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Apple M1 Ultra

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731–740 of 855 posts

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The M1 Ultra claims already look suspicious since the GPU graph tops out at ~120W & the CPU graph tops out at ~60W yet the M1 Studio is rated for 370W continuous power draw. And that is expected, a lot has to be reserved for USB devices.

SSD and those two large fans also use a fair amount of power too.

Those fans are unlikely to break 5w combined.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPU performance matters (Game performance, ML training perf) No one plays games on a Mac. And it has nothing to do with GPU performance but rather the fact that the audience simply isn't interested in gaming on it and so there is no economic incentive to target them. So the GPU performance that matters to Mac users and is relevant to Apple is not games but rather content creation, production etc.

M1's blender rendering performance also wasn't very good, though. Assuming the scene was small enough to fit in the smaller VRAM of competitive consumer GPUs anyway. Video content creation specifically is where it mostly achieves what the graphs indicate, and that's mostly a "well yeah, video decoder ASICs are really efficient. I'll take things we already knew for $100, Alex"

Unless you specifically configure Blender for GPU rendering, it renders on the CPU(s).

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... .

> Cursory look gives you a ~$3500 price tag for a gaming PC with a 3090 That 3500 is for a DIY build. So, sure, you can always save on labor and hassle, but prebuilt 3090 rigs commonly cost over 4k. And if you don't want to buy from Amazon because of their notorious history of mixing components from different suppliers and reselling used returns, oof, good luck even getting one.

The 3090 claims are overstated. There are multiple competitors in that space, and all of them need the TDP.

Performance per watt? I could see that being disrupted, but an iGPU in 2022 will be orders of magnitude less powerful than a dGPU, if wattage is ignored.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of powering my 3090 for a year is now more than the cost (RRP) of a 3090.

Where do you live that power is anywhere close to that expensive? And are you overclocking your 3090? Even assuming literal 24hr/day usage at a higher, "factory overclocked" 450w sustained, at a fairly high $0.30/kWh that's $1200/yr. Less than half the retail price of a 3090. And you can easily drop the power limit slider on a 3090 to take it down to 300-350w, likely without significantly impacting your workload perf…

Wholesale electricity price in some EU states is €550/MWh today. Most EU states are above €250/MWh.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GPU claims on the M1 Pro & Max were, let's say, cherry picked to put it nicely. The M1 Ultra claims already look suspicious since the GPU graph tops out at ~120W & the CPU graph tops out at ~60W yet the M1 Studio is rated for 370W continuous power draw. Since you mention ML specifically, looking at some benchmarks out there (like https://tlkh.dev/benchmarking-the-apple-m1-max#heading-gpu & https://wandb.ai/tcapel…

Gigabyte and strix 3090 are routinely in stock at Newegg. Msrp. The shortage is over

3090 is still 2400 EUR in Germany, pretty sure that's not MSRP

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of powering my 3090 for a year is now more than the cost (RRP) of a 3090.

Where do you live that power is anywhere close to that expensive? And are you overclocking your 3090? Even assuming literal 24hr/day usage at a higher, "factory overclocked" 450w sustained, at a fairly high $0.30/kWh that's $1200/yr. Less than half the retail price of a 3090. And you can easily drop the power limit slider on a 3090 to take it down to 300-350w, likely without significantly impacting your workload perf…

prices in Europe right now are considerably higher than $0.30/kWh

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#738
post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be fair that $2000 also gets you +32GB RAM, +512GB storage, and +10 CPU cores. Even though it's not an apples to apples comparison, keep in mind that a 1x32GB DIMM sells for less than 150$, and you can buy 1TB SSDs for less than 100$.

M1 Ultra is 64Gb extra, not 32. > keep in mind that a 1x32GB DIMM sells for less than 150$ Keep in mind that M1 Pro/Max/Ultra is LPDDR5 6400 ( https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... ) connected by a 512 bit memory controller. Whereas is a kit of 2x 32 GB LPDDR5 4800 (I could not easily locate a quote for 1x 64Gb LPDDR5 4800 DIMM, leave alone 6400) retails for USD 548 ( https://www.newegg.com/…

I remember a slide mentioning I think “up to 7.4gb/sec SSD read/write speed” or similar, which drastically reduces the pool of comparison SSDs. Intel Optane meets those specs, as do a few other brands I hadn’t heard of previously. In the later case, a 2TB version seemed to be $350-400. Take this for what it’s worth, but SSD is going to be more than $100 extra cost imho.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reliably run TensorFlow What reliability issues are you having with TensorFlow on M1 Macs?

We've followed five different instructional and documentation pages to make it happen and none seem to consistently install. Throw in a corporate system where you need IT for root access to make changes and it is game over. So i've got an M1-max fully loaded and cant get TF running on it. Now i've got a team of data scientists in a fully MBP shop and we're holding off upgrades to M1 until this all gets resolved. On m…

You can get off this GPU circus and simply go with purpose-built AI solutions.

You can buy single tensor accelerators from Google: https://www.coral.ai/products/

You can buy a bunch of those integrated into a single PCI-E card. https://iot.asus.com/products/AI-accelerator/AI-Accelerator-...

Cheap too. Some of these work with Mac. More of them work for PC, because the hardware interface is outside of Apple's thin vertical slice/garden.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, you can get a 3090?

3090 is literally the easiest card to get at RRP, at least here in UK. Set up discord alerts, the FE cards stay in stock for hours, the last one in February was in stock for the entire day so anyone who wanted to buy one at RRP(£1399) could do so without any issue at all.

its still 2400 EUR in Germany for example.
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