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Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

macworld.com

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Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#361

Post by qwytw »

newaccount74 wrote: post #266
ajmurmann wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one thing that creates that impression is the costs for beefier options in the Apple store. Everytime I configure a Mac and add RAM I feel ripped off. The price difference between the upgraded Mac and what you'd pay on Newegg is just so large. I'm still a happy customer, since I still get so much lasting value, but in the moment it certainly hurts.

It's Apple's way of price discrimination. They want to offer computers at every price point, but they don't want to build a dozen different models. So their entry level machines are a great deal -- you get the quality of a 5000€ machine for just 2500€ if you can live with limited storage. But if you want enough storage, you're paying the full price... I'm not a fan of their policy, because the result is that lots of…

Apple charges what the market will bear (and their guessing, mostly accurately, that people who want an extra 16 GB of memory would rather pay an extra $400 than switch to another laptop manufacturer). Claiming that they are selling their entry levels models at a discount is just silly, Apple has considerably higher margins than other manufacturers. I'm not sure what are their exact margins on laptops, but the 2500€ is more close to being an 1300€ machine than a 5000€ one (since their margins on storage and memory upgrades are almost definitely above 100% this gets worse the more upgrades you get).

Not that I'm trying to blame Apple, they've done a great job and it would be irrational for a company to not take the free money (I'd do the same and it's not that their competitors are better, high end PC laptops have similar margins it's just that less people want them so Dell, Lenovo etc. tend to sell them at massive ~50% discounts eventually (same with Android phones) which Apple never does, since their prefer to sell at relatively low volumes but with huge margins). However their prices for ram/storage are objectively predatory and the only reason they can get away with it is because there is no viable competition, it has nothing to do with "subsidizing" entry levels Macs. If they wanted to they could easily cut their prices by 500-1500 across the entire 14/16" mbp range and still remain more profitable than all the other laptop manufacturers.

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#362

Post by leokennis »

asdff wrote: post #227
victorronin wrote: post #25

I switched about half a year ago from a MacBook Pro with an Intel processor to MacBook Pro with an M1 processor. My overall impression was "when the hell will it run out of power"? I spent the whole working day (without a charger) and it was still at 60%, while I was constantly stressed before when I had to do something without a charger for more than 3-4 hours. I don't care what any test, but tripling battery life w…

Part of it might be new battery effect too. I just popped a new battery in my 2012 and just doing light dev work I could stretch it to 8 hours or so. This thing was doing like 3 hours on a good day before.

Certainly that plays a part. But my M1 Air is now over a year old and I can still easily edit 4K video in iMovie for a few hours and see the battery only drop from 100% to 70%.

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#363

Post by newaccount74 »

qwytw wrote: post #361
newaccount74 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Apple's way of price discrimination. They want to offer computers at every price point, but they don't want to build a dozen different models. So their entry level machines are a great deal -- you get the quality of a 5000€ machine for just 2500€ if you can live with limited storage. But if you want enough storage, you're paying the full price... I'm not a fan of their policy, because the result is that lots of…

Apple charges what the market will bear (and their guessing, mostly accurately, that people who want an extra 16 GB of memory would rather pay an extra $400 than switch to another laptop manufacturer). Claiming that they are selling their entry levels models at a discount is just silly, Apple has considerably higher margins than other manufacturers. I'm not sure what are their exact margins on laptops, but the 2500€…

Average margins on Macs are high because they charge huge amounts on updates. But I really doubt that the margin on the 2500€ Macbook Pro is 50% as you claim. Maybe the high end has big margins like that (since they overcharge on RAM/SSD), but I really doubt the low end machines have high margins like that.

I own one of the new Macbook Pros, and the build quality of them is fantastic. It's the sturdiest computer I've ever seen. It's a huge jump from their previous models, it's even better than the 2015 models, which were already very good. I've opened it up to look at the internals, and there's so much material everywhere. No wonder it's heavier. Even the base plate is a lot stiffer than in the previous models.

Now, I must concede that I'm not too familiar with windows laptops, but I've never seen anything remotely comparable to this. If you could point me to a 1300€ windows laptop that's even close to the Macbook Pro in build quality, I'd love to hear about it.

And that's not even mentioning how fantastic the display and the speakers are, because they are unbelievable.

The only thing that's cheap about the new Macbook Pros is the camera, which unfortunately is still a piece of crap, just with some machine learning algorithms applied (they don't help).

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#364

Post by qwytw »

newaccount74 wrote: post #363
qwytw wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple charges what the market will bear (and their guessing, mostly accurately, that people who want an extra 16 GB of memory would rather pay an extra $400 than switch to another laptop manufacturer). Claiming that they are selling their entry levels models at a discount is just silly, Apple has considerably higher margins than other manufacturers. I'm not sure what are their exact margins on laptops, but the 2500€…

Average margins on Macs are high because they charge huge amounts on updates. But I really doubt that the margin on the 2500€ Macbook Pro is 50% as you claim. Maybe the high end has big margins like that (since they overcharge on RAM/SSD), but I really doubt the low end machines have high margins like that. I own one of the new Macbook Pros, and the build quality of them is fantastic. It's the sturdiest computer I've…

My point is that Apple is not subsidizing lower end models by selling overpriced ram, if they were fine with the margins other laptop manufacturers have, they could sell their products much cheaper (they could still cut their prices significantly and have considerably higher margins than others) but they don't, because they don't have to (their products are good, there is a huge demand for them and they don't have as much competition as PC makers).

Obviously I don't Apple's exact margins, they are probably lower than 50% but not by much however: "But there's no way they could keep their entry level prices as low if they charged a fair price for upgrades." is simply just not true, they obviously could do that if any of the conditions I mentioned changed, they just don't because as any other company Apple seeks to maximize it's profits.

Dell XPS, Thinkpad X1, Razer Blade and Surface Laptop lines have pretty decent build quality, of course they all have inferior CPUs which use more power and generate way more heat compared to the Mac (I didn't say you can get one for 1300€, just that that other manufacturers try to price their premium laptop lines at similar level as Apple but usually end up having to sell them at significant discounts)

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#365

Post by asdff »

leokennis wrote: post #362
asdff wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of it might be new battery effect too. I just popped a new battery in my 2012 and just doing light dev work I could stretch it to 8 hours or so. This thing was doing like 3 hours on a good day before.

Certainly that plays a part. But my M1 Air is now over a year old and I can still easily edit 4K video in iMovie for a few hours and see the battery only drop from 100% to 70%.

Pretty huge! Don't expect miracles long term though. Batteries are still batteries M1 or not and if you do 4k video editing every day, you will notice wear over time. What sucks about the new macs is you need to take it in to replace a battery, where as you used to be able to do it yourself in like 2 mins or less.

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#366

Post by inkyoto »

smoldesu wrote: post #339
inkyoto wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I struggle to imagine a regular workload that benefits from 32gbps of bandwidth, much less a scenario where the average layman could saturate a 200gbps or 400gbps bus. Since this is HN, many of us like… compiling, you know, stuff. It is a regular workload for many of us on here. The main beneficiary of the M1 Max wide memory architecture appears to be the Haskell GHC compiler, which is very, very voracious when it…

I'd be inclined to agree, but my 16gbps i5 520m compiles Rust just fine. Small and medium-sized desktop applications aren't constrained by bandwidth as much as they are CPU-bound. I could easily imagine AI model training blowing up a memory bus, but every machine that isn't an M1 Pro or M1 Max is going to delegate that to a dGPU that is bound by PCIe bandwidth, not memory. Even then, properly-optimized CUDA programs…

Discussing needs of an average Macbook user is a moot point as they would not purchase a maxed out M1 Max. I was referring to specific use cases of a specific target group of users with specific examples who can benefit from specific hardware architecture solutions and about being able to put them into a practical use today.

> I'd be inclined to agree, but my 16gbps i5 520m compiles Rust just fine. Small and medium-sized desktop applications aren't constrained by bandwidth as much as they are CPU-bound.

Gbps refers to the memory throughput, not to the memory footprint. A Haswell CPU equipped laptop with 16 Gb of RAM can compile Rust applications just fine; the difference is the time. Compile times are the single important delineating factor for software engineers.

> Even then, properly-optimized CUDA programs will calculate most of the work on your GPU itself, constraining you to the 300-something gbps that your GPU is capable of.

With all due respect, it is exceptionally unusual to train ML models directly in CUDA, which is a low-level proprietory Nvidia API. Of which CUDA is one, and there are several others as well (ROCm, OpenCL, CoreML, Metal etc), and they are swapped out for one another depending on what the underlying hardware actually is. ML training is done via the use of high-level ML frameworks (Tensorflow, NumPy, SpaCy, Pandas, SPARK and others), but not in CUDA – it simply almost does not exist.

Lastly, whilst the ML training undertaken on a high performant and an exorbitantly expensive dGPU itself would be substantially faster compared to 32 M1 Max GPU cores, one would yet be constrained with the PCIe bus data transfers speeds: ~32Gbps for PCIe v4.0 in the x16 lane setup (the high end of the commodity PC hardware today), and ~64 Gpbs for PCIe v5.0 in the x16 lane setup (not even unavailable for purchase today in PC laptops and desktops). With both being a far cry from the 200 Gbps of a single M1 Max CPU cluster.

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#367

Post by fred33 »

mehrdada wrote: post #182
WatchDog wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 3 M1 series chips, the M1, the M1 Pro, and the M1 Max. The M1 is a different die to the M1 Pro and M1 Max. I believe the Pro and Max are the same die binned differently as you alluded to.

M1 , M1 Pro , and M1 Max are all distinct dies, with M1 Max being quite a bit larger, with a larger cache, and more I/O compared to its M1 Pro sibling. The 24-core M1 Max , however, is a binned die of the 32-core M1 Max . There are lower core bins of M1 Pro that are only available on the cheaper 14-inch MacBook Pro. M1 is also available in two forms, one with a 7-core and the other with 8-core GPU.

M1Max doesn’t have more I/O than M1Pro. All I/O blocs are localized on the top part of two dies.

And as Hector said, M1Max is identical to M1Pro but with an bottom extension which provides more Ram interfaces, Caches, GPU, Média and Neural Engines, PLL and probably all the logic for a die to die connection.

But this die-to-die area has been cutted on the Apple picture presented in keynote.

I don’t think M1Pro has a such die-to-die logic, but I don’t see real picture of M1Pro die.

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#368

Post by mehrdada »

fred33 wrote: post #367
mehrdada wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M1 , M1 Pro , and M1 Max are all distinct dies, with M1 Max being quite a bit larger, with a larger cache, and more I/O compared to its M1 Pro sibling. The 24-core M1 Max , however, is a binned die of the 32-core M1 Max . There are lower core bins of M1 Pro that are only available on the cheaper 14-inch MacBook Pro. M1 is also available in two forms, one with a 7-core and the other with 8-core GPU.

M1Max doesn’t have more I/O than M1Pro. All I/O blocs are localized on the top part of two dies. And as Hector said, M1Max is identical to M1Pro but with an bottom extension which provides more Ram interfaces, Caches, GPU, Média and Neural Engines, PLL and probably all the logic for a die to die connection. But this die-to-die area has been cutted on the Apple picture presented in keynote. I don’t think M1Pro has a s…

By "I/O" I am including memory bus, not merely devices.
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