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Apple M1 Ultra

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Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#771

Post by cma »

zamalek wrote: post #733
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They are still a year+ ahead of 3090 on process node. Max was about equivalent to a 2080, so 2X max does line up with a 3090. A big difference is no ray tracing hardware, which takes up a lot of die space. Same process node and no ray tracing hardware and nvidia would come in at far less die space (3090 is 628.4 mm ^2, M1 ultra is 850mm^2).

If Nvidia were on the same node and increased die space to match M1 (ignoring the CPU portion of the die size), they would then be able to run at a lower clock with more compute units and probably match the TDP discrepancy.

An iGPU isn't necessarily slower if the system ram is fast, and M1 was one of the first consumer CPUs to move to DDR5. 3090 has 936.2 GB/s with GDDR6X, M1 Ultra with DDR5 memory controllers on both dies gets 800GB/s.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#772

Post by Mikeb85 »

pantalaimon wrote: post #313
Mikeb85 wrote: post #287

Ugh really wish that a non-Apple vendor could make an ARM chip of this calibre. Jealous but cat bring myself to use a proprietary OS and get locked into Apple.

There is always Asahi Linux

Last I heard not all of the chipset's features are working in Linux yet...

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#773

Post by gameswithgo »

polyrand wrote: post #258

I think the GPU claims are interesting. According to the graph's footer, the M1 Ultra was compared to an RTX 3090. If the performance/wattage claims are correct, I'm wondering if the Mac Studio could become an "affordable" personal machine learning workstation (which also won't make the electricity bill skyrocket). If Pytorch becomes stable and easy to use on Apple Silicon [0][1], it could be an appealing choice. [0]…

GPU claims at carefully chosen tasks that don't need GDDR6 to get top performance. It wouldn't game like a 3090 for instance, but then not many people are gaming on macs anyway.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#774

Post by sroussey »

atq2119 wrote: post #566
paulmd wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in that one, you've got a 20-thread Intel part (6+8C/20T) at probably 3.5 GHz going against a 10-thread Apple part (8+2C/10T), at probably 3 GHz, and the Apple part still comes out on top by ~5% in Cinebench R23 MT. And that's with Intel having 50% more high-performance threads available. Work out the IPC there - the Intel has a 2x thread count advantage, a 17% clock advantage, and Apple comes out 5% ahead. So the…

I don't think there's anything specifically different about the reorder buffer between x86 and ARM. The reorder buffer size is just a logical consequence of the frontend width. And yes, scaling an Aarch64 frontend is dead simple compared to x86 due to the fixed instruction width. The disadvantage of x86 is serious, but I don't know if we can count it out quite yet. This is the first time Intel and AMD got any serious…

x86 and ARM have different memory access assumptions which affects the reorder buffer in material ways. Apple added something to their chips to use the x86 memory model when flagged for Rosseta2.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#775

Post by gameswithgo »

kllrnohj wrote: post #386
bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of Apple's historic MO has been to not invest in areas they don't see themselves having a competitive advantage in. Now that they can make gaming happen with a very low wattage budget they may well try to enter that space in earnest.

The gaming performance of the existing M1 GPUs is, well, crap (like far behind the other laptop competition, to say nothing of desktop GPUs). The Ultra probably isn't changing that, since it's very unlikely to be a hardware problem and instead a software ecosystem & incentives problem.

It is a video memory problem. Unified memory is nice but you need GDDR6 to feed a powerful GPU. But you don't want GDDR6 for the cpu.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#776

Post by ralfd »

altairprime wrote: post #391
bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of Apple's historic MO has been to not invest in areas they don't see themselves having a competitive advantage in. Now that they can make gaming happen with a very low wattage budget they may well try to enter that space in earnest.

The difference between an Apple TV and a Mac Mini is essentially how powerful of Apple silicon it has, whether it runs tvOS or macOS, and whether it has HDMI out or not. The Studio is a more compact form factor than any modern 4K gaming console. If they chose to ship something in that form factor with tvOS, HDMI, and an M1 Max/Ultra, it would be a very competitive console on the market — if game developers could be p…

> I look forward to Apple deciding to play ball with gaming someday.

I wish.

But playing ball is more than hardware. It is spending billions to buy Activision or Bungie. And I can't honestly imagine Apple having the cultural DNA or leader aspiration to make a game like The Last of Us where the player is brutally beating zombies to bloody clumps.

In video games the business side demands having exclusives, or timed exclusives, to sponsor twitch streamers playing your game and cutting special deals with studios. This is very different to the App store where Apple emphasizes their role as a neutral arbiter and a dev having the same deal as any other dev. Can you imagine the complains here on hn if Epic Games would get a a special deal just because they are a bigger fish and Fortnite is popular?

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#777

Post by manquer »

pjmlp wrote: post #635
manquer wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desktop will care about noise of the fans. Data centers are also pretty conscious of power consumption, more power means more cooling infra required and higher energy bill, while it is not the top priority it certainly is a significant factor in decision making.

Buying M1 chips from Apple isn't happening.

Not chips, servers. Apple has sold those before.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#778

Post by ralfd »

altairprime wrote: post #624
derac wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems unlikely that the general population would spend 2-4k on a console.

Well, only the macOS users would be spending a thousand dollars or more for their console-capable Macs, which are general purpose computers with absurd amounts of memory. TV users could spend a lot less for an Apple TV 4K with M1 inside, assuming Apple released it with less of this or that.

The Apple TV (A12 chip) is currently $199. The new iPad Air with the M1 chip costs $599.

They also don't need the display, camera, microphone. And could sell it at a loss and make the margins with TV+ and game sales.

But they would need their own bundled controller/accessories and get serious about AAA gaming.

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#779

Post by MaysonL »

kasperni wrote: post #72
cube2222 wrote: 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. Unlikely, M1 Ultra is the last chip in the M1 family according to Apple [1]. "M1 Ultra completes the M1 family as the world’s most powerful and capable chip for a personal computer.”" [1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/03/apple-unveils-m1-ultr...

M2 family Mac Pro upcoming…

Re: Apple M1 Ultra

#780

Post by ProAm »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #341
whoisburbansky wrote: post #301

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.

I'm not being snarky but I dont believe Mac people would know how to build a PC given their history of non-modifiable hardware and no way to repair them.
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