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Apple M1 Ultra

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Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#251

Is it actually more powerful than a top of the line threadripper[0] or is that not a "personal computer" CPU by this definition? I feel like 64 cores would beat 20 on some workloads even if the 20 were way faster in single core performance. [0] https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3...

Well compare that to a 400$ CPU like a 5900x, the first M1 is slower than this one and cost 2x the price.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#252
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Gaming benchmarks are completely irrelevant when discussing the actual raw power of the GPU. Maybe, but the "raw power" is useless if it can't be exploited. > Legacy games written for x86 CPUs obviously are going to perform poorly. Not if they're GPU-bound. Even native performance isn't that impressive

If the power is substantial enough it will get exploited eventually. Hopefully even if Metal ports don't occur the eventual Asahi-adjacent open source drivers will open the gaming doors.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large businesses do. I bet in some places you could get grant/loan incentives to replace a PC fleet with these things. Back in the Pentium-4 days, iirc I was able to get almost $250k in grants and $1.5M in subsidized loans to do accelerated refresh of a PC fleet and small datacenter, all through a utility's peak load reduction program.

I don't deny such things happen but it's illogical. If you have 20 people on desktops a small fraction of them will use more energy for microwaving lunch, making coffee or on air conditioning than they will save in aggregate on this nominal reduction in power draw.

20, yes, it’s a waste of time. At 2000, reducing power consumption by 30%, may yield $100k annually.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#254

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…

Something is seriously fishy about those geekbench results. 24-core scores 20k, 32-core scores 22.3k, and 64-core score 25k. Something isn't scaling there.

Probably it's the thermals that don't scale. The more the cores, the lower the the peak performance per core.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#255

How does Apple manage to blow every other computing OEM out of the water? What's in the secret sauce of their company? Is it great leadership? Top tier engineering talent? Lots of money? I simply don't understand.

If I had to guess, their secret sauce is that 1) they're paying lots of money to be on a chip fabrication node ahead of both AMD and Intel, 2) since their chip design is in-house, they don't have to pay the fat profit margin Intel and AMD want for their high-end processors and can therefore include what is effectively a more expensive processor in their systems for the same price, and 3) their engineering team is as good as AMD/Intel. Note that the first two have more to do with economics rather than engineering.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#256

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…

Something is seriously fishy about those geekbench results. 24-core scores 20k, 32-core scores 22.3k, and 64-core score 25k. Something isn't scaling there.

Yeah, it’s the real world tasks that GeekBench tries to simulate that don’t tend to scale linearity with processor count. A lot of software does not take good advantage of multiple cores.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#257
post #76

At what point Apple will put those chips in their servers or sell server chips? It only makes sense for them to take this architecture to the cloud deployments

Unfortunately I still don't think the market has much interest in energy-efficient servers. But maybe the energy-sector crunch created by Putin's war will precipitate some change here...

Energy is probably the biggest bill for a data centre.

Lower TDP = lower electric bills and lower airconditioning bill. Win win

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#258
I think the GPU claims are interesting. According to the graph's footer, the M1 Ultra was compared to an RTX 3090. If the performance/wattage claims are correct, I'm wondering if the Mac Studio could become an "affordable" personal machine learning workstation (which also won't make the electricity bill skyrocket).

If Pytorch becomes stable and easy to use on Apple Silicon [0][1], it could be an appealing choice.

[0]: https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/47702#issuecomment... [1]: https://nod.ai/pytorch-m1-max-gpu/

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#259
post #60
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.

640GB should be enough for anyone.

Perhaps until VR becomes more main stream and gets higher frame rates, resolutions etc.

Rendering in VR takes a lot of memory at higher resolutions.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#260

Is it actually more powerful than a top of the line threadripper[0] or is that not a "personal computer" CPU by this definition? I feel like 64 cores would beat 20 on some workloads even if the 20 were way faster in single core performance. [0] https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3...

It is worth noting that it has, at least according to Apple's graphs, slightly more than an RTX 3090 in graphics performance.

So, even if it doesn't quite beat Threadripper in the CPU department - it will absolutely annihilate Threadripper in anything graphics-related.

For this reason, I don't actually have a problem with Apple calling it the fastest. Yes, Threadripper might be marginally faster in real-world work that uses the CPU, but other tasks like video editing, graphics, it won't be anywhere near close.

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