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Apple M1 Ultra

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Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#181

Post by flatiron »

throwawayboise wrote: post #110
Synaesthesia wrote: post #96

Apple have some serious chip design abilities. Imagine if they entered the server market, with this architecture it could be very successful.

They tried that before and flopped. The server market is different. Companies buy servers from the low bidder. Apple has never really played in that market.

People care about performance per watt now. So they could compete. The real question is if they would support Linux. In our containerized world I can’t see their servers getting super big running macOS

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#182

Post by npunt »

em500 wrote: post #175
arcticbull wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They likely won't re-visit the Xserve, IMO. No reason to. They can't sell them at a premium compared to peers and its outside their area of expertise.

> They can't sell them at a premium compared to peers Intel is believed to have pretty good margins on their server CPUs > and its outside their area of expertise. That's what people used to say about Apple doing CPUs in-house.

FWIW, Apple's been helping define CPU specs in-house since the 90s. They were part of an alliance with Motorola and IBM to make PowerPC, and bought a substantial part of ARM and did a joint venture to make Newton's CPU. And they've done a bunch of architecture jumps, from 6502 to 68k to PPC to Intel to A-series.

Folks who said CPUs weren't their core expertise (I assume back in 2010 or before, prior to A4) missed out on just how involved they've historically been, what it takes to get involved, the role of fabs and off the shelf IP to gradually build expertise, and what benefits were possible when building silicon and software toward common purpose.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#183

Post by [deleted] »

cassac wrote: post #142
Omniusaspirer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on Anandtech benchmarks the M1 Max GPU is basically on par with a mobile 3080, which a quick search tells me is about 60% as fast as a desktop 3080. Not unreasonable to believe 2 of them combined will outperform a 3090- with nearly 128 GB of VRAM to boot. Even more incredible Anandtech reports the M1 max GPU block maxing at 43W in their testing. So a 90W GPU in the M1 Ultra is trading blows with a 350+ watt 309…

What on earth are you talking about. That link shows it’s not even half as fast as the 3060, let alone the 3080. In borderlands it got 24 FPS while the 3080 got 52 FPS. How is that on par?

[deleted]

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#184

Post by zitterbewegung »

t_mann wrote: post #63

Would be interesting to get more info on the neural engine. On one hand, I find it fascinating that major manufacturers are now putting neural architectures into mainstream hardware. On the other hand I wonder what exactly it can do. To what degree are you tied into a specific neural architecture (eg recurrent vs convolutional), what APIs are available for training it, if it's even meant to be used that way (not just…

It's a general purpose accelerator. You have coremltools[1] to convert your trained model into a format or you can make your own using CreateML[2].

[1] https://coremltools.readme.io/docs

[2] https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/create-ml/

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#186

Post by tacLog »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #171
cehrlich wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like for things that are: 1. Perfectly parallel 2. Not accelerated by some of the other stuff that's on the Apple Silicon SoC's ...it will be a toss-up. Threadripper 3990X get about 25k in Geekbench Multicore [1] M1 Max gets about 12.5k in Geekbench Multicore, so pretty much exactly half [2] Obviously different tasks will have _vastly_ different performance profiles. For example it's likely that the M1 Ultra wi…

Also of note is that half of the Mac Studio's case is dedicated to cooling. Up to this point, all M1 Max benchmarks are within laptops while all Threadripper benchmarks are in desktops. The M1 Max in the Mac Studio will probably perform better than expected.

This is sound logic and probably be the case but I wonder if this effect will be less than what we have seen in the past because of the reduced TDP of the M1 processors in general.

Maybe the cooling and power delivery difference between laptop formfactors and PC formfactors will be less with these new arm based chips.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#187

Post by freemint »

klelatti wrote: post #48
freemint wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Thanks to the GPU interconnect NVLINK we have system 320GB. https://www.deltacomputer.com/nvidia-dgx-a100-320gb-3ys-edu.... There are even some with 640GB. This is at a different price point though.

Not on a single GPU though and it’s 40x the cost!

Rewriting a CUDA application to use NVLINK is a lot easier then rewriting it for Apples GPU.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#188

Post by masklinn »

1123581321 wrote: post #135
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is M2 really going to be difference wise?

~15-20% faster if releases start this year, plus whatever optimizations learned from M1 in wide release such as perhaps tuning the silicon allocation given the various system. If next year, M2 or M3 (get it) will use Taiwan Semi's so-called 3nm, which should be a significant jump just like 7-5nm several years ago for the phones and iPads.

Hopefully one of the changes of the M2 design will be a better decorrelation of RAM and cores count.

They’d need that anyway for a Mac Pro replacement (128GB wouldn’t cut it for everyone), but even for smaller config it’s frustrating being limited to 16G on the M1 and 32 on the Pro. Just because I need more RAM doesn’t mean I want the extra size and heat or whatever.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#189

Post by etchalon »

contingencies wrote: post #24

Desktop marketing seems to be getting desperate. Few people use the apps they show in the Mac Studio benchmarks. Fewer still care that their chips use less power... if they did, they would stay on their phones.

The "few people" who use those apps are the people Apple is selling these systems to.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#190

Post by Omniusaspirer »

cassac wrote: post #142
Omniusaspirer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on Anandtech benchmarks the M1 Max GPU is basically on par with a mobile 3080, which a quick search tells me is about 60% as fast as a desktop 3080. Not unreasonable to believe 2 of them combined will outperform a 3090- with nearly 128 GB of VRAM to boot. Even more incredible Anandtech reports the M1 max GPU block maxing at 43W in their testing. So a 90W GPU in the M1 Ultra is trading blows with a 350+ watt 309…

What on earth are you talking about. That link shows it’s not even half as fast as the 3060, let alone the 3080. In borderlands it got 24 FPS while the 3080 got 52 FPS. How is that on par?

Gaming benchmarks are completely irrelevant when discussing the actual raw power of the GPU. As the other commenter said- look at the actual GPU benchmark in the first graph.

Legacy games written for x86 CPUs obviously are going to perform poorly. I recommend you actually read the review and don't just scroll to the worst gaming benchmark you can find.

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