Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs
wccftech.com
wccftech.com
We cannot speak of performance without the per-watt quotient. Battery life is a real concern, and current Wintel laptops just don't compete.
Energy concerns are real (as depicted in the George Miller-directed films mentioned above), and it may be the case that the premium paid for Apple Silicon-based devices is actually a bargain.
I have a m2 Max, the battery life is awe inspiring. M2 ultra doesn’t best the competition for its use case.
As for the desktop use case... sure, you aren't going to care about the $200 of saved power draw, but not having a very loud and hot machine at your desk has to count for something, right?
[0] GPUs won't work, their memory access is locked out in hardware and Apple removed the MPX connectors that powered the Intel GPU modules.
And as far as heating the room, okay that's an extra $50 of air conditioning to remove the $200 of heat.
They’re telegraphing the use case for future SOCs.
Can someone explain what that means?
And those really weird PCI cards are what underpins many industries for which the Mac Pro is designed for e.g. video and audio production.
Provided Apple signs 'em :p
What matters more than people may realize is battery runtime. The Apple hardware just spanks x86 hardware, unless that hardware is fitted with a big battery, and or a secondary one.
I typically run Lenovo hardware, and on my faster machine, I got a very large battery and could get 6 solid hours. And that is at a nice 3Ghz speed too.
My current machine (i5) is far slower than the M1 and that hot running Lenovo. (i7) It has two batteries that can yield 5 to 7 hours.
Those machines are heavier, slower, bigger, and just feel crappy compared to the M1 Air I have been using.
And that thing is crazy good. Battery life is longer, sometimes by a considerable amount. It is great hardware, fast, easy to use, light, you name it.
I don't get it.
The M2 is 15W. There are mobile Ryzen APUs with the same TDP. They're about the same speed; maybe the M2 is a little faster for single thread and the PC is a little faster for multi-thread, it's not that different. You can get a PC laptop which is under 3 lbs and has 14+ hours of battery life.
You can also get a PC laptop which is heavier and has a shorter battery life because they have no qualms about selling you what amounts to a desktop CPU which is then something like 30% faster for multi-thread. But nobody forces you to buy that one.
I want to put Linux on it. So far I have been looking at the legion 5 pro, because a friend got one recently, and seems amazing, though haven't yet got my hands on it long enough to try it with an USB stick with a recent Ubuntu (with a recent kernel) to test the power management feature support.
Before that I had a Dell XPS, which lasted about 7 hours IIRC, which was pretty good for the time.
My Acer could pull about 15 hours when new, but it is a fairly underwhelming Celeron CPU so that probably helps.
Maybe other systems are worse; I don't know, but overall things always seem to work well for me.
I guess I don't understand why you would want the ultra if you still prioritize TDP over performance.
I own a Mac Studio and PC 10980xe with 4090 and the latter has to live in a separate room because of the noise.
Apple should assume that desktop machines have an unlimited power source, and that users want a maximum speed. That the users time is more expensive than the electricity being fed into the computer.
Laptops, sure, sacrifice power to extend the battery. Apple does an excellent job here.
The only reason you would buy one of these desktop machines is because you want to be in the Apple ecosystem.
But here is what is visible:
The M2 core is probably in the same ballpark as Zen 4 core, likely a tiny bit below. That may become very tiny if Zen 4 core runs at lower frequency to equalize the power. This doesn't account for the AVX512 of Zen4.
24 M2 cores manage to beat 16 Zen 4 cores also at lower power, but these are different products. Zen 4 does scale to far more cores, 96 in an EPYC chip. AMD and Intel have far more investments in interconnects and multi-die chips to do these things.
The M2 GPU is in the same league as a 300$ mid-range nVidia card. It is not competitive at all - Apple produces the largest chip it can manufacture to go against a high margin smaller chip that nVidia orders.
Again all of this doesn't mean each product is not good on its own.
It seems strange to me for Apple to advertise something they haven't exactly mastered yet on stage.
Maybe they have some kind of optimization up their sleeves that will roll out later? I can imagine Apple coming out with their own answer to DLSS and FSX2 based on their machine learning hardware, for example. On the other hand, I would've expected them to demonstrate that in the first place when they shoed off their game port toolkit.
I don’t mind that it has nothing to show for all the talk once you throw out the need to basically sip power (like a notebook computer).
Is this something inherent with ARM though? Why can’t there be ARM based desktop and server computers that need a kilowatt of power at peak? Like how much more performance can you get for each additional watt of power? (I don’t know. I’m genuinely asking.)
When running native code.
Look at the performance of Microsoft's ARM Surface Pro when running emulated code.
> My frustration with this computer wasn’t a workload thing. It didn’t start out fast and gradually slow down as I opened more things and started more processes. It was peppered with glitches and freezes from start to finish.
I’d have only Slack open, and switching between channels would still take almost three seconds (yes, I timed it on my phone). Spotify, also with nothing in the background, would take 11 seconds to open, then be frozen for another four seconds before I could finally press play. When I typed in Chrome, I often saw significant lag, which led to all kinds of typos (because my words weren’t coming out until well after I’d written them). I’d try to watch YouTube videos, and the video would freeze while the audio continued. I’d use the Surface Pen to annotate a PDF, and my strokes would either be frustratingly late or not show up at all. I’d try to open Lightroom, and it would freeze multiple times and then crash.
It quickly became clear that I should try to stick to apps that were running natively on Arm.
https://www.theverge.com/23421326/microsoft-surface-pro-9-ar...
I am not knowledgeable enough to know how much work it is but I have played games that didn’t initially support it but eventually released an updated that added support.
There are also multiple “levels” for DLSS in games that support it, eg. Quality, performance, etc
Here's a video comparing DLSS and MetalFX upscaling.
The issue is that people compare games running under emulated x86 and emulated graphics APIs, when making claims about what the SOC is capable of.
There's nothing wrong with knowing how well the SOC performs when emulating games, but if you claim to be talking about what the SOC can do, then include the performance of native games as well.
Bigger overhead for AAA games is likely due to emulation of DirectX or Vulkan on Metal, but that's just Apple's stubborn choice to have it that way.
In the end, none of that matters. I won't be playing Cyberpunk at 14fps, without RTX, and comforting myself that the SoC could do maybe 28fps without emulation. Lower-tier Nvidia cards perform better, even when paired with slower CPUs.
This is a weird take. None of he major gaming platforms use the same graphics API.
Microsoft has DirectX on Windows and XBox, Apple has Metal on iOS and Macs, Sony has Gnmx on Playstation.
It's like saying Android gaming is terrible because they didn't use DirectX.
WINE on Linux is able to match the performance of games on Windows, so the DirectX translation layer shouldn't be a problem either.
So it's not unreasonable to assume that the M2 just doesn't have a GPU capable of running these games. And it's really not that surprising that an integrated GPU doesn't match the performance of a dedicated GPU.
I mean… No?
CPU bottleneck is super common, especially on slightly older engine bases like source or unreal.
I think you are assuming big AAA games at 4k, which puts an especially big strain on the GPU.
Maybe I’ve been developing games too long, but we are constantly fighting CPU bottlenecks.
Without including comparison data on native games? It's entirely unreasonable.
For instance, The native version of the DirectX 12 game "The Medium" was shown running side by side with the emulated version at WWDC, and the native version had double the frame rate.
The 7950x is running at 5.7Ghz when only a single thread is saturated. The M2 Ultra caps its cores at 3.5Ghz. A 62% higher clock speed, at a monster power profile, to barely beat it isn't evidence of a core advantage.
>24 M2 cores manage to beat 16 Zen 4 cores also at lower power
The M2 ultra has 16 real cores, with 8 additional efficiency cores that are very low performance. And of course the M2 Ultra could pretty handily trounce the 7950x because the latter has to dramatically scale back the clock speed, as the power profile of all 16 cores at 5.7Ghz would melt the chip. And of course the 7950x has hyper-threading and hardware for mini-versions of 16 more cores, so in a way it has more cores than the Apple chip.
>This doesn't account for the AVX512 of Zen4.
AVX512 is used by a tiny, minuscule fraction of computers ever in their history of existence. It is the most absolute non-factor going.
I mean...in an ideal world Apple would get the GPU off the core. It limits their core and power profile, and takes up a huge amount of die space. They could then individually mega-size the GPU and the CPU. They could investigate mega interconnects like nvidia's latest instead of trying to jam everything together.
Was Apple correct to call it the most powerful chip? Certainly not. And there is a huge price penalty. But they're hugely, ridiculously powerful machines that will never leave the user wanting.
But also as users, some were expecting the M series are so good that they are going to take many markets by storm. And it seems it is not happening.
$300 midrange Nvidia card? Did you get stuck in 2010?
That's way below entry-level at this point. You're likely comparing it with a 1666 cards or something, which is based on a chip from 2012.
I wish Apple silicone was actually competitive on performance. Nvidia needs competition or they'll likely double prices again with the next generation.
It still has the advantage of a much larger memory pool.
I did a quick comparison exercise - I priced two workstations with similar configurations, one from Dell, the other from Apple. While there are x86 (and ARM) machines that'll blow the biggest M2 out of the water, the prices, as far as Apple can go, aren't much different.
https://twitter.com/0xDEADBEEFCAFE/status/166747612998729728...
The article describes the M2 being blown out of the water by a 4080 and a 13900KS. That's about $2000 + RAM, motherboard, and power supply. Plus you can use the built in GPU in your CPU for acceleration things like transcodes.
You can get a pre-built gaming PC with a 4090 for about $4000, that'll crush the M2 in compute if you use any kind of GPU acceleration.
Of course the M2 has some other advantages (the unified memory and macOS) and some other disadvantages (you're stuck with the amount of RAM you pick at checkout, macOS, you have to sacrifice system RAM for GPU RAM) so it all depends on your use case.
I think the M2 still reigns supreme for mobile devices, though AMD is getting closer and closer with their mobile chips, but if you've got a machine hooked into the wall you'll have to pay some pretty excessive electricity rates for the M2 to become competitive.
The price of workstation-class machines also includes the cost of higher build-quality and stability, things like same-day support and service - at least the option for a long-term (5-6 year) warranty, and FRUs - you don't get that with consumer-grade computers - and those things matter when a machine is something you depend on professionally.
Both machines have a quality that I appreciate: they are never, ever slow.
We are not comparing MacPros to low-end desktops.
> You can get a pre-built gaming PC with a 4090 for about $4000, that'll crush the M2 in compute if you use any kind of GPU acceleration.
Yes, but the gaming PC will not as well built as the workstation-grade machine. And pretty much any GPU you can install on a gaming PC you can install on a MacPro - it's just that it won't be there out of the (Apple branded) box.
> you're stuck with the amount of RAM you pick at checkout
Sadly, this has been Apple for some time now - you buy the machine as it will be used for its whole intended lifetime. With the MacPro you can at least add internal storage and one or more GPU cards.
I wonder if given roughly equal power to the GPUs in current gen consoles (PS5/XBSX), it'd yield some advantage in porting console games since those consoles also have a large shared pool of memory (16GB), and neither AMD nor Nvidia want to give up using VRAM as an upsell.
I don't know the M2's efficiency for things like machine learning, but the M1's machine learning performance seemed to have been beaten 4-5x by the 3060Ti so I'm pretty sure "more VRAM" is all it's got going for it in ML tasks.
Why do you think NVIDIA doesn't "just add" "more memory"? To its $40,000 H100s, which top out at "just" 80GB?
The answer isn't price segmentation.
The 3080 series would be fine for likely beyond the 50x0 series gpu-wise, but current games are already starting to stutter unless you downgrade textures because of its limited VRAM
I think it’s a U shaped curve.
Beyond 80GB, today, the larger chip would maybe all of these: yield less, scale worse, take too much power, etc.
Like this matching of compute resources to RAM is partly the difference between CPUs and GPUs.
Anyway, it’s just to say that it isn’t a business decision. The extra RAM in the M2 doesn’t help the GPU much for the same tasks the H100 excels at, because it isn’t performant enough to use that RAM anywhere near the same way an H100 would, and if it were, there would have to be less RAM. The H100 doesn’t even have a graphics engine. It’s complicated.
So many people making claims that power utilization doesn't matter. Perhaps not to them, but it does for many.
Energy prices are getting higher and higher in many parts of the country, heck in the world.
Devices that consume more power generate more heat. So now one is likely using more electricity to keep their home or office cool and comfortable.
Noise matters for many people using workstations. Running a system at full tilt can be irritating, distracting, because of the active cooling.
Some people are just simply conscious of how much electricity they use and want to have a lower environmental impact.
And then there's the large scale matter. One workstation might not be a big deal in terms of energy usage, but millions of them absolutely is.
Saying no one cares how much power a workstation uses is disingenuous.
Power costs (in datacenters at least) were high enough that buying the €10,000 server that sucked 200w more was worth less than the €15,000 machine that didnt suck that extra 200w.
So electricity prices can be more than a negligible amount on the total.
Where that line is depends on your personal situation.
I live in southern sweden and they hide the total price of power here, but aggregated my cost per watt is 5sek/kWh (roughly €0.45).
So a worst case for me at 200w with 24hrs of usage is about €800/y
At this point we are seeing the globalised fossil fuel market endgame in this country.
A workstation can be a single core, 256MB RAM, 1 watt SBC. It can be a 96 core, 2TB RAM, 1 kw beast. It can be anything in between or even outside of that range.
I'm not saying everyone cares about power consumption, but several people here seem to be saying that no one does, and that's simply not true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workstation
Generally, 1 low performance core with 256RAM is not enough for technical or scientific applications. Not many professions you could get away with those kind of specs really.
I would not call a computer with a single low performance core and 256 MB RAM a workstation either, but for a 4GB/8GB RPi 4, that term seems applicable.
No. Words have meanings. Workstation does not mean that.
Accounting? Writing? Programming? Video editing?
Whereas raw performance specs are typically high but ultimately dependent on use case.
I can show you a company of 10,000+ people using Chromebooks and Macbooks for 'business purposes' with little regard for performance per watt.
Everyone cares about power, at a fairly similar level - maybe 2-4x differences, but not 10x. And most of the ones who care underestimate how rarely their machine is actually fully busy.
Idle power is probably more interesting than even task power, for anything other than an unusually busy server or cloud hypervisor.
And yeah, as others point out, this is Apples to oranges. x86 desktops are great at some things, M2 Ultras are great at others, and the overlap that really matters is pretty small... Like, you have to be crazy to buy an M SoC for gaming, or buy a Nvidia GPU for workloads that won't fit in VRAM.
I have seen the demos, but I am skeptical of the actual practicality or value proposition until a 3rd party publishes some frametime benchmarks, and games out in the wild get battle tested.
I imagine that in the future, something like Steam will wrap this functionality to provide the ability to run the whole library under the toolkit. And individually-published games will do the same so they install and run with a more consumer-friendly experience.
(There is the Neural Engine which supports lower precision, but it limited in various ways.)
Regardless, the strides that Apple has been making are impressive.
Apple have an opportunity, if they 2-4x the memory on the entry level devices (not beyond the realms of possibility), to make local inference a thing available to all.
A lot of work is going on in 8-bit inference and even 4 bit inference. So, models that need 64 GB in FP32 can do with 16GB VRAM in FP8 or INT8, which is well within the realm of consumer NVIDIA cards. And the latest NVIDIA tensor cores will absolutely destroy Apple Silicon GPUs or the Neural Engine in 8 bit.
So, I don’t think it’s really a strong argument. And as someone who is a Mac user and a ML practitioner, I’d be very happy if they started supporting eGPUs again.
Apple Silicon has many strengths and the GPU core are fine for many ends, from games to graphics apps.
But let’s not pretend that Apple is beating NVIDIA at their own game (yet). That day might come, but currently it only leads to disappointed users in ML forums who were hyped into thinking that their vanilla M2 MacBook Airs can almost compete with a 4090 in training a deep transformer model. (Yes, that happens.)
Then there's the power consumption difference to consider. This seems like one of those cases where benchmarks reveal only a fraction of the larger picture.
https://wccftech.com/m2-ultra-only-10-percent-slower-than-rt...
What would be more interesting is to see how Nvidia's laptop cards fare here though - they're constrained to much lower wattage (80-120w) and would make for a much fairer fight against the ~200w M2 Ultra.
Doesn't look like Apple offers Ultra in a laptop - just the Basic, Pro, and Max.
That being said, it's pretty obvious that Apple's mobile-style solution isn't really working out on the desktop side of things. The new iMac feels starkly pedestrian compared to the old ones, and the Mac Mini/Studio are both neat but not unprecedented. The M2 Ultra represents a lot of engineering effort going into flipping that status quo, but its still slipping behind by a considerable margin. Don't forget that a second "Ultra" style SOC with 4x M1 Maxes was supposedly cancelled for drawing too much power and being too hot. It's just not effective or efficient to force that much silicon that close together.
Then you’d be looking for a 24 core CPU, 64GB RAM, 1TB PCIe 5 SSD, mainboard with 6x thunderbolt ports, a silent cooling setup, high quality case that is both small and all the gear while running cool. and if you’re stuck with MS Windows - an Operating System.
Source?
https://twitter.com/0xDEADBEEFCAFE/status/166747612998729728...
Regardless, wccftech is far from reliable. IIRC, /r/amd blocks links to the site.
Those are nvidia's best consumer GPUs. I think the cheese grater falls into the pro segment. In that segment nvidia has the A6000s with 48GB VRAM and 91 SP TFlops compared to the 4090's 24GB and 73 SP TFlops. But that costs as much as the Mac Pro alone. And even bigger options (segmented for server/datacenter use) are available.
power consumption doesn't scale linearly with performances
the absolute best of class NVIDIA discrete GPU offering could possibly outperform the Apple GPU at the same power level
Or, to put it in another way, to recover that remaining 50% of performances (2x) the increase in power consumption would be exponential (a lot more than 2x, like 10x)
As far as I understand it—and this is just from watching Apple's presentations on the architecture—the lack of a discrete GPU is a big part of how the Apple Silicon machines achieve good performance per watt.
Instead of having discrete RAM or a discrete GPU with its own VRAM, all of the RAM is accessible to the CPU and and the GPU in a unified memory architecture. On the M2 Ultra, this allows for 800 GB/s of memory bandwidth, and also eliminates a lot of the need to copy data from RAM to VRAM, as both the GPU and the CPU can access the same memory. In return, this allows the GPU to match the performance of discrete GPUs that have a lot more cores.
Of course, the big downside is that you can't expand the RAM or install a beefier GPU. It's all baked in to the logic board.
Plenty of PC hardware reviewers have done sensitivity analysis experiments to see how discrete GPU performance is affected by running with a slower or narrower PCIe link. The consensus is usually that GPUs connected by PCIe have more than sufficient bandwidth, and cutting it in half only affects gaming framerates by a few percent. Tighter coupling between CPU and GPU can plausibly have a bigger impact for some GPU compute workloads, but for traditional 3D graphics it doesn't help performance much.
While 192GB of RAM is more than I would need, for people looking to use 1.5TB of RAM and a pair of NVIDIA GPU they had from previous model, they’d have to go elsewhere.
Which leaves me wondering; how much engineering at Apple are happening on Mac?
The best case this article can make is that if you need to play the latest game or do intense ML stuff you probably want NVIDIA, but that's the same as it ever was.
I don't think it was ever meant to be the most informative article: it seems written to serve the contrarians because that's profitable from a readership perspective for a publication like this.
A 4080 is best of class?
And second of all, for the price it should be compared to the 4090, which absolutely demolishes it.
Second, people don't buy Macs only for performance. They also buy Macs for macOS, for integration between devices, for a system that is cool and quiet, for hardware acceleration of ProRes, for on-device privacy-preserving machine learning. Being a bit slower than competing AMD and Intel systems is acceptable, because you get so many other desirable properties in return.
I'd definitely consider a Mac Studio with an M2 Max or M2 Ultra, if I didn't want something portable. I would never buy a machine with a competing machine with an Intel or AMD machine, because I don't want to deal with Windows or desktop Linux.
Other people have another set of priorities and that is fine.
While I’m still surprised they didn’t put a second Ultra in the Mac Pro, I’m betting there’s a wider delta than people imagine between the two form factors.
Having said that, the 7950X was released late February, and the 13900KS was released in mid January. Both of this year. Both are their premiere available chips right now in the segment. Referring to them like they're last year's junk is rather silly.
[1] Though fun fact with the M1, I remember super disappointing Geekbench results leaking before its release. People do know how low trust the site is, right? The computer identifiers on the claimed "M2 Ultra" devices claim to be Macbook Pro 14" devices....which aren't getting M2 Ultras for obvious reasons. In all likelihood someone is making guesses and posting nonsense.
7950X was released September, 2022. It's quite literally last year's chip and given that AMD release cycle is typically about 2 years, we're roughly halfway between last release and 9000 series release.
You might be getting it confused with the Non-X versions that were released earlier in 2023 -- those are basically the same chip but power limited and maybe slightly worse selections of silicon. Of those Non-X versions it was 7600, 7700, 7900 but non-X of 7950 was released. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Ryzen_processors
May I assume that you haven't used a desktop from some year equivalent to whatever Mac you use? Because modern desktops are far from "honking."
I have a 7950x (the high core count desktop offering). AMD require (sans one brand) water-cooling for it. That means you get big quiet fans, which are far less "honking" than the tiny loud ones that are in laptops by necessity. In fact, due to the nice large radiators that liquid coolers have the fans don't spin at all the majority of the time.
When I do need power, it's on-tap.
My 6900xt is big honking during gaming, but you can get real quiet $300 GPUs. Or just use the integrated graphics and enjoy the quiet liquid cooling.
> big
High-end PSUs now overlap with smaller space heaters on power output. My living room is usually 3-4 degrees hotter around my desk than it is by the dining table.I'm looking to upgrade my gaming PC, and getting the power budget under control is surprisingly challenging.
I have a AMD 7700X and I run it on Eco Mode which is approx 65W TDP instead of the 105W TDP it wants to run at.
For my general use (including cpu intensive operations) this makes absolutely no perceivable difference. I ran some benchmarks out of curiosity and I take about a 5% haircut for a massive power and heat savings.
What Intel and AMD did with the chips was essentially sell consumers a default overclocked chip that will run to the max of the thermal headroom that your fan will allow and sit there. They did this to be competitive with each other in benchmarks for marketing.
Most consumers should run these chips in some sort of eco mode since the performance per watt has severe diminishing returns and they are actually quite power efficient as long as you don't run it on the default factory overclocked settings.
Technically true, but vacuously. The limit of a standard US circuit is 1500w, which is why you see all space heaters and the good PSUs hitting the figure
You can drastically reduce the power you supply to desktop chips with BIOS settings. You'll generate far less heat, can use a smaller power supply and form factor, while still getting great performance.
If Intel/AMD get to a level where their chips rival M1/M2 while power throttled, things get interesting.
Another point is that in terms of power efficiency AMD are absolutely mopping the floor with Intel, where even older high power R9s are consistently outperforming Intel's lower power i5 and i7s by a wide margin. This sort of discussion is often left out of reviews which only look at TDP or peak wall power. It's still not ARM levels of efficiency, but x86 vs ARM or even desktop vs laptop efficiency is an entirely separate conversation.
> If Intel/AMD get to a level where their chips rival M1/M2 while power throttled, things get interesting.
For laptop users, maybe. For desktop extra 40W literally doesn't matter.
For me this was going from 105W to 65W on my 7700X and my results were similar.
Not sure how it would look or work with Intel though.
My machine is entirely silent on normal operations (Zen 3 5600X and RX 6700). All the fans, on both GPU and CPU are stopped in desktop usage. And it doesn't obviously eat that much power (my monitor probably eats more).
The only moment I could hear them is if I play games. And then I have headset on, so I can't hear them.
I really couldn't care less if it ate twice the amount of power when playing games.
Because, while gaming, the vents in my case blow air at over 40 degrees Celsius, and that heat has to go somewhere. Absent a setup that can put the case several meters away from me, that "somewhere" is on top of me.
>big honking machines
Buy an all-in-one water cooler for the CPU https://pcpartpicker.com/product/2PFKHx/arctic-liquid-freeze...
It's easy to install and you have a quiet, well-cooled CPU.
This also pushes more "desktop like" performance to both ultraportable and reasonably portable laptops, allowing these machines to fully replace desktops for the overwhelming majority without all of the caveats that come with "desktop replacement" laptops (workstation laptops, heavy duty gaming laptops, etc). A lot of people who previously wouldn't have seen laptops as capable of being their primary machines are doing exactly that with M1/M2 Pro MBPs.
This is actually the case! The 7950X and 13900K come in non-X and non-K variants, which have vastly reduced power footprints and overall consumption, and you can even take your X or K variant and... Enforce that exact same power envelope in BIOS, for minimal loss in performance. But the purchasers of desktop X and K SKUs are the overclocking fringe (by and large). I will admit though, a lot of laptops are sold with with i|r7|9 +HX variants that shouldn't be purchased because big number means easier upsell.
It is the goal (after all more efficiency also means fitting more powerful cores into the thermal envelope) but given the choice most desktop users would be fine with "just a bit bigger box" rather than sacrifice performance for the price.
Either you are not measuring power consumption correctly, or there is something very wrong with your PC.
And it's an entirely believable statement. A Mac Mini uses between 5w - 20w. Many PCs idle at >50W, and under use hit 500W+.
I think you're confusing Mac14,14 which is the internal designation for the Mac Studio with a MacBook Pro 14". The leak if anyone's interested: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/21305974?baseli...
It's a no brainer anyway to get more performance from desktop and non apple much cheaper due to apples pricing.
Apple has a huge advantage price / performance wise with the cheap m based Mac book air.
The comparison with a Mac book pro which costs 2-3k is slightly less so.
My 7950x machine cost, excluding the enthusiast GPU, $3000. That's less than half the cost of the M2 Ultra.
> Apple has a huge advantage price / performance wise with the cheap m based Mac book air.
The MBA is in the US $999 with M1 and $1099 with M2. (You can get them even at about $800 in sales.) This is an entirely different segment.
The cynical view is that Apple is intentionally misleading customers with their ambiguous graph axes. Another perspective is they’re simply demonstrating the metric they’ve optimized for in the first place.
Have you ever upgraded any components of your Windows desktop (RAM, GPU, CPU, motherboard) or did you discard the entire thing?
I don't think it's misleading anyone to say they're faster, when their on SoC graphics are 4060 level, they definitely are overall.
As you said though, it's a very niche thing, so even without beating Intel at the top end they're not going to be losing much. It's just a bit of a shame. The i9-13900K is only $500, it's not like it's some wildly out-of-reach thing.
But of course, combining any number of M2’s won’t increase their single core scores. Intel’s desktop chips are there for people who want high clock speeds and are happy to pay in power for that (and the power cost is super linearly related to clock frequency). The Intel chips are just designed for different use-cases, it doesn’t make sense to assume either company could just linearly scale things to reproduce each other’s products.
The relevance of multi-core scores depends on how parallel the workload is. If we all had perfectly parallel workloads I guess Xeon Phi’s would have sold better.
This is a lazy argument. Why did they make the M1 faster than other CPUs? I would argue that most people don’t need even that performance. Why do they put M chips in iPads - they can’t even use it optimally.
You can play that in the other way too. Use multiple 13700Ts at 35W each.
The article mentions that apple has focused on single core performance while the x86 processors in question are designed for multi core use cases. This reflects two different markets being addressed and the sad state (small amount) of multicore code today.
Also it’s silly to claim that the M2 Ultra is so expensive — you can get the same performance from a 3K “studio” desktop that you do from the >7K “Mac Pro”.
I use apple for all my “terminals” (macs, iPhone, etc) but really want AMD and Intel to keep working on these multithreaded powerhouses because I depend on that on the cloud side. I don’t see this ever being in Apple’s markets. Articles that further that are needed, but this isn’t one of them.
It seems pretty clear and unsurprising that Apple optimises their design for their use case (e.g. major consideration of bandwidth to screen in handheld devices, reminiscent of one of the Alto's design criteria) but how that plays out doesn't support my claim either. But Apple's intended use cases aren't the same as the threadripper's.
I don’t see how that could be true. A huge amount of software tasks are basically single threaded.
Remember since Apple does everything soup-to-nuts they have a ton of performance data from their computers to know what real user workloads look like so they can optimize the hardware + the software for them.
So in that spirit I will point out that Apple's support code / framworks etc do a bunch of multithreaded UI and network stuff even when and app's code is putatively single threaded.
Now that stuff IMHO is pretty high latency (e.g. waiting on user action) so as a developer I still think my statement, and your impression, are correct. But I'd like to see something from Apple on the topic.
Multithreaded performance is only good when you don't care about power use, but that's never true on a battery powered phone. It's actually more often the case that you optimize software by removing accidental excess concurrency than by adding it. Junior engineers love them some unstructured concurrency.
A few days ago I was thinking of getting a beefy Mac Studio for deep learning since M1 and M2 are now fairly well supported. I didn’t because this felt like swimming up river, using something not as it was designed to be used. (I decided to use $10 or $50/month Google Colab instead).
* The latest Intel/AMD desktops only have two channels of DDR5, and if you put as little as 64GB RAM in them they can drop to DDR4 speeds (2DPC, dual-rank), less than 10% of M2 memory bandwidth.
* You can (surprisingly cheaply) buy an M2 with 192GB GPU VRAM, but you can't buy a DDR5 PC with the same amount. If we all start wanting to run LLMs locally that'll be a pretty big deal.
Should be available soon.
https://www.techpowerup.com/306005/asus-teases-192-gb-ddr5-m...
There aren't any 32GB single-stick DDR5 DIMMs yet, let alone 32GB single-rank single-stick, so if you want 64GB then you're using four sticks of dual-rank 16GB, the worst scenario.
They also posted this.
Anyone can get the performance crown by having an unlimited energy budget. Performance per watt is much more valuable in data centers (TCO) and consumer devices (battery life).
Not really. No.
> Performance per watt is much more valuable in data centers
Assuming performance can be combined.
You can't get the same performances of an Nvidia RTX 4080 using 2 M2
For me, Desktop use is almost perfect on Apple due to battery life and perf but professional use is much better on Intel/AMD+NVidia. Also you could get much more perf for $ on such machines
I hate this terminology. How would anyone define "professional use"
I live in a country where it gets very hot in the summer. I prefer to keep my environment cool without needing AC. Unfortunately I have found that is not possible to do with my beefy Dell workstation that consumes in the 1kW range thanks to the Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU.
It isn't just a feeling but a hard fact that my thermostat can confirm that running my Intel workstation puts my office up to uncomfortable temps. No such thing happens with my M1 Ultra Mac Studio running with a third to a quarter less power consumption.
Perhaps I am alone in this but I dislike having to use AC to cool my office when I can just not make it so damn hot in the first place. It is all just a waste of energy and energy isn't free.
If it's not an issue for you then fair enough buy a 1kW+ Intel/Nvidia system but to say "it makes fuckall difference on a workstation" is disingenuous.
Dropping cpu and GPU frequencies even a few % might have a significant impact.
I’m also disappointed that Apple didn’t go for a 2-socket Mac Pro so they could offer a compute advantage over Mac Studio in addition to the PCI Express slots. Other than the IO, I can’t think of a reason to pick the Mac Pro.
I also remember my macbook unibody 2008 and mbp 2012, with them I could do a lot with 4gb ram, even on hdd, nowadays 8gb is kinda too small for most of programming jobs, it look like macs keep getting better hardware every year and macOS using it more and more aggressively
I think power efficiency by itself is a laudable goal, but the idea that other chipmakers don't optimize this doesn't make sense...you have to if you are building a laptop. A lot of the desktop chips are ludicrously overtuned, even AMD's chips, but the laptop chips have to be power-efficient due to the limitations on cooling.
I would look in particular at the AMD APUs that are being used in handheld devices. Unlike Mac's chips, which promised much but delivered little, they are actually delivering desktop GPU-tier (in the range of 1050/1060) performance in a 20W package and under.
Would you point out where it is trivial to purchase a new AMD chip under 30 watts TDP? I'd sincerely be interested and the question isn't asked rhetorically.
Considered certainly, adjust less so.
If you want to adjust for something price makes more sense than TDP
To illustrate and acknowledging that this calculation is more practical than satisfying to mathematicians:
I wouldn't say that a chip that takes half of the power and costs half as much, while performing three times better, than a decade old chip is twelve times better all around. Even though the gains exceed both those indicated by price and watts, taken on their own. It performs roughly six times better per dollar spent and watt consumed, respectively. These performance differences are not reconcilable into a single number that most would quickly understand, but they should be considered together. And this in fact was the specific situation for the processor that I replaced. Not accounting for processing improvements that aren't included in thread processing speed. Try playing 4k video with a decade old processor while monitoring its utilization.
Not to be argumentative as everyone is certainly entitled to their own weighting. I value TDP more than I do dollars spent. Though, both will always be unavoidably important.
But I agree, tdp should really be kept in consideration.
IIRC, the desktop i3 and i5 processors are in many cases literally last-gen, since Intel is using a mix of Alder Lake and Raptor Lake dies on most of the "13th gen" desktop products that do not have more cores or cache than Alder Lake did.
Never been a problem, even when Intel TDP was 20x worse than today.
EDIT: the author forgot that the tested system is an M2 Ultra a desktop class system with a TDP of 90 watts
The i9-13900T and i7-13700T come in at a max turbo power of just 106W
which is just 1.2x
Now add in the GPU. Because the Apple number combined both.
When has Intel's real, advertised, or specified CPU power consumption or TDP ever been 20x that of the i9-13900KS?
Economically and environmentally it's absolutely a problem.
I've never tried to water cool a 125 watt processor and so I can't speak to that. But especially if one uses air cooling or ideally passive cooling, one's ability to reduce noise is proportional to the chip's TDP. Noise reduction is important to many.
This doesn’t matter for everyone’s use case, but it is a factor some people might consider.
I wonder if they'll give up on going past 2 dies and leave their high-end eternally lacking or if there is something else coming down the pipe.
Hint: M2 destroys the competition
They already had the Mac Studio, they could have kept the Mac Pro on Intel.
How is not wanting to do x86 on the high end? The article says just as much.
Or, of course, there's the classic Twain / Disraeli quote ... take your pick.
I don't care if it consumes 200 W of power. I don't care if the chassis needs to be thicker to accommodate a larger heatsink. I don't care if you need to run the fans at 100%. Just let me use the full power of the CPU created by the chip designers god dammit!
That's the thing: they aren't building it just for you. We can speculate about their internal requirements documents, but what's for sure is that they calculate a projected market adoption based on various factors like cost, market segmentation, power draw, heat transfer, noise etc. If it turns out that they project a bigger profit with a lower power limit than technically possible, that's what they'll do.
Personally, it would be nice of this were to apply to any CPU, GPU, SoC and even VRM and DC-DC regulators; let me worry about the dissipation, just pump out as many cycles as possible. But that's not really something that covers any significant market that Apple (or most multinationals) is targeting.
What I find much more surprising is that all of their M1/M2 deployments seem to be far fewer bin-limited; normally you'd get a crapton of SKUs for a SoC because they are so hard to manufacture, but Apple seems to get away with only 15 to 20. Perhaps this is also why there are much clearer power limits on most of their devices.
It is what I find about this article to be disingenuous. Sure, by all means compare the M2 Ultra to the Intel 13900K and the Nvidia 4080, but at least mention that it is consuming a third of the power.
A high wattage, highly cooled proc.
But nope, they did what you described.
MKBHD put forward an interesting hypothesis in his last podcast: this generation Mac Pro has simply to get the refresh out the door. They took their existing designs (SoC/chips, cases) and simply mashed them together. Similarly to how they simply mashed the M-chips into existing laptop case designs first, and then optimized with Gen2.
Now that they have something, they can iterate on a more harmonious solution that allows for the advantages of each.
They could use this version as a stepping stone to a future faster device. But I suspect this form factor is a dead end for the Apple customer base. Maybe it exists for bragging (i.e. marketing) rights, the same reason Honda funds a Formula 1 team.
It’s overcooled. There is no way it’s thermally limited. It’s got to have headroom for days.
I’m very curious where this idea I keep seeing in the comments that Apple refuses to run chips at full speed for cooling reasons comes from.
Then how were IBM processors cooled ? IBM used also PowerPC