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Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

Some of these images look incredibly real. Even knowing those are renders my brain refuses to believe these are not actual photographs.

Also, these Xeons are really put to shame here.

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They are from 2012. They are not "are getting kind of old", but are actually discontinued.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/64583/i...

Not the Intel Xeon W-3245 which is from 2019.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/193753/...

Still, the going price for a W-3245 is more than $2,000. That's just the CPU, no memory, motherboard or anything else. A 16" MacBook with 16GB of RAM is $2,499.

The MacBook comes with a free display, input devices and a UPS :)

Apple managed to book entire TSMC 5nm production or close to all last year - that's the main reason for this performance. and by managed - its passed on consumer ofc.

ill just wait for amd 5nm offering that will also be in ram/cpu upgreadeable form factors and Linux compatible out of the box for half the price.

Sure, it's a reason for the performance. But it's still not a reason for the performance to price comparison that I was making.

Surely a CPU that is on an older, more tested node (albeit an Intel node, take that as you will) should have amortized the costs of producing silicon products on that node.

The cost of an Apple CPU is cheaper than a worse-performing older CPU. The economics here are surely poor? You can't tell me that Apple of all companies are taking a hit on their new CPUs? I mean, they could be for all I know, but that would be very un-Apple like.

Yes, but the author is pretty intellectually dishonest when he says that his new MBP beat out a "somewhat old" xeon.

That's a ten year old CPU.

Hi! Author here. I don't call the E5-2680s "somewhat old", I call them ancient, because they are... well.. ancient. I included them in the comparison because up until recently, I was still using an E5-2680 workstation. So really the point was that for ME personally, the M1 Max is a huge improvement over what I had previously. I don't really keep piles of the latest Xeons sitting around my house, so I had to make do with what I had. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

For what it's worth, I also threw in comparisons with the 2019 Mac Pro's Xeon W-3245 and the Threadripper 3990X, both of which might be described as "somewhat new".

That's the thing most people don't get about Intel: nothing has really changed perf-wise since Haswell, which is older than that.

If your old Haswell / Skylake machines still work (and if you don't need Windows 11 which doesn't support them), there's zero technical reason to upgrade to something newer, at least on the desktop.

There's been some progress in terms of power efficiency on laptops, but even there 5+ year old chips are pretty much as good as it gets if you want to stick to Intel. Maybe 10-15% percent slower than the very latest stuff, you won't even notice it. That's why Apple is currently obliterating Intel and AMD - the latter milked their cash cow until it fell over.

And Apple knew that they didn't even need to work particularly hard on core perf - memory bandwidth improvements alone would have delivered the goods. That's another thing people don't get - the CPUs spend quite a bit of their time waiting for bytes to come in or go out. The latencies involved in that are upwards of 200 cycles, and any significant improvement in both the latency and the bandwidth has insane, immediately noticeable benefits for perf, particularly in "modern" languages with poor cache locality. Why Intel / AMD duopoly did so little to address this deficiency is inexplicable, but here we are.

> That's the thing most people don't get about Intel: nothing has really changed perf-wise since Haswell, which is older than that.

Single core performance on current i9 processors benchmarks at twice the performance of the Haswell chips. Multicore performance is ~4x.

They definitely slept for a while and AMD started taking their lunch money with Ryzen and EPYC but "nothing has really changed since Haswell" is blatantly wrong.

> If your old Haswell / Skylake machines still work (and if you don't need Windows 11 which doesn't support them), there's zero technical reason to upgrade to something newer, at least on the desktop.

Wrong again, mostly because quicksync in that old a processor won't handle current popular streaming video codecs so you end up with non-accelerated video decoding unless you've got a discrete GPU.

> memory bandwidth improvements alone would have delivered the goods.

No advantage from people upgrading from a Haswell's DDR3-1600 (13GB/sec) to Comet Lake's DDR4-2933 (94GB/sec), eh?

Either it's not worth upgrading from Haswell or it is.

I'm sure that's what Intel would like you to believe. But if you benchmark this stuff (which I have) you will see that real world single core perf hasn't moved much in a decade, and memory bandwidth is never "94GB/sec" or whatever, especially not in a laptop.

When I viewed Figure 5 [link] at full resolution, the pine tree bark felt to me like a poorly-done bump-mapping tech demo. I think it lacks sharp contrast between the raised and recessed regions (instead having a gradient), and I think the outline/silhouette of the branches are perfectly smooth and unaffected by the bark, and too uniform and slender to look like real trees.

[link]: https://blog.yiningkarlli.com/content/images/2021/Oct/takua-...

Yeah, some images look very fake, which is why I wrote that only some looked incredibly real.

The one you linked looks great to me. Some parts are more convincing than others, but in general I almost feel as if I could touch those trees. Although I admit I don't have a trained eye to see the rendering tricks used.

> these Xeons are really put to shame here.

It doesn't really matter. Nobody's doing rendering on CPUs.

I get that he's sticking to comparing CPU to CPU rendering to compare apples to apples, but that's like saying "My new buggy whip is amazing!" in a news article written in 1950.

Everyone is doing GPU based rendering. Pascal based GPUs are still (I believe) several times faster than even current mid-tier AMD desktop processors. Pascal is two generations behind current GPUs, which are several times faster than it is.

What will actually be relevant and interesting is how the M1X's full capabilities can be leveraged for rendering, and how that will compare against Ampere GPUs.

Not necessarily true. I know several studios in Los Angeles that do 3D final renders on CPU, such as Disney Animation. GPU rendering works for realtime, but the memory constraints on GPU limit its use in the high end.

Everyone in the field is looking at GPU and some significant advances have been made, but it's definitely not true that "nobody" is doing rendering on CPUs.

Do those studios do final renders on someone's Macbook Pro?

Is the article about performance in a final render pipeline?

Is this chip sold by apple in a cluster/datacenter-friendly package?

That's not what anyone was disputing though, is it?

Talk about moving the goalposts.

CPU ray tracing is still widely used in the movie business. Might change eventually but most CGI scenes are ray traced on CPUs.

Renderman (Pixar/Disney's renderer) has only recently (~2017 iirc) started working with GPUs to do scene renders.

It was only within the last year that a hybrid CPU/GPU renderer was added to Pixar‘s commercial Renderman.

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