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Apple's M4 Max chip is the fastest single-core performer in consumer computing

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Re: Apple's M4 Max chip is the fastest single-core performer in consumer computing

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was looking into this recently as my M1 Max screen suddenly died out of the blue within warranty and Apple are complete crooks wrt honouring warranties. The AMD mobile chips are right there with M3 for battery life and have excellent performance only I couldn't find a complete system which shipped with the same size battery as the MBP16. They're either half or 66% of the capacity.

> and Apple are complete crooks wrt honouring warranties Huh? I've used AC for both MBP and iPhones a number of times over the years, and never had an issue. They are known for some of the highest customer ratings in the industry.

They claimed that it wasn't covered because the machine was brought in Germany. I live in The Netherlands and brought it here. Also I contacted Apple Support to checked my serial number and then gave me the address to take it to. Which I did.

They charged me $100 to get my machine back without repair.

Also bear in mind that the EU is a single market, warranties etc are, by law, required to be honoured over the ENTIRE single market. Not just one country.

Especially when the closest Apple Store to me is IN GERMANY.

I have since returned it to Amazon who will refund it (they're taking their sweet time though, I need to call them next week as they should have transferred already).

Re: Apple's M4 Max chip is the fastest single-core performer in consumer computing

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has always baffled me why Apple doesn't take gaming seriously. It's another revenue stream, it would sell more Macs. It's profit. Is it just some weird cultural thing? Or is there some kind of genuine technical reason for it, like it would involve some kind of tradeoffs around security or limiting architecture changes or something? Especially with the M-series chips, it feels like they had the opportunity to make…

Apple has one of the, if not the biggest gaming platforms in existence (the iphone and ipad), but everyone seems to have a blind spot for that and disregards it. Sure, the Mac isn't a big gaming platform for them because their systems are mostly used professionally (assumption), but there too, the Mac represents only 1/10th of the sales they get from the iPhone, and that's only on the hardware. Mac gaming is a nice-t…

The iPhone gaming market is abusive and predatory, essentially a mass exploit on human psychology. Certainly not something to be proud of.

Re: Apple's M4 Max chip is the fastest single-core performer in consumer computing

#183
post #6

Good enough to be used for gaming? Really want Apple to get into that because dealing with Windows sucks.

Valve has/continues to do way more to make Linux a viable gaming platform than Apple will likely ever do for mac

I get it, you want to leave windows by way of mac. But your options are to either bite the bullet and expend a tiny bit of your professional skill on setting up a machine with linux, or stay on windows for the foreseeable future.

Re: Apple's M4 Max chip is the fastest single-core performer in consumer computing

#184

I'll admit to some reflexive skepticism here. I know GeekBench at least used to be considered an entirely unserious indicator of performance and any discussion relating to its scores used to be drowned out by people explaining why it was so bad. Do those criticisms still hold? Are serious people nowadays taking Geekbench to be a reasonably okay (though obviously imperfect) performance metric?

It'll still be at the top of SPECint 2017 which is the real industry standard. Geekbench 6.3 slightly boosted Apple Silicon scores by adding SME - a very niche instruction set extension which is never used in SPECint workloads. So the gap may not be as wide as GB6.3 implies.

Does SPECint cover heavily memory bound pointer chasing stuff? Not up to date.

Re: Apple's M4 Max chip is the fastest single-core performer in consumer computing

#185
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M3 Pro user here, agree with the same points. It's nice to be able to actually have your laptop on your lap, without burning your legs.

ARM processors have always been good at handling heat and low power (like AWS Graviton), but what laptop did you have before that would overheat that much during normal usage? That seems like a very poor design.

My 2010 i7 MBP would do that under heavy loads. All aluminum body, with fans, and when that CPU really had to work it put out a lot of heat.

Compiling gcc multi thread a few times would be enough.

Re: Apple's M4 Max chip is the fastest single-core performer in consumer computing

#186

For how long? There are a lot of superlatives ("simply incredible" etc) - when some new AMD or Intel CPU beats this score, will that be "simply incredible" too? New chips are slightly faster than previous ones. I am not incredulous about this. Were it a 2x or 3x or 4x improvement or something, sure. But it ain't - it's incremental. I note how even in the Apple marketing they compare it to generations 3 or 4 chips ago…

Incremental progress gonna increment.

We're on a perpetual upgrade treadmill. Even if the latest increment means an uncharacteristically good performance or longevity improvements... I can't bring myself to care.

Re: Apple's M4 Max chip is the fastest single-core performer in consumer computing

#187
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll still be at the top of SPECint 2017 which is the real industry standard. Geekbench 6.3 slightly boosted Apple Silicon scores by adding SME - a very niche instruction set extension which is never used in SPECint workloads. So the gap may not be as wide as GB6.3 implies.

Does SPECint cover heavily memory bound pointer chasing stuff? Not up to date.

Yes, yes it does.

https://www.spec.org/cpu2017/Docs/overview.html#Q13

Re: Apple's M4 Max chip is the fastest single-core performer in consumer computing

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the early 90s, when Apple was literally building their first product line with the Mac, they would come out with their second big honking powerhouse Mac: the Macintosh IIx. It blew everything out of the water. Then they would come out with their next budget all-in-one machine. But computing was improving so fast, with prices for components dropping so quickly, that the Macintosh SE/30 ended up as impressive a…

I think that machine is this M1 Pro MBP I'm using right now, and will probably still be using in 20 years.

Agreed. It might share the title with the M1 Air which was incredible for an ultraportable, but the M1MBP was just incredible period. Three generations later it's still more machine than most people need. M2/3/4 sped things up but the M1 set the bar.

Re: Apple's M4 Max chip is the fastest single-core performer in consumer computing

#189
post #31

So Ultra used to be the max but now Max is max… until Ultra goes past the max and Max is no longer the max. Until the next Max that goes beyond Ultra!

Apple has gotten into Windows and PC territory with their naming for chips and models. Kind of funny to see the evolution of a compact product line and naming convention slowly turn into spreadsheet worthy comparison charts. That all said, I only have an M1 and it's still impressive to me.

Same. I have an M1 Air and it is an amazing machine!

Re: Apple's M4 Max chip is the fastest single-core performer in consumer computing

#190

I'll admit to some reflexive skepticism here. I know GeekBench at least used to be considered an entirely unserious indicator of performance and any discussion relating to its scores used to be drowned out by people explaining why it was so bad. Do those criticisms still hold? Are serious people nowadays taking Geekbench to be a reasonably okay (though obviously imperfect) performance metric?

If it shows a good result for Apple then it's perfectly accurate, otherwise it's flawed.
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