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Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

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Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#201

Post by newaccount74 »

setpatchaddress wrote: post #84
newaccount74 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> XPC is not asynchronous It's been some time since I dug into the internals of XPC, but my assumption was that the underlying protocol is asynchronous, and if you do sync calls the wrappers just do the waiting for you. The problem is that it has a tendency to get stuck in some rare cases, where services just don't reply for some reason. Then the sync calls are the worst -- the UI of the app is completely frozen and…

XPC sync is not in fact async underneath in recent macOS versions. It’s a severe performance pessimization to use async in many cases, because sync propagates thread priority and async often can’t. You don’t seem to have a full grip on the reasons for the intermittent hangs you’re experiencing. Can I suggest two things? 1 Grab a sysdiagnose during one of the hangs and file a feedback report with Apple 2 Use the `samp…

> XPC sync is not in fact async underneath

That's interesting! I thought XPC was a wrapper around async mach messages. Do you have any pointers where I can learn more about this?

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#202

Post by reportingsjr »

soneil wrote: post #61
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't get that much bigger. The Max is already over 400mm^2. For comparison, the biggest chips are around 600. Apple can't realistically get much bigger than this since yield already drops off a cliff at 600. Getting bigger than that will be tough for them since it isn't clear that apple has put R&D into interconnect tech needed to make effective multi-chip modules.

It looks like they were designed for chiplets from the start. So desktops could simply be the existing chips stacked.

Is this true? I was curious and searched around for sources, but it looks like all of the news outlets screwed up and thought the M1 Pro was going to be a chiplet based device called the M1X.

All of the M1 devices have been monolithic dies so far.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#203

Post by whynotminot »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #115
whynotminot wrote: post #8

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.

> 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. The problem with this take is this: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2685?vs=2613 This is mobile vs. desktop Zen 2 with the same number of cores. You give a CPU three times the power budget and it gets marginally faster. Because the…

I don't really understand your point. The impressiveness of M1/Pro/Max is what they do holistically for the power draw. The CPU + GPU + other accelerators combined and across the board approach what powerful desktops can do even with discrete power guzzling components. This is not about a single aspect of the silicon.

So sure, you can cherry pick one part of the SoC, match it up against one aspect of Chip X and try to make a point. OK, you win that one. I'm talking about what the SoC as a whole does while running near-silently off a battery.

Yes, a desktop gives you the ability to have more CPU cores. I'm sure that's what we'll get from whatever Apple decides to ship for its true Pro desktops.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#204

Post by vel0city »

graftak wrote: post #190
edgyquant wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think regions susceptible to black/brown outs and power outages are the intended market of an M1 Mac, though that could change.

Aren’t many companies normally located in the Silicon Valley now migrating to Texas, where the electricity infrastructure is wonky at best.

Texas is pretty average when it comes to electricity reliability in the US even though it experiences some of the most diverse weather in the US. Not too many states experience both tornadoes and hurricanes on a regular basis. Its biggest challenge it currently faces is winterization measures due to climate change. Things just weren't designed to get as cold as it did in February, which was a exceptionally rare event historically. I've lived in Texas nearly my whole life, it has never been that cold for that long since I've been here.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#205

Post by bitL »

Jack000 wrote: post #54

One thing I don't see anyone mention is that the M1Max is the probably the cheapest GPU memory you can buy. The only other way to get >=64Gb GPU memory is with the A100 (?) which is like 20k by itself. So this would be great specifically for finetuning large transformer models like GPT-J, which requires a lot of memory but not a lot of compute. Just hoping for pytorch support soon..

Do you have any evidence one can use >48GB RAM on transformer tuning on the new M1 Max? That would be for me the only reason to buy it as I dislike notch very much, have a beefy 3080-based notebook already and can use 2x3090 for 48GB transformer tuning.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#206

Post by bitL »

sudosysgen wrote: post #200
menmob wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that’s system memory. Not GPU memory. M1 shares that memory, so it’s addressable by both directly, but with ryzen (and almost every other consumer platform) the cpu and gpu memory are separate.

No, you misunderstand. The 5700G is an APU. Memory is shared between it's GPU and CPU. Hence the "G".

It's unlike 5700G would push 200-400GB/s for GPU tasks, assuming one gets pytorch/tensorflow to use the shared memory and BIOS allows setting such a large shared window, all of them unlikely unfortunately.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#207

Post by AnthonyMouse »

whynotminot wrote: post #203
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #115

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. The problem with this take is this: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2685?vs=2613 This is mobile vs. desktop Zen 2 with the same number of cores. You give a CPU three times the power budget and it gets marginally faster. Because the…

I don't really understand your point. The impressiveness of M1/Pro/Max is what they do holistically for the power draw. The CPU + GPU + other accelerators combined and across the board approach what powerful desktops can do even with discrete power guzzling components. This is not about a single aspect of the silicon. So sure, you can cherry pick one part of the SoC, match it up against one aspect of Chip X and try t…

The point is that we already had this. Both the CPU and GPU are competitive with existing CPUs and GPUs. Which is a first in a long time for anybody outside of AMD/Intel/Nvidia. But "competitive" and "dramatically better" are not the same thing.

People were primarily comparing it to desktop CPUs because of where we were in the release cycle. How does it compare to Zen 3? Well, Zen 3 laptops were still a few months away when the M1 was released, but Zen 2 desktops were only a single digit percentage faster than Zen 2 laptops, so how does it compare to Zen 3 desktops?

Meanwhile the primary real advantage of the M1 is that it uses less power. Compared to PC laptops, it's a somewhat less power. There are already PC laptops with 9+ hours of battery life (and no matter how little the CPU uses, you still have to run the screen and everything else), so the practical impact of this isn't enormous, but it's there. But if you compare the power consumption to PC desktops, OMFG! Except that nobody really cares about the power consumption of PC desktops. That's why they triple the power consumption to eek out 8% more performance.

A lot of this is also attributable to how good Apple's marketing is. I don't know if they did this on purpose, but people keep publishing SPEC benchmarks for comparison with PCs. Part of this is that a lot of the ordinary benchmark software either doesn't run on Mac at all or there was no native ARM version available yet. But SPEC was put together by a consortium of server vendors. Their incentive is show that their POWER and Xeon processors are worth the fat premium over regular desktop CPUs. So the suite skews heavy to benchmarks limited by memory bandwidth, because big servers will have like 16 times more memory channels than a desktop.

Then Apple shows up with this SoC that has a ton of memory bandwidth because it's necessary to feed the GPU and it stomps all over those specific benchmarks. Then it's OMFG again even though those results aren't actually typical because most workloads aren't limited by memory bandwidth.

It's not a bad chip. The level of hype is just extraordinary.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#208

Post by whynotminot »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #207
whynotminot wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand your point. The impressiveness of M1/Pro/Max is what they do holistically for the power draw. The CPU + GPU + other accelerators combined and across the board approach what powerful desktops can do even with discrete power guzzling components. This is not about a single aspect of the silicon. So sure, you can cherry pick one part of the SoC, match it up against one aspect of Chip X and try t…

The point is that we already had this. Both the CPU and GPU are competitive with existing CPUs and GPUs. Which is a first in a long time for anybody outside of AMD/Intel/Nvidia. But "competitive" and "dramatically better" are not the same thing. People were primarily comparing it to desktop CPUs because of where we were in the release cycle. How does it compare to Zen 3? Well, Zen 3 laptops were still a few months aw…

If you don't like SPEC then look at workload benchmarks like video rendering or code compilation. The M series chips acquit themselves quite well.

> There are already PC laptops with 9+ hours of battery life

Not when they're actually doing anything. To compete with what the M series chips bring, you need a discrete GPU and a very hungry CPU. Such a machine does not get 9+ hours of battery life.

> The point is that we already had this. Both the CPU and GPU are competitive with existing CPUs and GPUs. Which is a first in a long time for anybody outside of AMD/Intel/Nvidia. But "competitive" and "dramatically better" are not the same thing.

Right, you already had something like this in multiple discrete components that consume a huge amount of battery life when cobbled together into one system. My entire point has been that the impressiveness of the M series chips comes from their efficiency and what they are able to do holistically in a single SoC.

> A lot of this is also attributable to how good Apple's marketing is

Sigh. Alright I know what I'm dealing with now. Good day to you sir!

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#209

Post by AnthonyMouse »

whynotminot wrote: post #208
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that we already had this. Both the CPU and GPU are competitive with existing CPUs and GPUs. Which is a first in a long time for anybody outside of AMD/Intel/Nvidia. But "competitive" and "dramatically better" are not the same thing. People were primarily comparing it to desktop CPUs because of where we were in the release cycle. How does it compare to Zen 3? Well, Zen 3 laptops were still a few months aw…

If you don't like SPEC then look at workload benchmarks like video rendering or code compilation. The M series chips acquit themselves quite well. > There are already PC laptops with 9+ hours of battery life Not when they're actually doing anything . To compete with what the M series chips bring, you need a discrete GPU and a very hungry CPU. Such a machine does not get 9+ hours of battery life. > The point is that w…

> If you don't like SPEC then look at workload benchmarks like video rendering or code compilation. The M series chips acquit themselves quite well.

Then you get results that are equivalent rather than superior.

> Not when they're actually doing anything.

Yes, when they're actually doing anything. The M1 Macbooks get around 16 hours. Under the same kind of load a similarly performing PC laptop might get around 10 hours. Other PC laptops will get 16 hours (or more) by having a lower TDP and then being slower, especially on multi-threaded workloads.

This obviously only matters to people who care about not just long, but very long battery life, and very high performance, and aren't willing to make the weight trade off of getting one with a bigger battery.

> My entire point has been that the impressiveness of the M series chips comes from their efficiency and what they are able to do holistically in a single SoC.

It has very little to do with being in a single SoC. The CPU being able to use the memory bandwidth which is there for the GPU is a neat parlor trick but it only matters if memory bandwidth is the bottleneck, which it usually isn't.

> Sigh. Alright I know what I'm dealing with now.

You don't think that Apple has excellent marketing? They've done this for decades. They make a competitive product and then convince their customers that alternatives are dramatically inferior by pointing to narrow edge cases.

Re: Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max

#210

Post by whynotminot »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #209
whynotminot wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't like SPEC then look at workload benchmarks like video rendering or code compilation. The M series chips acquit themselves quite well. > There are already PC laptops with 9+ hours of battery life Not when they're actually doing anything . To compete with what the M series chips bring, you need a discrete GPU and a very hungry CPU. Such a machine does not get 9+ hours of battery life. > The point is that w…

> If you don't like SPEC then look at workload benchmarks like video rendering or code compilation. The M series chips acquit themselves quite well. Then you get results that are equivalent rather than superior. > Not when they're actually doing anything. Yes, when they're actually doing anything. The M1 Macbooks get around 16 hours. Under the same kind of load a similarly performing PC laptop might get around 10 hou…

> It has very little to do with being in a single SoC.

The part where the efficiency is radically better than competing parts has everything to do with it being an integrated SoC.

> Then you get results that are equivalent rather than superior.

Equivalent to what? Your desktop at 5+ times the wattage? A Windows laptop with half the battery life and twice the weight?

> Yes, when they're actually doing anything. The M1 Macbooks get around 16 hours. Under the same kind of load a similarly performing PC laptop might get around 10 hours. Other PC laptops will get 16 hours (or more) by having a lower TDP and then being slower, especially on multi-threaded workloads.

Ok this is so ambiguous as to be nearly meaningless. 10 hours of what? At the least you're conceding that in this undefined workload the MacBook gets 6 more hours, which again, has been my whole point. The holistic efficiency is the whole story.

> This obviously only matters to people who care about not just long, but very long battery life, and very high performance, and aren't willing to make the weight trade off of getting one with a bigger battery.

"Only people who want better performance and better battery life should get an Apple Laptop" ... is that basically what you're saying here? Because we might just finally be in agreement.

If you don't care about performance or battery life or weight there are plenty of Windows options available. This is true.

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