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Apple M1 Ultra

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41–50 of 855 posts

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#41
post #35
post #4

Looks like all the people saying "just start fusing those M1 CPU's into bigger ones" were right, that's basically what they did here (fused two M1 Max'es together). And since the presenter mentioned the Mac Pro would come on another day, I wonder if they'll just do 4x M1 Max for that.

>I wonder if they'll just do 4x M1 Max for that. They'll be running out of names for that thing. M1 Ultra II would be lame, so M1 Extreme? M1 Steve?

M1 Hyper or M1 Ludicrous:)

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#42
post #15

Are the neural engines actually used for anything, to anyone's knowledge? Edit: Apparently in iPhones, they are used for FaceID.

I thought it's also used to activate Siri by voice without any CPU usage

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#43
post #26
post #10

And overnight, Intel's Ice Lake is again way behind.

PC user don't pay 4k for a computer, on PC you can get 2x the speed for 2x less the price.

Link me to the $2K computer that's twice as fast as the M1 Ultra. Take all the time you need.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#44

> M1 Ultra features an extraordinarily powerful 20-core CPU with 16 high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores. It delivers 90 percent higher multi-threaded performance than the fastest available 16-core PC desktop chip in the same power envelope. Maybe not a huge caveat, as 16-core chips in the same power envelope probably covers most of what an average PC user is going to have, but there are 64-core Thre…

"in the same power envelope" is a pretty big caveat. Desktop chips aren't very optimized for power consumption.

I'd like to see the actual performance comparison.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#45
post #25

Didn't AMD do something similar with putting 2 CPU chips together with cache in-between? What's the difference here in packaging technology? (maybe there is no shared cache here)

This doesn’t seem to be two cores connected in standard SMP configuration, or with a shared cache between them. Apple claims there were like 10,000 connection points. It sounds like this operates as if it was one giant physical chip, not two separate processors that can talk very fast. I can’t wait to see benchmarks.

Modern SMP systems have NUMA behavior mostly not because of a lack of bandwidth but because of latency. At the speeds modern hardware operates at, the combination of distance, SerDes, and other transmission factors result in high latencies when you cross dies - this can't be ameliorated by massively increasing bandwidth via parallel lanes. For context, some server chips which have all the cores on a single die exhibit NUMA behavior purely because there's too many cores to all be physically close to each other geometrically (IIRC the first time I saw this was on an 18 core Xeon, with cores that themselves were a good bit smaller than these).

It's probably best to think of this chip as an extremely fast double socket SMP where the two sockets have much lower latency than normal. Software written with that in mind or multiple programs operating fully independent of each other will be able to take massive advantage of this, but most parallel code written for single socket systems will experience reduced gains or even potential losses depending on their parallelism model.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#46
post #26
post #10

And overnight, Intel's Ice Lake is again way behind.

PC user don't pay 4k for a computer, on PC you can get 2x the speed for 2x less the price.

May I ask the $2000 desktop configuration with 2x the speed?

Of course Apple chips won’t work well for gaming, but what other benchmarks will this $2000 desktop win?

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#48
post #9
post #7

I wonder if the max 128GB graphics memory opens up some applications that would not have been viable before?

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.

Not on a single GPU though and it’s 40x the cost!

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#49
post #26
post #10

And overnight, Intel's Ice Lake is again way behind.

PC user don't pay 4k for a computer, on PC you can get 2x the speed for 2x less the price.

> PC user don't pay 4k for a computer

I'm almost certain that's not true, especially for machines that would compete with the Studio

> on PC you can get 2x the speed for 2x less the price.

Citation needed. This hasn't been true for a long time as far as I can tell.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#50
post #35
post #4

Looks like all the people saying "just start fusing those M1 CPU's into bigger ones" were right, that's basically what they did here (fused two M1 Max'es together). And since the presenter mentioned the Mac Pro would come on another day, I wonder if they'll just do 4x M1 Max for that.

>I wonder if they'll just do 4x M1 Max for that. They'll be running out of names for that thing. M1 Ultra II would be lame, so M1 Extreme? M1 Steve?

Just need to increment the 1 instead... Eventually moving into using letters instead of numbers, until we end up with the MK-ULTRA chip.
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