>in order to give the M1 Max some real competition, one has to skip laptop chips entirely and reach for not just high end desktop chips, but for server-class workstation hardware to really beat the M1 Max
this is really interesting
this is really interesting
Sadly this is not really interesting, it's disingenuous. He benchmarked against a ten year old (03/06/2012) server CPU. My two year old intel laptop cpu (i7-9750H) also outperforms the xeon's he's comparing against by almost 40%.
The M1 is a great chip, it's sad that this got published with a "server chip" comparison at all. A real server class CPU from the modern era, at a comparable price point, is the AMD EPYC 7443P, which is 400% faster on cpu bench.
Unfortunately I don't exactly have access to piles of fancy server chips sitting around, so I had to make do with just testing against what I have access to, and that's all I had access to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
None of them beat an actual, modern, mid-market desktop CPU. And none of those compare to the likes of the threadripper.
The test results are amazing, the exposition here is simply inaccurate. Again, you don't need a "server-class highend workstation" CPU to best the M1 in raw performance. Nothing on the planet beats the m1 in tpd/performance. That's amazing enough on its own.
The remarkable thing about the m1 is the tpd/performance it gets.
Yeah, but for how long? My laptop has a respectable CPU as well but any kind of sustained load would melt it down if it didn't automatically throttle itself back to 2 GHz and below after like 5 seconds.
These M1 chips somehow manage to have great performance while also keeping temperatures and power draw low. I think this will change everything forever.
Bingo
With Apple they are just overcharging for solid state drives, which I’m cool with these days (because at least I’ll get them)
Thermodynamics would not take kindly to you having a >99.999...% efficient anything.
Coefficient of performance is a type of efficiency.
> modern heat pumps reach their CoP because they don't actually generate heat, they simply move it around
That's not even true! What a mess of a pedantic correction.
> Thermodynamics would not take kindly to you having a >99.999...% efficient anything
Well the cogen gas powerplants here can produce 50kWh of electricity from burning 100kWh of natural gas. I can use 50kWh of electricity to put 200kWh of heat into my house with a heatpump.
Seems like a good deal to me, and I think carnot would be fine with that.
I know that’s a bummer for people who want to heat their house with their computer, but Thermodynamics is always a bummer, I don’t make the Laws.
I wonder how many CPUs I need to build a cryptocurrency miner water heater... That would be so much better than just wasting energy heating up dumb elements.
Was semi-useful in winter though, all 6 weeks of it...
"If you're plugged in all the time" then try the Mac Pro version when it comes out.
This is about performance in laptop models, where it IS critical.
Except it is still direct electrical heating which is atrociously inefficient.
Electric heating converts practically all energy into heat, making it ~100% efficient. You can make statements about cost-effectiveness compared to burning things, but not all houses can.
CHP configurations are more common in colder climates with district heating, so their "waste" heat during generation often isn't wasted at all.
No, not even close. There are huge losses in electricity production and transmission.
In bigger houses direct electricity just isn't a thing, most have some sort of central heating, and lots have either some combustion or heat pump solution. The latter is gaining.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
The 5950X is only 55% faster than the M1 Max on multi-threaded integer benchmarks. The M1 Max is even 26% faster than the 5950X on multi-threaded FP benchmarks (maybe it has two AMX units?).
The M1 Max is really in 5900X/5950X territory... in a laptop.
I agree on the pricing (I also have a 5900X and a 5950X machine). But it is fantastic that we can have that kind of performance in a mobile device and still have many hours of battery life.
We should complement both AMD and Apple and be happy that we finally have serious competitors to Intel. AMD has managed to compete with and outrun Intel from the an initial position of an also-ran underdog. I think the M1 line is more impressive technically than Ryzen, given the very low TDPs. But Apple has vastly more budget and much more opportunity for vertical integration.
Both companies have done impressive work the last few years.
For all the dissing of Geekbench, I found it to actually correlate pretty closely with supposedly more elaborate benchmarks like SPEC. (The writing was on the wall for Apple Silicon performance for many years, when the iPhone/iPad Ax CPUs where catching up and surpassing laptop CPUs in Geekbench, but lots of people dismissed it because it was just Geekbench...).
To get some context of the M1 Pro/Max perf, people should take a look at https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks, sort by Multi-Core, and slot the M1 Pro/Max in at around 12500.
I would say TSMC's 5nm process is more impressive technically than TSMC's 7nm process, which are used here respectively.
I think Apple will still win on a per Watt basis even when AMD starts using the current-generation process, but the question is: by how much?
Apple bought timed-exclusive access to TSMC 5N and also now 5NP. On the same node the differences would be less.
The comparison should not even be close TBH. We're talking about a laptop chip that can run on battery for an extended period of time that performs as well and sometimes better than the high end consumer AMD desktop chip. Kudos to Apple.
I'm not suprised. Apple has the lead in the fabrication process, 5nm vs 7nm. I eagerly await a true apples to apples comparison when AMD uses the same 5nm process.
The article ends wondering about the impact on PC OEMs. I presume they are extrapolating the performance improvement curves, talking with Microsoft about Windows on ARM and working at HW contingency plans in case they have to leave a sinking x86 ship. I don't think they are resting on promises of big improvements from AMD and Intel.
A 14' Macbook Pro (M1 Max with 32 GPU cores, 32 GB RAM, 512 GB storage) is 3440€.
A PC: 5950X (750€), 32GB RAM (150€), Mainboard (130€), WD SN850 500GB (90€). Now if you build from scratch you need a PSU, CPU cooler and a case (~200€ together).
That's 1320€ without a GPU. Depending on your workload the GPU performance seems to be between a desktop 3060 and 3080. So between 700€ and 1400€.
Tl;dr: A 3440€ Macbook competes with a 2000-2700€ desktop depending on your workload. The desktop has no peripherals and no USB4/TB4.
On the other hand I really want to give the keyboard a shot before I pull the trigger, after 3 years of Thinkpad I think that will be the real pain point...
M1 Max still is the better experience and innovation.
Edit: I know this discussion is partly focused on laptops, but the overall comparison is including server chips so it's clearly not just about laptops. And 60 or 100 watts is child's play in even a tiny desktop.
The 3060 alone is a 60W TGP.
The M1 Max running Cinebench consumes 9W while the 11980HK (previous gen) consumes 45W. Perf/W Is about 3X higher for the M1 Max on CPU alone and I suspect factoring in graphics we’ve got a breakaway here.
Intel will catch up but not today.
I am pretty sure perf/W for the M1 Max chips is excellent, better than the 3060. But saying it performs "on par" with a 3060 isn't really correct.
M1 lovefest won't end just like MacBook lovefest haven't ended all this years when Apple made stuff everyone criticizes now.
Bicycle chains, not so much.
Why?
https://wccftech.com/intel-officially-launches-12th-gen-alde...
As for your power consumption figures, Apple has a supply agreement over 5nm so don't think you can compare architecture apples to apples yet.
The geekbench benchmark is more CPU focused AFAIK, and the article we are discussing is talking about just how much the astonishing M1(.+) memory access bandwidth is improving their rendering time.
The only result I could find with the memory details for the 12900HK didn’t calculate out what the (overclocked) memory bandwidth was: https://gadgettendency.com/intel-core-i9-12900k-lights-up-wi...
I am joking but just a bit. Intel has long history of dirty tricks when it comes to benchmarks - using liquid nitrogen cooling and not mentioning it, manipulating the compiler to generate slower code on competing CPUs, terms of service forbidding publication of benchmarks, fuzzy use (or not mentioning it at all) of TWP/energy usage.
What they say can only be used as an upper bound of how it actually is. The odds are is that it's much worse and with some strings attached as well.
Well be very interesting to see given Alder Lake is dumping AVX-512 which was one of their core performance strengths against AMD. Albeit at staggering cost in thermals and power.
Intel is playing this PR game where they release / announce or leak info, so people might try and wait for what Intel has to offer. It's super obvious, weak, and disingenuous.
Apple doesn't have to score the absolute highest in performance. For better or worse, they need a credible high-end chip that they can marry with their proprietary OS and computer designs to win customers via a compelling package not some benchmark result.
After the M1*, intel is facing an uphill fight to keep other laptop manufacturers on x86. They may well pull together and come out stronger, but the last 10y haven't been stellar and Apple exposed that weakness.
So, will intel win back some of the performance benchmarks? Sure, no doubt. But will Dell win over Apple customers using the latest intel chips? Let's see...
https://www.gettingtechnologyright.com/apples-mac-pro-wheels...
>The second bit of design is in the optional “Afterburner” video editing card. The discussion of it starts at around the 1hr. 26 min. point in the Keynote. It is described as a custom FPGA-based HW accelerator. It is claimed to be capable of processing 6 billion pixels per second. The silicon is not Apple’s but the design is.
Anyway, it’s academical because I don’t see them doing that. Expect maybe to power their own datacenters, but then we’d never hear about it.
But this might a bit in the future as they barely can make enough of them for the MacBooks. I even would assume that the launch of the other computers in the lineup has been put to a later time to be able to keep up at least a bit with demand.
Some are actually hosted in a cloud provider like Google, Microsoft, or AWS.
But they also have a fair amount of their own physical data centers, and I would not be surprised to find that they start filling them out with Apple Silicon hardware.
And they might roll out a lot of services on AWS using Apple Silicon hardware, because AWS has recently made available actual Apple hardware in some of their regions. I think this could potentially be a precursor, but this is just my own personal hunch and I have no information outside my own brain towards this end.
It's only a little thicker than the macbook pro. It's keyboard doesn't break, and the product line has had a 4k screen since 5 years ago. It's 120Hz refresh rate. It has a very large power brick - 240W, it gets hot and loud with a huge fan exhaust. It's thick metal and about 7-9lb - you can run over it with a car. It only gets 9 hours battery w/ regular usage, and about 3 hours of "fan on time." Keep in mind, with the large and loud fan on, it can stay at 5GHz. This is called a pro laptop - a workstation. When I travel, I bring a 65W PSU, and it runs fine on that, just w/o turbo boost.
No, don't point to the lower "geekbench" score for this laptop - that's not a CPU test. GPU performance is a large part of that test, and they run the test on the default GPU. The M1 only has a single GPU. The Precision's default is the low power integrated graphics, not the discreet GPU. If you have a test where they assign the discreet GPU, please feel free to point it out.
As I've discussed before here, I have a shell script that runs in parallel with a bunch of VMs. My coworkers air (yes, I know it's not the max) runs it in 8-10 hours overnight. I run it over lunch. It loads, does calculations on, and creates graphs from several gig of ascii performance data.
What does compare in performance to the M1 air is my Latitude w/ the I7 in it. The M1 "max" is "max for apple" but competes with mid-tier laptops from everyone else. And that's ignoring the fact that it can't run pretty much any of the useful industry tools or games w/o recompiling x86 to arm on the fly.
Yes, I think my Dell cost the company $7-8k, without support. That's why it's called a pro laptop.
You go on a diatribe about how it doesn’t compete, but your only source is some proprietary workload that you claim is much faster on your laptop.
... but the way you present it undermines your case a bit.
It seems like what you want to say is that if money is no object, weight is no object, heat is no object, battery life is no object, and portability is no object, but the comparison must absolutely be laptop to laptop, then there exists a laptop PC configuration that beats M1. If this is your point, then probably you want to compare an M1 Max to your PC, not your coworker's Macbook Air (which is a fanless laptop...)
I think this is a pretty unusual use case and there aren't too many people who are looking for this exact market segment. I definitely think it's fair to admit that Apple isn't intending to operate in this market segment, for better or worse.
You'd probably also want to drop the part about game support, since anyone who wants to play games can spend 1/4 what your workbench costs and get a shitkicking fast small form factor PC. But also, like, recompilation isn't what you should highlight -- what you should highlight is performance. If the recompilation is fast enough for users not to notice, then it doesn't matter, and if it's not, then the reason why it matters is performance, not recompilation.
Anyway, again, I don't think you're necessarily wrong or whatever here, but you're just presenting your point in a way that I think it's extremely unlikely anyone will care or be convinced.
(Also, "discrete")
The 2TB M1 macbook 16" is $4,300 and the 8TB, max-specced version is $6,100.
I know Apple has a bad rap for high prices, but that machine's prices make Apple prices look bargain basement. You could almost buy TWO M1 macs for the price of one 4TB Dell.
A more practical and better deal would be to get a standard laptop and a beefy workstation/grid you can ssh into.
[Spoiler because I don't think I'll get a response -- there are none. Even when you get into the "luggable" category of workstation that is ostensibly portable but really needs to be plugged in, there is no competition right now. The upcoming Alder Lake should significantly improve Intel's entrant in this category, and hopefully brings some real competition]
But I'm just going to tell it to you now so we don't make the same mistake we have for the past 10 years of computer hardware discussions: specs don't matter. You could tell 90% of the people buying PCs with dGPUs about your 5nm GPU and next-gen power efficiency, but they won't care. They're buying them as gaming devices, general-purpose machines and game development laptops. I'd argue the market for Mac users and PC users has not radically shifted, just the hardware you're using. If we're here to talk smack about hardware superiority, this website would have been insufferable for the past decade, because there was quite literally a complete lack of professional dGPU Macs. Now that the tables have shifted slightly, I don't see why Mac users feel the need to crawl out of the woodwork and declare the game as changed, now that Prometheus gave them the gift of a laptop that doesn't throttle to hell.
I do love this review though:
"It is a nice laptop but extremely noisy. Even when idle the fans are on all the time."
I remember memory bandwidth being the bottleneck when running large(ish) datasets for game worlds. It was so much that we put a lot of pressure on google cloud because we worried they wouldn't be able to compete with bare metal (since it's not usually measured, reported and can be non-guaranteed when you have neighbours).
That doesn't change the fact that the above claim about "laptop Xeon chips" beating the pants off the M1 Max is delusional nonsense.
I have to comment on the RTX 3080 bit: I have used many PC laptops over my career, and currently have a Lenova with a fat, barnburner Nvidia dGPU. The GPU is literally never used, because the moment it engages my battery life falls to cartoonish levels (somewhere in the range of 40 minutes), the laptop becomes a space heater, and the fans turn into jet engines. This is the sort of "spec chasing" that the industry is addicted to, providing absurd, completely unreasonable solutions just so someone can boast. One of the things about Apple, quite contrary to your claim, is that they don't do that. When they provide something, it is meaningfully usable and useful 100% of the time.
Xeon W-11955M (8 cores)
They are what would previously have been branded as "Xeon E3" series chips - on the desktop platform they used to share a socket and be drop-in upgrades with consumer desktop chips, because they're basically the same chips with "enterprise" features like ECC turned on.
An example would be Xeon E3-1285 v3 - which is basically the same thing as an i7 4770.
These products are nowhere, nowhere near the M1 Max. They are consumer laptop chips with ECC and vPro turned on.
I'm also not sure why you're sarcastic about ECC RAM. I have 128GB of RAM in my laptop. If it wasn't ECC, I'd have crashes in my VMs and errors in my calculations. When you go 32GB+ and actually use the RAM, anything that doesn't support ECC cannot be taken seriously for professional use. Like the M1 Max.
So, really no need to test them specifically. Go get an 1185G7 or something and you know what “Mobile Xeon” benches will look like. Anandtech already did those benches.
M1X is using DDR5 which does have on-die ECC.
Apple has never sold a laptop with a Xeon in it.
It's not even interesting that the M1 is "slightly" beaten by a Mac Pro's Xeon, because nobody is doing raytracing on CPUs.
A Pascal nvidia GPU will render scenes in Blender faster than a current mid-tier AMD CPU, and it's two generations old.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=blender-...
It takes an RTX 3080 card (not even the fastest consumer Ampere card) 11 seconds to render a scene that the fastest Pascal card (1080) took 94 seconds. That's nearly an order of magnitude faster.
I saw an article comparing the M1 Max to a high end AMD card, but that's also meh. AMDs's GPUs don't perform anywhere near as well as Ampere and they use far more power, so they're an easy target to compare against. AMD fakes their benchmarks by overclocking the cards depending on temperature, and the benchmarks they run to tout performance figures are just shy of where the card starts to throttle back for thermals. An AMD GPU that has been running for an hour will perform substantially worse compared to an Ampere card.
This is backwards -
Nearly all major raytracing workloads today are done primarily on CPUs: vfx, animated film and tv, etc.
There are several reasons for this, including memory limits and the lack of coherence in both path tracing algorithms and common acceleration structures. GPU-based tracing is currently a small subset of rendering tasks (primarily those with real-time requirements).
As GPU memory increases, GPUs will become more attractive in this space - likely in the next few years.
Mental Ray, heavily used in the industry for feature films: GPU accelerated since eleven years ago.
Pixar licensed a bunch of GPU rendering tech from NVIDIA in 2015, so that's six years ago.
Autodesk Arnold
After Effects
Chaos V-Ray
Weta Gazebo and Manuka
...all GPU accelerated for three years or so.
After Effects doesn't really belong on this list?
Gazebo is a preview renderer explicitly designed for GPU use, it's not designed for accurate lighting or material look.
Manuka is not GPU accelerated (it used to be when first written, but it wasn't worth it given complexity of build setup for very little benefit, it's pure CPU now and has been for > 7 years).
Until the GPU renderers can run custom shaders (rather than just the stock shaders the renderers ship with), i.e. OSL supports full GPU support, high end VFX facilities aren't really using GPU renderers that much for final lookdev and lighting.
Smaller facilities which are happy using the stock shaders are though.
You didn't say "feature films", you said "film and TV." You're goalpost-shifting / no-true-scotsman'ing.
> it hasn't been since ~2013 (when Arnold came around).
The Arnold I mentioned that is GPU accelerated? Or a different Arnold? Just checking.
> high end VFX facilities
Again with the goalpost shifting / no-true-scotsman-ing
> aren't really using GPU renderers that much for final lookdev and lighting.
They doing that rendering work on laptops?
What is the article talking about? Server farm hardware?
We're done here.
I haven't moved any goalposts.
Arnold has only been GPU accelerated for a few years - not since 2013. Same with Renderman - XPU only came out this year, and still doesn't support everything on the GPU, including custom shaders (like Arnold GPU doesn't).
Mental Ray really isn't used anywhere. It sort of died like more than a decade ago.
Honestly, I used it back in 2003 in the VFX industry, but not since.
You have to be mistaken here. No one uses Mental Ray that I have heard of in production in the last decade. Probably someone does, but not anyone serious.
Autodesk doesn't even sell licenses of Mental Ray and I believe you will find it hard to buy them from NVIDIA as well: https://www.autodesk.com/products/mental-ray-standalone/over...
Are you thinking iRay? Still made by NVIDIA and uses GPU acceleration.
The default renderer in Maya, 3DS Max is Arnold these days, others use V-Ray, RedShift, Octane, RenderMan, etc....
Surprised no one has mentioned Redshift Renderer yet; GPU-based, supports out of core for both geo and textures, and OSL.
Nevertheless, I agree that "nobody renders on CPU" is just patently false - one need only look at the Corona Renderer numbers to instantly disprove that.
Pixar still primarily renders on the CPU. Only within the last year have they added a hybrid GPU option to the Renderman renderer.
Pixar didn't license any particular special GPU rendering tech from NVIDIA in 2015; they're just using OptiX and CUDA like everyone else. Pixar released initial GPU support in RenderMan this year, but currently XPU only supports a subset of the full RenderMan functionality. Before that, the only GPU ray tracing they were using internally was on an extremely limited basis for early lookdev workflows. Final lookdev and all of lighting continues to be CPU-only. I likely know more about this particular usage than you do because... I worked on the early internal GPU ray tracing for lookdev stuff at Pixar.
Autodesk Arnold has initial GPU support, but it was only added in the past few years. Most studio usage limits Arnold GPU usage to lookdev; most desktop workflows for iterating continue to be CPU because again... not enough memory on GPUs. SPI Arnold has no GPU support at all. Yes, there are two Arnolds out there.
After Effects is not really used for high-end 3D rendering? Why is it on your list? Did you just do a Google search for "GPU renderer" and throw what you found into a list without actually understanding what each thing is?
V-Ray has had extensive GPU support for many years now, and it probably leading the pack among usage in film/vfx/etc houses. However, most film/vfx/etc places use V-Ray CPU for both iterating on the desktop and for final frames, due to GPUs not having enough memory. V-Ray GPU has seen wide adoption in the archviz world though.
Gazebo is an OpenGL viewer, used in DCC viewports. It's not even remotely close to a final frame renderer. Manuka does not have GPU support whatsoever; the Manuka development team literally published an entire ACM TOG paper on this topic which I guess you haven't checked.
I'm not entirely sure how you put your list together; everything on here is either out of date, misunderstood, or just flat out wrong, and all in ways that are immediately apparent to those of us who actually work in this industry.
Nobody is doing realtime raytracing on CPUs. The author is talking about production ray tracing rendering working with scenes that won't fit in most workstation GPUs.