.

> so they wouldn't be usable while running Live native

Live still doesn't have built-in bit bridging? (Of course, bit bridging doesn't come free.)

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#155
Good post. One thing to note is that the 3090 being 8 times faster is not very correct statement. The author is comparing FP16 3090 with FP32 M1. The difference between them is more like 3-4 times for FP32.

Even that is not true FP32 for 3090 as tensorflow uses Nvidia's AI32 by default for convolution.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#156
post #2

for those curious about running their own matmul benchmarks, I wrote a script a while back that works with both linux and MacOS that should make comparison easy. https://jott.live/code/blas_test.cc I saw ~1.2tflops on the regular M1

2.1 TFlops on 8(6 efficiency) core M1 pro

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#157
post #121
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rumors are that the M1 supersized version they are putting in the new Mac Pro is 20 CPU cores and 128 GPU cores, which would place it at a little under twice the performance of a 3090. Not saying that Nvidia can't catch up with a hypothetical 4090 next year but it'll be a tall order.

The M1 Max 32 core GPU is ~1/8 the performance of the 3090. 4x the core count should put it half of 3090 performance, not double.

That's just not true. 3dmark shows it having a little under half the performance of a 3090 with the largest GPU, with it getting a score of 18,000 vs a 3090 having around 42,000. Scaling up linearly by a factor of 4 would lead to a comparison of 72k vs 42k, or a little less than twice as much.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#158
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why people keep talking about power performance per watt, do we know for a fact that a 90w Apple GPU would perform 4x faster if it was running at 500w? Does the performance scales linearly? The other thing is price, the m1 max cost $5k here. You know what kind of PC you can get for that price? A 3080 MSRP is $700 and beat any mac GPU right ( and that's a GPU from last year ). 5900x cost $480.

One reason: try to work alongside a 3080 or 3090 running at full power for awhile, and you will understand. Especially if you don't have really good AC in your work area during summer. =)

You can downclock your GPU as much as you want and get better perf/watt, which is what most crypto miners do

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#159
Did I get the worst M1 Max in the world? In my one month with this computer so far -- its been problematic. It has this fun issue where it freezes up for a couple seconds randomly when watching youtube. Its frozen for a few seconds in other situations also. One time it just rebooted completely right in the middle of using it. Add to that I've never gotten more that 4 hours out of this battery.

Personally I'm kind of regretting the purchase. My 2015 Macbook Pro is faster than it.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#160
post #159

Did I get the worst M1 Max in the world? In my one month with this computer so far -- its been problematic. It has this fun issue where it freezes up for a couple seconds randomly when watching youtube. Its frozen for a few seconds in other situations also. One time it just rebooted completely right in the middle of using it. Add to that I've never gotten more that 4 hours out of this battery. Personally I'm kind of…

Did you use Migration Assistant to move your stuff over? You might be using Intel versions of your apps.
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