Hacker News Reader

Comment by gcanyon | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know how this compares to Apple’s M5 chips? Or is that comparison <takes off sunglasses> apples to oranges.

Features like hardware FP8 support definitely make it apples-to-oranges.

But doesn't the Apple M series NPU support FP8, and as it's a monolithic die (except for the GPU in the M5 Pro and Max) it could be argued it has hardware FP8 support, no?

By that logic, on the M4 (which still has the GPU on the same die as the CPU), CPU cores have hardware accelerated raytracing, which is obviously nonsense.

Apple's hardware does not support FP8 (neither the ANE NPU, or the new "neural accelerator" tensor cores), though the most recent variant supports INT8.

I thought the M5 had FP16 support, and not FP8.

It doesn't matter, because you will never find M5 chips on cloud offerings, or server racks.

It is kind of rediculous that the only server option with Apple hardware has been to stack up mac minis.

They got rid of the server and workstation market, focusing on consumers only.

Grace GB10, Vera's predecessor, had a single core performance comparable to M3 so I guess we can expect at least M4 level performance now.

Isn't the GB10 a Mediatek chip and not directly related to the Grace datacenter CPU?

The DGX Spark (and the white box variants of it) run on the Grace Blackwell GB10 "superchip".

More fair to say it's completely unrelated to the Grace data center CPU.

M5 are 9-18 cores and optimized for power-efficiency, those are more like Xeons, with 200-300W TDP, I'd bet.

If M5 has 9-18 cores and takes ~20w, then that's ~1-2w per CPU core. If these are 200-300W, and have ~100-200 CPU cores, then guess what? That's also ~1-2w per CPU core.

Xeons, Epycs, whatever this is - they are all also typically optimized for power efficiency. That's how they can fit so many CPU cores in 200-300W.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com