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Comment by moron4hire | Hacker News Reader

I can think of a huge area in which it's lacking: GPU performance.

Did you check what they were saying about the M1 Max? It is comparable to the fastest GPU in a notebook they could find while using 100w less energy. We have to wait for the reviews next week what it actually means though.

You can't really trust Apple's claims on GPU performances though, we'll have to see how that really pans out on actual benches.

Also you can't compare GPUs _exactly_ since apple ignoring everything except their own Metal thing

If you care about GPU performance, you don't care about 100W of power.

If someone is buying a laptop they are typically going to care about what 100W savings means in a laptop: less heat and noise, longer battery life or less weight, longer component life, ...

Regardless of whether GPU speed is a top priority or not.

Apple were making direct comparisons to the GE76 Raider 11UH-053 which has a RTX 3080 in it, indicating that it had the same performance for 100W less power consumption. That seems pretty competitive to me!

In what way is it competitive? Like, are there any big titles that I can fire up and have it perform like a desktop gaming PC?

Or is it merely competitive in specs or in applications like Illustrator?

They do not market these as gaming devices. The GPU is intended for rendering content for pro use cases. It is competitive if this is your use case.

Where are you seeing that? The only comparisons I've seen were labeled as being against Intel and AMD integrated graphics.

It’s in the presentation.

Everything in the OP page that talks about GPU perf has a footnote on it that is comparing speeds to Intel Irix or Radeon Pro 5600 (which is about the same).

Yes it’s in the presentation. The video. Skip to the graphs. They have tiny footnotes giving the models they’re comparing to, the highest one is a mobile 3080.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=22m04s&v=exM1uajp--A&feature=y...

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/10/introducing-m1-pro-an...

Really? The M1 is a bit slower than a 1650, so 4x that performance gets you solidly into 3000 series range. There might be a handful of PC laptops that can outpace the M1 Max, but none in remotely comparable a package.

There is no way a SoC is running in the same range as an NVideo 3000 series GPU.

The GPU performance of my M1 Mac Mini is roughly comparable to that of my Pixel 5 and Quest 2--both of which are running the Qualcomm Adreno 650 GPU.

If (Big if) the provided graphs on apple's M1 Pro & M1 Max article are to be believed you're getting 90% the performance of a RTX 3080 Mobile (A 3070 with a clockspeed cut) but at a quarter of the power draw. This seems to be quite a development.

For all the other claims on GPU performance, they call out that they are comparing to the integrated graphics, and they name the GPU specifically. With this one claim, they name a computer, but not the GPU. "Compared to a computer that has a laptop 3080 in it" is not the same thing as "compared to a 3080."

And they don't define "performance". Is it fill rate? Is it TFLOPs? Is it memory bandwidth? The M1 Max has 64 GPU cores. That sounds like a lot! It's not! The NVidia Laptop 3080 has 6,144 cores. That's NINETY SIX TIMES as many cores. I'm sorry, but supposedly achieving 90% of the "performance" of a GPU that has 2 orders of magnitude more cores is just not in the realm of believable. They are being intentionally evasive here.

They very much put some numbers on performance in the keynote, you can go back and watch it.

The Max:

10.4 tflops

327 gtexels/sec

164 gpixels/sec

What I see on desktop 3080 is:

465 Gtexels/s

164.2 Gpixels/s

if those numbers from Apple are real -- that's bonkers

Wouldn't the 3080's core count you mentioned be more comparable to the 'Execution Unit' quoted on Apple's slides: 4096 EUs on the 32-core variant?

https://images.anandtech.com/doci/17016/2021-10-18%2019_21_1...

> performance of my M1 Mac Mini is roughly comparable to ... the Qualcomm Adreno 650 GPU

I find it hard to believe and benchmarks [0][1] don't seem to support that.

[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Qualcomm-Adreno-650-GPU-Benchm...

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M1-GPU-GPU-Benchmarks-an...

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