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Apple's rumored M7 Ultra targets 1.5TB and Blackwell-class AI performance

tomshardware.com

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Re: Apple's rumored M7 Ultra targets 1.5TB and Blackwell-class AI performance

#31

Post by fvwqcecvq »

eigenspace wrote: post #25
0-_-0 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want to be power efficient, while Nvidia doesn't. That means a much higher cost (larger chip area) for the same performance.

I don't buy this as an explanation for the gap in the actual silicon's performance. Nvidia's chips lose very little performance when they're severely power limited. In fact, that's why Nvidia's Professional versions of their GPUs are typically running at under two-thirds of their consumer equivalent's power draw. Nvidia's cards are primarily designed for their professional applications where the power consumption is…

> On a performance-per-watt basis, Apple is still behind an Nvidia card with the juiced up power consumption, and when you dial back the power draw, Nvidia cards are miles ahead of Apple's silicon for performance-per-watt.

Do you have a citation on Apple vs nVidia performance-per-watt? I'm not aware of any benchmark that shows nVidia with a better performance-per-watt. Higher performance, sure, but performance-per-watt, not that I'm aware of.

Re: Apple's rumored M7 Ultra targets 1.5TB and Blackwell-class AI performance

#32

Post by dagmx »

eigenspace wrote: post #8

It's pretty interesting that Apple was so quick to get to industry-leading status on their CPUs, but their GPUs are still in a state where they won't match Nvidia's GPUs from 2024 until at least next year, and will need a significantly bigger chip to do so. Similar story with Qualcomm but to a lesser degree (both on the CPU and GPU side). I wonder why that is. Lack of priority? Legitimately harder problem to solve? E…

Do you have comparisons for Apple’s GPU to NVIDIA’s at the same power and thermals?

Right now the M5 Max is one of the best laptop compute GPUs for blender rendering and doesn’t do too badly on raster tests either. But it operates at a fraction of the equivalent NVIDIA parts.

It’s more that Apple doesn’t provide a competing tier of device as the high end NVIDIA GPUs. But within the tiers they do provide they’re fairly competitive.

Re: Apple's rumored M7 Ultra targets 1.5TB and Blackwell-class AI performance

#34

Post by KolibriFly »

eigenspace wrote: post #25
0-_-0 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want to be power efficient, while Nvidia doesn't. That means a much higher cost (larger chip area) for the same performance.

I don't buy this as an explanation for the gap in the actual silicon's performance. Nvidia's chips lose very little performance when they're severely power limited. In fact, that's why Nvidia's Professional versions of their GPUs are typically running at under two-thirds of their consumer equivalent's power draw. Nvidia's cards are primarily designed for their professional applications where the power consumption is…

Another important thing to keep in mind here is the software. Nvidia has been optimizing their software stack for decades to squeeze every clock cycle out of the hardware under any limits. TensorRT alone does straight up magic. Apple is just starting out with MLX, and their hardware is often idling not because it is worse per watt but because the compiler does not know how to optimally load the ALU blocks for specific graphs yet

Re: Apple's rumored M7 Ultra targets 1.5TB and Blackwell-class AI performance

#35

Post by KolibriFly »

nozzlegear wrote: post #5

"Blackwell-class AI" sounds like one of those cool sounding nonsense terms out of a military sci-fi book.

Yeah, that is pretty funny considering Blackwell isn't just a chip but a whole ecosystem with a fifth-gen interconnect and huge cooling racks...
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