Hacker News Reader

Comment by forgotmyoldacc | Hacker News Reader

My workstation build with Epyc is ~$5,000 and has more cores (24 core), more memory (256 GB), faster GPU (3090), a 2TB pcie 4 SSD and I suspect will perform better on standard benchmarks. Definitely not as compact as the Studio though but lot more extendable.

View on HN

> I suspect will perform better on standard benchmarks.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. These M1 chips have some crazy benchmark performance.

What they don't have, is a standard x86 ISA, which means that a lot of applications run emulated (and still tend to beat many Intel specs, anyway). I keep reading people complaining that "It's faster, but not that much faster. What's the big deal?", when they are talking about an i86 application, running on Rosetta2.

Geekbench scores came out, The Epyc 7443p scored 27461, M1 Ultra scored 24055 on multi-core. Geekbench uses ARM-native for Mac M1 iirc.

Yeah, the Threadripper beats the M1Ultra, by just a bit, and has the advantage of being an i86 ISA.

So given the Epyc has 24 cores versus 16 cores for the M1 Ultra, the Epyc has roughly 75% of the single core performance of an M1 Ultra and 115% the multi-core performance.

I feel that the M chips are awesome at saving power while providing performance which makes them perfect for laptops and portables. I’m not seeing their value proposition for desktops though. I don’t care about something that saves space. The only time I care about that is for portables.

Remember when people were talking about "ARM rack servers"? The idea was to have dozens of daughterboards, jammed into a 2U chassis, providing massive parallelism. The low power draw would make this possible.

Wouldn't surprise me, if Apple is thinking about doing something like this, maybe with a new API/SDK, focused on this. They would probably sell it as an ML machine.

The issue for that is that it’s not cheap, commodity hardware. It’s a risk to build a server farm with Apple given their historical penchant to arbitrarily cancel entire product lines that were doing ok. Apple is best as a workstation or personal machine.

That‘s a good point.

Tell me about it.

We used to have a couple of their XServe rack servers, as well as that fat RAID rack.

Iirc, we had to get $pecial disks for that damn thing.

imo this is just an improved version of garbage can Mac Pro

They refuse to build what a sizable number of people want, yet we're stuck with Apple because the alternatives are even worse. That's what pg got wrong with one of his predictions. He didn't realize that no one can do better than Apple's worst effort

Reply on news.ycombinator.com