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GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]

developer.apple.com

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Re: GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]

#41

Post by reroute22 »

nemothekid wrote: post #36
jeffybefffy519 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should just support directx. Devs will never support two graphics api’s. it costs too much especially to grab the marginal mac os share that has powerful enough gpu’s. Id bed in 4 years apple moves to directx.

DirectX is exclusive to the Windows platform. At this point, it's probably deeply tied into Windows. I don't see how you can make that bet.

I've no idea exactly how MS licenses uses of DX, but just for context Imagination Technologies just released a custom GPU design that implements DirectX Feature Level 11_0 (which corresponds to earlier versions of DX 12 [1]): https://www.imaginationtech.com/news/imagination-launches-br...

Imagination Technologies is a near 40 year old British silicon IP company that has been doing GPUs for quite some time, just not ones supporting DX up until now, and it has nothing to do with MS (in terms of ownership / rights / etc).

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3d11/o...

Re: GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]

#42

Post by pixelpoet »

aurareturn wrote: post #39
jeffybefffy519 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should just support directx. Devs will never support two graphics api’s. it costs too much especially to grab the marginal mac os share that has powerful enough gpu’s. Id bed in 4 years apple moves to directx.

DirectX is closed source. Also, there are more games on Metal than DirectX.

> Also, there are more games on Metal than DirectX.

Sorry, I was around for DirectX 1.0 back when GPUs were called "graphics accelerators", and don't see how that's possible.

Do you have a source for that, or is there some implicit caveat like counting some emulation later or something? Even then...

Re: GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]

#43

Post by flohofwoe »

jeffybefffy519 wrote: post #33
w10-1 wrote: post #12

The video is just enough of a peek into the GPU's to encourage people to write using Metal API's (and by the way, use the new APIs and FP16).

They should just support directx. Devs will never support two graphics api’s. it costs too much especially to grab the marginal mac os share that has powerful enough gpu’s. Id bed in 4 years apple moves to directx.

> Id bed in 4 years apple moves to directx.

Not going to happen, what's more likely is a Proton-like layer above macOS APIs to simplify porting games over. Also see "Game Porting Toolkit" here: https://developer.apple.com/games/

Re: GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]

#44

Post by reroute22 »

cmovq wrote: post #34
zmmmmm wrote: post #8

Does apple document exactly how many actual true cores there are inside their GPUs? It is always confusing they say "40 core GPU" but I assume these are shader cores which each inside them can execute (per the video) "many thousands" of parallel execution paths. So how does one translate to an equivalent in "CUDA cores" type terminology?

I think a better comparison is to look at floating point performance. For example, the 10 core M2 GPU does 3.6 TFLOPS (FP32) while an RTX 4060 does 15 TFLOPS and an RTX 4090 82.58

Unfortunately, hardly. Ampere's (Nvidia 3000 series), Ada's (Nvidia 4000 series), and RNDA 3's (AMD 7000 series) GPUs have doubled up their FP32 units in ways that differ in implementation (between AMD and Nvidia) but are relatively similarly poor in their ability to be utilized properly at rates much higher than pre-doubling (Nvidia is doing better than AMD in that, but very far from great).

The formal TFLOPS comparison as a result would be most sensible between pre-M3 designs, AMD 6000 series (RNDA 2), and Nvidia's 2000 series (Turing). After that it gets really murky with AMD's "TFLOPS" looking nearly 2x more than they are actually worth by the standards of prior architectures, followed by Nvidia (some coefficient lower than 2, but still high), followed by M3 which from the looks of it is basically 1.0x on this scale, so long as we're talking FP32 TFLOPS specifically as those are formally defined.

You can see this effect the easiest by comparing perf & TFLOPS of AMD 6000 series and Nvidia 3000 series - they have released nearly at the same time, but AMD 6000 is one gen before the "near-fake-doubling", while Nvidia's 3000 series is the first gen with the "close-to-fake-doubling": with a little effort you'll find GPUs between these two that perform very similarly (and have very similar DRAM bandwidth), but Ampere's counterpart has almost 2x the FP32 TFLOPS.

Re: GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]

#45

Post by flohofwoe »

pixelpoet wrote: post #42
aurareturn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DirectX is closed source. Also, there are more games on Metal than DirectX.

> Also, there are more games on Metal than DirectX. Sorry, I was around for DirectX 1.0 back when GPUs were called "graphics accelerators", and don't see how that's possible. Do you have a source for that, or is there some implicit caveat like counting some emulation later or something? Even then...

I guess parent forgot "on macOS and iOS". Technically every game on macOS or iOS is running on Metal, because the Apple OpenGL implementations are also running on top of Metal for quite a while now ;)

Across platforms, there's no chance in hell that more games run on Metal than DirectX, not even when counting iOS shovelware.

Re: GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]

#46

Post by hutzlibu »

KingLancelot wrote: post #22
hutzlibu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about your facts, but "Is it that hard to just copy the winning formula?" yes it is, thanks to IP law. And back in the day Steve Jobs already wanted thermonuclear war on Samsung, because he felt their flagship at the time was too close to the IPhone.

Steve Jobs wanted nuclear war with Google (not Samsung) because Eric Schmidt was on Apple’s board of directors while the iPhone was being developed, so Jobs felt Schmidt was basically doing insider trading for google to develop Android.

Ah, I did not remember that one about Eric Schmidt, but I thought there was also something with Samsung.

Btw. it appears you are shadow banned. You might want to check some of your comments and then contact dang.

Re: GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]

#47

Post by KeplerBoy »

pavlov wrote: post #26
zmmmmm wrote: post #8

Does apple document exactly how many actual true cores there are inside their GPUs? It is always confusing they say "40 core GPU" but I assume these are shader cores which each inside them can execute (per the video) "many thousands" of parallel execution paths. So how does one translate to an equivalent in "CUDA cores" type terminology?

What Apple calls a GPU core seems to be roughly the same as what Nvidia calls a “stream multiprocessor”. For example a 1080 GTX GPU has 20 stream multiprocessors (SM), each containing 128 cores, each of which supports 16 threads. Meanwhile Apple describes the M1 GPU as having 8 cores, where “each core is split into 16 Execution Units, which each contain eight Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs). In total, the M1 GPU contai…

Just for clarification: The 1080 has 20 SMs with 128 FPUs each. Each FPU can perform 2 FLOPs per cycle (fused multiply adds). Combined with the frequency of 1607 MHz we land on the advertised 8.2 TFlop/s.

The fact that each SM can support 1024 threads (that's the maximum blocksize of CUDA on that card) doesn't do much for the theoretical flops. Only a fraction of those threads can be active at a time. The others are idling or waiting on their memory requests. This hides a lot of the i/o latency.

Re: GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]

#48

Post by flohofwoe »

nemothekid wrote: post #36
jeffybefffy519 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should just support directx. Devs will never support two graphics api’s. it costs too much especially to grab the marginal mac os share that has powerful enough gpu’s. Id bed in 4 years apple moves to directx.

DirectX is exclusive to the Windows platform. At this point, it's probably deeply tied into Windows. I don't see how you can make that bet.

DirectX APIs can be emulated on top of other 3D APIs, see Proton on Linux for instance.

Of course the idea of Apple switching from Metal to D3D is rubbish, but a Proton-like solution for macOS totally makes sense (maybe the "Game Porting Toolkit" will be exactly that eventually).

Re: GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]

#49

Post by monocasa »

reroute22 wrote: post #41
nemothekid wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DirectX is exclusive to the Windows platform. At this point, it's probably deeply tied into Windows. I don't see how you can make that bet.

I've no idea exactly how MS licenses uses of DX, but just for context Imagination Technologies just released a custom GPU design that implements DirectX Feature Level 11_0 (which corresponds to earlier versions of DX 12 [1]): https://www.imaginationtech.com/news/imagination-launches-br... Imagination Technologies is a near 40 year old British silicon IP company that has been doing GPUs for quite some time, just not o…

The way that works isn't that IMG ships a full directx implementation, but that they ship some kernel and user mode components that plug in to Microsoft's directx implementation such that when taken together, directx is accelerated by IMG's hardware.

Similarly, Microsoft would need to release the non GPU specific bits for macos to fit the same model.

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