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Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

The 5900X can do 24 threads, so why artificially limit it to 16 threads? Unless that's because the M1 Ultra has 16 performance cores. Why include the 3 year old 3700X? Why not include the 32 thread 5950X which can be had in a complete system for 1/3 the price of the Mac Studio M1 Ultra?

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This isn’t a scientific study, it’s one guy who reviews the pro Macs he gets to work on. Also he’s been using the same benchmark for years and the figures for previous Mac Pros are historical, so past tests weren’t conducted with any knowledge of the M1 architecture.

They clearly just picked 16 threads because it is enough to demonstrate the point.

M1 only has 4 performance cores and they still ran it with 16 threads. So it's not like they are trying to skew the benchmark by not showing the potential of the 5900x.

Also the 5950x is 2 years old and still is an active product.

The performance generally regresses when using more threads on the Ryzen CPUs.

Also, maybe I can only benchmark on the hardware that I actually have?

The 5900X is a fine reference as a common chip. The peak performance should be at 12 threads, it has 12 cores, and that's what the table appears to show.

It would make more sense to compare systems with similar price points.

In this case that would mean ThreadRipper systems and not Ryzen.

Sure, if I had a ThreadRipper, I’d be happy to add the results. I don’t have an M1 Ultra either, but someone was kind enough to do the benchmark for me.

For the guy who, you know, actually did the comparison here... Of _course_ it makes most sense to compare the new system he has on his desk with the previous systems he's already done relevant performance tests as comparison points.

If you want a comparison between a Threadripper system and an M1 Ultra system, I'd be fascinated to read your blog post with your results.

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