Apple M1 Ultra • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#301

Post by whoisburbansky » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 9:32 PM UTC

polyrand wrote: post #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]…

Cursory look gives you a ~$3500 price tag for a gaming PC with a 3090 [1], vs. at least $4k for a Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra. Roughly the same ballpark, but I wouldn't call the M1 Ultra more affordable given those numbers.

1. https://techguided.com/best-rtx-3090-gaming-pc/#:~:text=With....

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#302

Post by xedrac » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 9:32 PM UTC

While I'm not on the Apple train, I love how they are pushing AMD, Intel and NVidia out of complacency. No more of these little tiny incremental improvements to milk the industry. Bring your BEST to the table or get left behind!

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#303

Post by BobbyJo » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 9:33 PM UTC

fivea wrote: post #268

enneff wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> A lot of software does not take good advantage of multiple cores. It sounds pointless to come up with synthetic benchmarks which emulate software that is not able to handle hardware, and then use said synthetic benchmarks to evaluate the hardware performance.

It has a very specific point: communicating performance to people who don't know hardware.

Most consumers are software aware, not hardware aware. They care what they will use the hardware for, not what they can use it for. To that end, benchmarks that correlate with their experience are more useful than a tuned BLAS implementation.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#304

Post by petecooper » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 9:34 PM UTC

howinteresting wrote: post #244

kiratp wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My workstation has a 3990x. Our "world" build is slightly faster on my M1 Max. https://twitter.com/kiratpandya/status/1457438725680480257 The 3990x runs a bit faster on the initial compile stage but the linking is single threaded and the M1 Max catches up at that point. I expect the M1 Ultra to crush the 3990x on compile time.

Try mold.

>Try mold

Curiosity got the better of me:

https://github.com/rui314/mold

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#305

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 9:34 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #276

In some ways I wish this processor was available from a CPU chip seller. As a compute engine it gets a lot "right" (in my opinion) and would be fun to hack on. That said, the idea that USB C/Thunderbolt is the new PCIe bus has some merit. I have yet to find someone who makes a peripheral card cage that is fed by USBC/TB but there are of course standalone GPUs.

[deleted]

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#306

Post by Koshkin » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 9:34 PM UTC

swyx wrote: post #289

was surprised to learn that the CPUs and GPUs on the M1x chips are essentially a single unit, and for the M1 Ultra they basically slapped two M1’s together. in traditional PC building, the CPU is quite distinct from the GPU. can anyone ELI5 what the benefits are to having the CPU closely integrated with GPU like the M1 has? seems a bit unwieldy but i dont know anything about computer architecture

I remember how AMD 3DNow! and Intel MMX were meant to render GPUs obsolete.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#307

Post by Geee » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 9:35 PM UTC

This is insane. They claim that its GPU performance tops the RTX 3090, while using 200W less power. I happen to have this GPU on my PC and not only it costs over $3000, but its also very power-hungry and loud.

Currently, you need this kind of GPU performance for high resolution VR gaming at 90 fps, but its just barely enough. This means that the GPU will run very loudly and heat up the room, and running games like HL Alyx on max settings is still not possible.

It seems that Apple might be the only company who can deliver a proper VR experience. I can't wait to see what they've been cooking up.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#308

Post by delusional » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 9:35 PM UTC

dheera wrote: post #291

ChuckMcM wrote: post #276

In some ways I wish this processor was available from a CPU chip seller. As a compute engine it gets a lot "right" (in my opinion) and would be fun to hack on. That said, the idea that USB C/Thunderbolt is the new PCIe bus has some merit. I have yet to find someone who makes a peripheral card cage that is fed by USBC/TB but there are of course standalone GPUs.

> USB C/Thunderbolt is the new PCIe bus Oh please hell no. I have to unplug and plug my USB-C camera at least once a day because it gets de-enumerated very randomly. Using the best cables I can get my hands on. File transfers to/from USB-C hard drives suddenly stop mid-transfer and corrupt the file system. Don't ask me why, I'm just reporting my experiences, this is the reality of my life that UX researchers don't se…

You have a very exotic configuration if you plugged your webcam and thumb drives into PCIe slots.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#309

Post by my123 » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 9:35 PM UTC

rowanG077 wrote: post #83

cehrlich wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think some of this can be guessed from the SoC codenames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apple_codenames M1 Max is Jade C-Die => 64GB M1 Ultra is Jade 2C-Die => 128GB There is a still unreleased SoC called Jade 4C-Die =>256GB So I think that's the most we'll see this generation, unless they somehow add (much slower) slotted RAM If they were to double the max RAM on M2 Pro/Max (Rhodes Chop / Rhodes 1C), which…

How is slotted RAM slower? 6400Mhz DIMM exists. This would match the specs of the RAM on the M1 Max. Even octa-channel has been done before so the memory bus would have the exact same width, latency and clock frequency.

Note that those are overclocked out of spec configurations today.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/134599/...

4800 MT/s is the actual maximum spec, anything beyond that is OC.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#310

Post by Lramseyer » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 9:35 PM UTC

1980phipsi wrote: post #220

Can we trust the performance measurements that are listed?

Yes, but assume that they're cherry picked. Don't get me wrong, these numbers are impressive, but it claims that it's GPU is faster than the highest end discrete GPU (RTX 3090) but it's unclear on what benchmark it used. It's important to keep in mind that their GPUs are not architected with gaming in mind, whereas the 3090 definitely is. So it's not unreasonable to find some metrics where their GPU performs better.