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Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

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Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#231

Post by floatboth »

zozbot234 wrote: post #192
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there was a longstanding prediction that the arm architecture would overtake x86. So now the wheel turns and someone will have to predict how long it takes before RISC-V overtakes ARM.

RISC-V has a few ISA advantages over ARM64 (mainly the variable length instructions, which provide instruction density that's comparable with x86 while still being very easy to decode) but meaningful competition would have to come from something more like the upcoming Mill architecture - VLIW-like power efficiency with the same flexibility and IPC as current OOO designs.

RISC-V has some bad ISA disadvantages like needing three (!) instructions for array indexing: https://gist.github.com/erincandescent/8a10eeeea1918ee4f9d99...

Isn't Mill eternal vaporware?

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#232

Post by floatboth »

girvo wrote: post #169
PostOnce wrote: post #41

One of several tradeoffs is that M1-based stuff has a RAM ceiling, which until a few days ago was 16GB, now it's 64GB. If you need more than that, then you can't use M1. Does the performance gap close if Intel starts selling similar on-package RAM to consumers? I suspect yes, and rapidly. They have it, they just apparently don't want to sell it outside of specialized high-margin goods like Xeon Phi.

Intel's new Sapphire Rapids is also doing on-package HBM

IT'S NOT HBM! NEITHER IS APPLE'S MEMORY!

Stop spreading this myth, please just look at a Vega GPU die shot and you'll know what HBM looks like. You cannot put HBM on a PCB package. HBM is connected with a silicon interposer.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#233

Post by authorityofnil »

yxhuvud wrote: post #212
speed_spread wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're plugged in all the time, lower TDP is nice but not critical. And if you live in a cold country, you have to heat up the house six months per year, TDP is just heating with a computing side effect.

> And if you live in a cold country, you have to heat up the house six months per year, TDP is just heating with a computing side effect. Except it is still direct electrical heating which is atrociously inefficient.

>Except it is still direct electrical heating which is atrociously inefficient.

Electric heating converts practically all energy into heat, making it ~100% efficient. You can make statements about cost-effectiveness compared to burning things, but not all houses can.

CHP configurations are more common in colder climates with district heating, so their "waste" heat during generation often isn't wasted at all.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#234

Post by bhouston »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #70
bhouston wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody does that though. But you can denoise a sequence which is similar.

I'm guessing they don't interpolate frames either, but maybe that would be a good time saving feature if you know the end compression format and you can just interpolate the frames at the render stage instead of re-encoding it again later.

There are ai upscalers and also ai interpolators to uprez the frame rate. Haven’t heard they used used in film but I suspect they will be as they get better.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#235

Post by rerx »

threeseed wrote: post #202
smoldesu wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The upcoming Thinkpad X1 Extreme is going to give it some stiff competition. It's wielding the insurmountable RTX 3080, and it's priced very competitively. But I'm just going to tell it to you now so we don't make the same mistake we have for the past 10 years of computer hardware discussions: specs don't matter. You could tell 90% of the people buying PCs with dGPUs about your 5nm GPU and next-gen power efficiency,…

It's using DDR4 versus DDR5 in the Mac and a fraction of the memory bandwidth so will be interesting to see its performance on heavier tasks. Also looks like it has at least half the battery life if not far less when put under heavy load. I do love this review though: "It is a nice laptop but extremely noisy. Even when idle the fans are on all the time."

Which review are you quoting?

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#236

Post by bhouston »

dagmx wrote: post #230
glenneroo wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when was the discussion purely feature films? Our little studio can't afford racks full of Xeon CPU renderers, so we do as GP said, using redshift, etc. and just have a ton of GPUs.

Because the commenter I replied to said that only old school artists render on the CPU. People pick the renderer that suits their needs, and it's not just a matter of old school people picking CPU pathtracers because it's what they know. You picked GPU rendering because you're, as you said, a smaller studio. That suits your needs. It's however not old school for big studios to use CPU rendering because GPU renderers…

The reason why most artists highly prefer gpus is it gets their cycle time down. Farms often use CPU’s still because of cost and less pressure on a single image render time.

Usually what one does is break the shots down into individual elements rather than render everything as once and then composite it in. Rendering it all in one go can prevent touchups to individual elements. But I am much more VFX than pure animation - I think animation does more one shot one render work.

Funny thing I mostly know what I am talking about.

What studio do you work at?

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#237

Post by beowulfey »

Thaxll wrote: post #64
pier25 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AMD Threadripper 3990X costs about $5,000 and I'm guessing that's cheap compared to the Xeons.

An AMD Ryzen 9 5950X cost $700 and is almost 2x faster than an m1 max in multi core.

That’s amazing that it’s not even twice as good!

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#238

Post by jb1991 »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #208
hunterloftis wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not even interesting that the M1 is "slightly" beaten by a Mac Pro's Xeon, because _nobody is doing raytracing on CPUs._ This is backwards - Nearly all major raytracing workloads today are done primarily on CPUs: vfx, animated film and tv, etc. There are several reasons for this, including memory limits and the lack of coherence in both path tracing algorithms and common acceleration structures. GPU-based trac…

Final renders may be done on CPU for maximum accuracy, but that's not what is being discussed . What's being discussed is desktop workstation rendering. Mental Ray, heavily used in the industry for feature films: GPU accelerated since eleven years ago. Pixar licensed a bunch of GPU rendering tech from NVIDIA in 2015, so that's six years ago. Autodesk Arnold After Effects Chaos V-Ray Weta Gazebo and Manuka ...all GPU…

> Pixar licensed a bunch of GPU rendering tech from NVIDIA in 2015, so that's six years ago.

Pixar still primarily renders on the CPU. Only within the last year have they added a hybrid GPU option to the Renderman renderer.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#239

Post by dagmx »

bhouston wrote: post #236
dagmx wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the commenter I replied to said that only old school artists render on the CPU. People pick the renderer that suits their needs, and it's not just a matter of old school people picking CPU pathtracers because it's what they know. You picked GPU rendering because you're, as you said, a smaller studio. That suits your needs. It's however not old school for big studios to use CPU rendering because GPU renderers…

The reason why most artists highly prefer gpus is it gets their cycle time down. Farms often use CPU’s still because of cost and less pressure on a single image render time. Usually what one does is break the shots down into individual elements rather than render everything as once and then composite it in. Rendering it all in one go can prevent touchups to individual elements. But I am much more VFX than pure animat…

> Funny thing I mostly know what I am talking about.

You are only however talking about your subjective experience and projecting it onto the entirety of the industry.

I've worked in both animated features and VFX at a few of the bigger studios. What sort of studio do you work at?

I'd suggest looking at the landscape of big feature films and seeing what studios are using GPU rendering. It's rare to see any of the big studios using GPU rendering, not just because of existing farm hardware, but because none of the current GPUs and GPU renderers are capable of handling the larger scenes required, as well as losing out on some shader functionality like full OSL support among others...

If you look at the ACM breakdown of production renderers, in their rendering special, there's not a single GPU focused renderer there.

Individual artists may want GPU rendering. However your statement of only old school people using CPU rendering is just ignoring the realities of production.

Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

#240

Post by matheusmoreira »

zbobet2012 wrote: post #146
MangoCoffee wrote: post #9

>in order to give the M1 Max some real competition, one has to skip laptop chips entirely and reach for not just high end desktop chips, but for server-class workstation hardware to really beat the M1 Max this is really interesting

>this is really interesting Sadly this is not really interesting, it's disingenuous. He benchmarked against a ten year old (03/06/2012) server CPU. My two year old intel laptop cpu (i7-9750H) also outperforms the xeon's he's comparing against by almost 40%. The M1 is a great chip, it's sad that this got published with a "server chip" comparison at all. A real server class CPU from the modern era, at a comparable pric…

> My two year old intel laptop cpu (i7-9750H) also outperforms the xeon's he's comparing against by almost 40%.

Yeah, but for how long? My laptop has a respectable CPU as well but any kind of sustained load would melt it down if it didn't automatically throttle itself back to 2 GHz and below after like 5 seconds.

These M1 chips somehow manage to have great performance while also keeping temperatures and power draw low. I think this will change everything forever.

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