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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]

#51

Post by reroute22 »

monocasa wrote: post #49
reroute22 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow, that sounds like a very impressive level of separation of concerns. May I kindly ask for some links for further reading? If you have any handy.

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

#52

Post by baz00 »

alphanullmeric wrote: post #7

It’s amazing how bad the competition is. The A17 pro has 2 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. The Google G3 has 9 cores of 3 different types, the fastest being slower than Apple’s performance cores, the most efficient being less efficient than apple’s efficiency cores. And it’s a phone so you don’t take advantage of the extra parallelism. You just get the worst of both worlds. no wonder these android phones ha…

It's not that simple though though. I have never got through an entire day with an iPhone (XR, 12, 13 Pro). I'm just hitting 2 days easily with my Pixel 7a with the same crap on it. My daughter just took an iPhone 15 back because it won't get through the day.

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

#53

Post by pavlov »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #47
pavlov wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For sure. Just counting threads doesn't give anything like a complete picture of performance.

It's still somewhat interesting because threads are a low-level programming primitive. If you can come up with work for 40k simultaneous threads, you can use the GPU effectively. For some tasks this parallelization is obvious (a HD video frame has 2 million pixels and shading them independently is trivial), and of course often it's anything but.

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

#54

Post by aurareturn »

flohofwoe wrote: post #45
pixelpoet wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Metal owns a significantly bigger market for gaming revenue than DirectX.

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

#55

Post by pixelpoet »

aurareturn wrote: post #54
flohofwoe wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Metal owns a significantly bigger market for gaming revenue than DirectX.

Probably, but that's a completely different claim from your first, isn't it?

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

#56

Post by YetAnotherNick »

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

While FP32 non tensor flops at least looks comparable, FP16/BF16 with tensor core(nowadays a default for any neural network including LLM) at 330 TFlops/s blows away M2.

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

#57

Post by coldtea »

creshal wrote: post #38
alphanullmeric wrote: post #7

It’s amazing how bad the competition is. The A17 pro has 2 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. The Google G3 has 9 cores of 3 different types, the fastest being slower than Apple’s performance cores, the most efficient being less efficient than apple’s efficiency cores. And it’s a phone so you don’t take advantage of the extra parallelism. You just get the worst of both worlds. no wonder these android phones ha…

A big part of Apple's "winning formula" is taking their giant piles of money and negotiating exclusive contracts for whatever is scheduled to be the most advanced semiconductor node next year. Anyone else literally cannot compete, they don't have billions in pocket change they don't know how to spend otherwise, so they'll have to wait until the exclusivity agreement expires.

Well, they got into that position starting from a near bankrupt company, which couldn't negotiate anything exclusive, and which was for a long time at the mercy of Motorola and the Intel.

So it's something they took advantage of after they grew (well, which company at their scale wouldn't ask for the best wholesale deals?), but not what made them big in the first place.

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

#58

Post by saagarjha »

gary_0 wrote: post #2

I skimmed the video but a lot of it sounded more like advertising than technical information to me. On the other hand, I'm looking forward to watching the Asahi folks crack this stuff open.

I think it's important to understand that this video is aimed at a broad audience of developers. Obviously some of them are GPU experts but a lot of people are quite literally app developers who are going to watch this video as an introduction to "hmm everyone keeps telling about this GPU thing, what can I do with it?" So the video has to provide them with some context they can use to explore more.

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

#60

Post by gumby »

baz00 wrote: post #52
alphanullmeric wrote: post #7

It’s amazing how bad the competition is. The A17 pro has 2 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. The Google G3 has 9 cores of 3 different types, the fastest being slower than Apple’s performance cores, the most efficient being less efficient than apple’s efficiency cores. And it’s a phone so you don’t take advantage of the extra parallelism. You just get the worst of both worlds. no wonder these android phones ha…

It's not that simple though though. I have never got through an entire day with an iPhone (XR, 12, 13 Pro). I'm just hitting 2 days easily with my Pixel 7a with the same crap on it. My daughter just took an iPhone 15 back because it won't get through the day.

Hmm, interesting. I have the opposite with my 12. We must have quite different use patterns.
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