Holy shit. It’s absolutely incredible what Apple has cooked up, seeing it in a real life workflow like this. And the bigger iMacs and Mac Pros with even beefier M1 derivates haven’t even been released yet!
Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
251–260 of 328 posts
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't the point of a FPGA that you can reconfigure it? It seems like a waste to expend it on another CPU.
I’ve certainly seen in low volume specialty equipment (think things like Video Routers, and surprisingly some high end audio equipment) FPGAs being used where an ASIC would be a better fit. I suspect however this comes down to a business decision, that the time and money spent getting a run of an ASIC with the same logic put together may be better spent elsewhere.
The FPGA can be deployed and designed for today, while an ASIC isn't going to ready until after a few tape outs, and it's often a race to market. While it's really cool and actually works, the reality is that reconfiguring the hardware to do something different isn't a necessary feature in just about anything. There's still a huge market for FPGAs, but its already got a lot of active competition.
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
But a heat pump is more than 100% efficient.
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you name those laptop Xeon CPUs that beat the pants off the M1 Max? [Spoiler because I don't think I'll get a response -- there are none. Even when you get into the "luggable" category of workstation that is ostensibly portable but really needs to be plugged in, there is no competition right now. The upcoming Alder Lake should significantly improve Intel's entrant in this category, and hopefully brings some real…
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,…
People will still buy all sorts of computers. Lots of options will appeal to different people. Intel is finally being forced to actually complete. It's all good. My M1 Mac (not even M1 Pro/Max) is quite easily the best computer I've ever owned, but I have zero need to proselytize and simply do not care what you or anyone else use.
That doesn't change the fact that the above claim about "laptop Xeon chips" beating the pants off the M1 Max is delusional nonsense.
I have to comment on the RTX 3080 bit: I have used many PC laptops over my career, and currently have a Lenova with a fat, barnburner Nvidia dGPU. The GPU is literally never used, because the moment it engages my battery life falls to cartoonish levels (somewhere in the range of 40 minutes), the laptop becomes a space heater, and the fans turn into jet engines. This is the sort of "spec chasing" that the industry is addicted to, providing absurd, completely unreasonable solutions just so someone can boast. One of the things about Apple, quite contrary to your claim, is that they don't do that. When they provide something, it is meaningfully usable and useful 100% of the time.
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has to be 3x faster to match M1's efficiency given the TDP is 30 vs 105.
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.
A hot laptop can have significant impacts on fertility in men. And in the summer you have to dissipate that heat. A heat pump is more efficient for heating, to boot.
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#256Just for fun, I would run PostgreSQL on this Mac with 64GB of memory and see how it flies. Heck even install Linux on it and then put on Postgres. It might just put some baremetal servers to shame if 64GiB of memory is enough. If only I had enough money to splurge on such curiosity experiments… :-( For my personal machine, I’d wait for Framework with Ryzen 5000 series…
>Heck even install Linux on it
Good luck with that... it's the one thing that doesn't seem to come up in these comparisons. At least with the Ryzen/Intel CPUs you can easily install Linux - but until this is true of the M1 chips then these benchmarks aren't all that useful.
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 lo…
> 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
Bingo
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#258Earlier 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.
A hot laptop can have significant impacts on fertility in men. And in the summer you have to dissipate that heat. A heat pump is more efficient for heating, to boot.
It's a temporary infertility, at least.
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't really know where to start on this. SKUs that target very different markets are necessarily going to have different performance and efficiency tradeoffs. And core which target different cycle times are going to be able to achieve different IPC. This clearly confuses the basis of performance and different freq/ipc design points. see my response elsewhere, but these aren't unrelated problems: Apple has higher…
> see my response elsewhere, but these aren't unrelated problems: Apple has higher IPC at a lower power-per-core. You can slide around where on the scale x86 falls - maybe you can match perf/watt but then you're getting wiped by a factor of 3 on performance, and you can match on performance but then you're getting wiped by a factor of 6 on perf-watt. You can't do both at once. I'm not sure how you established that. I…
“Intrinsically linked” doesn’t mean anything, if you want to make an argument then make it.
I’ve already made mine - Anandtech shows a factor of 6 difference in perf/watt between a 11980HK and a M1 Max at peak performance, and this likely translates into a ~factor of four-ish difference in perf/watt and IPC at iso-power. That’s a performance gap that is unlikely to be closed by a node shrink - there is a large architectural gap there. Sure, Apple is probably using tighter pitches as well, but that doesn’t add up to a factor of 4 difference either.
If you have one processor that is doing 4 times the performance at iso clocks, and 2.2x the performance with both processors running at peak clocks, the "megahertz myth" isn't applicable, one of those processors is just faster than the other.
We will see next year, with Zen4 and A16 (apples next core) going head to head on N5P. I strongly doubt Zen4 will even get close.
> I just mean the rule of thumb for the "x86 tax", not any specific device.
Ah, so you are conflating “the amount of transistors spent on x86 decoding” with “the architectural impact that x86 has on performance”.
Unfortunately those are not the same thing. To make the car analogy, how much of your car’s engine bay is spent on aspiration? Probably 5%, maybe 10% right? So obviously aspiration is not important to a car’s performance output at all? And a different method of aspiration would not affect performance at all, a turbocharged car performs almost identically to a naturally aspirated car?
That’s the argument you’re making by focusing on number of transistors spent decoding instead of the impact on the rest of the design. Having a much higher “rate of feed” enables much higher-performance optimizations in the rest of the design - like a much much much deeper reorder buffer.
And just like with cars - that 5% or so of the processor is a key enabling factor that can produce gains of 2x in the rest of the processor, because it’s the only way to keep an engine that is 2x as powerful fed. It doesn’t, itself, produce all that much speedup, but you can’t design bigger engines without clearing that bottleneck. Even if it’s only 5% you can’t do those same designs naturally aspirated.
Similarly, even if the decoder is only 5% of the x86 design, it doesn't mean it's not strangling the ability to scale the rest of the design.
Re: Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip
#260Just for fun, I would run PostgreSQL on this Mac with 64GB of memory and see how it flies. Heck even install Linux on it and then put on Postgres. It might just put some baremetal servers to shame if 64GiB of memory is enough. If only I had enough money to splurge on such curiosity experiments… :-( For my personal machine, I’d wait for Framework with Ryzen 5000 series…
>Heck even install Linux on it Good luck with that... it's the one thing that doesn't seem to come up in these comparisons. At least with the Ryzen/Intel CPUs you can easily install Linux - but until this is true of the M1 chips then these benchmarks aren't all that useful.
Installing Asahi is pretty straightforward to be honest. The guided installer due soon is a nice to have, not a major roadblock to benchmarking.