61 ms·

Apple M1 Max Geekbench Score

488 points by mv9 5y ago

dsign 5y ago
I'm envious. I like the hardware a lot. But at the same time, I can't help but think "This has to be the most powerful computer ever built to run a browser and a terminal". I can't run PyTorch with acceleration, I can't use Numba, or CUDA. It seems it will soon be possible to use Blender, which for my artsy side is a plus, and I know that a few of the other design tools I use work on MacOS with varying degrees of acceleration, so there is that.
- sudhirj 5y ago
  These are not insurmountable, probably only a matter of time. Tensorflow has already been ported and optimised. https://blog.tensorflow.org/2020/11/accelerating-tensorflow-performance-on-mac.html https://blog.tensorflow.org/2020/11/accelerating-tensorflow-...
- ramraj07 5y ago
  It’s obviously not for you, yet, then? People who need PyTorch or numba or cuda are a vanishing minority even in the tech scene.
petersellers 5y ago
Pretty impressive, all things considered. Looks like it's roughly on par with an AMD 5800X, which is a Desktop CPU with 8C/16T and a 105W TDP.
- Thaxll 5y ago
  5800x seems 20% faster for single core: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/5874365 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/5874365 so def not on part.
  - tbob22 5y ago
    That's certainly overclocked or very high PBO offsets, at stock the 5800x gets around 1700-1800 ST.
  - YetAnotherNick 5y ago
    This is the official score: https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-7-5800x https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-7-5800x
    - tbob22 5y ago
      Yeah, that looks correct. With faster ram and PBO it should hit closer to 1800. Here is my 5600x with PBO enabled and 3800MT/s CL16 DDR4 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10516280 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10516280 5800x would have a max clock of 4950mhz with PBO
  - hajile 5y ago
    But if you run TWO single-threaded workloads at once, the clocks dial WAY back. Meanwhile, the M1 can keep all cores at 3.2GHz pretty much indefinitely.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  Impressive but unbelievably expensive considering what will actually be run on it. I kind of want one, but the 5800x for example is about 10x less expensive than a specced out MacBook Pro
  - megablast 5y ago
    Are you comparing the price of a chip to a laptop??
    - mhh__ 5y ago
      Yes. If I bought one of these it would never actually move so I don't actually mind the comparison all that much for my personal use case, obviously it isn't apples to oranges but my point is that this performance is not free.
      - hwita 5y ago
        Then perhaps you may want to wait for Apple to release a desktop-class processor to make the comparison, perhaps early next year?
        lostmsu 5y ago
        Perhaps. AMD should also release 5nm processors by then too.
        yazaddaruvala 5y ago
        Its not clear to me that Apple will make a desktop-class processor. The unit economics likely don't make sense for them. All of Apple's innovation seems to be towards better and cheaper AR/VR hardware. Desktop-class processors would be a distraction for them. And with all of the top cloud players building custom silicon these days, there is little room for Apple to sell CPUs to the server market even if they were inclined (which they are not). The only strategic Apple vertical that might align with desktop-class CPUs is the Apple Car initiative and specifically self-driving. Dedicated audio/image/video processing and inference focused hardware could better empower creatives for things like VFX or post-processing or media in general. However, its not clear to me that is enough of a market for Apple's unit economics compared with more iDevice / MacBook sales.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jb1991 5y ago
Would like to see the Metal benchmark too, but doesn't appear yet on the Geekbench Metal page. That would be interesting to see how Geekbench scores it against many discreet GPUs.
louwrentius 5y ago
The single core performance is still the same as the M1, so frankly, for a laptop that's awesome, but I wish single core performance could hit the AMD Ryzen scores.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  Depends what benchmark you ask. According to Passmark, the M1 is the best single core CPU no question.
habitue 5y ago
Today's the day when people actually check Apple's claims with a graph that didn't originate inside Apple. Remember the reality distortion field guys?
bullen 5y ago
Where are the Gflops/W?
aledthemathguy 5y ago
you guys nitty grit. it's all about efficiency.
Osiris 5y ago
Do we know of the M1 Max in the MacBook can sustain this level of performance without thermal throttling? Mobile phones often have this issue where the benchmark looks gear until you run it for 15 minutes and the thermal throttling kicks in and kills the performance. Thermal throttling is something I'd like to understand when comparing these against a desktop CPU. For example, I just bought a 5900X and the Geekbench scores are very similar. My assumption is that the 5900X will be able to sustain full boost speeds indefinitely because of the additional cooling. I don't know if the MacBook can do the same. If it can sustain mac performance without overheating inside the laptop form factor that'll definitely be a big win for Apple.
- jb1991 5y ago
  They increased the thermal cooling area inside the laptop by something like 60% if I recall, it’s a whole new design for temperature control. But they were quick to add that most of the time the fans will still not be needed because the chip rarely gets warm enough to require that.
headgasket 5y ago
IMHO, ditching Intel is a smart move for apple but a bad one for hackers. I’m sticking with older intel mbps until decent emulation scores are achieved with qemu, and probably further down the line. Hypervisors (say VBox proxmox combo) are so useful when you have to experiment/test with other platforms. Happy to see HDMI and escape key back tho, and it looks like we’ll even get a Target Display Mode equivalent! We’ll be back to my 2015 setup.:-) My ideal M1 mbp would be this new one with 64gb ram but with a second cheap mid tier i5 with 16gb dedicated, and a rtx2070(cmon NVdia has Cuda —we need that) with 8gb, connected via internal tb3. I don’t care that it would be 700g heavier and a bit bigger or have less battery life when used to the max (idled chips should not eat a lot). It terms of bare costs thats maybe 1000$ more silicon, but it’s a world more of possibilities. What’s wrong with dedicated gpu offering— not for everyone but hackers love it and help the aura. And —-please—- bring back a modular slot (m2?) for (additional?) storage! (Also good for hackers but not for Apple)
- alexktz 5y ago
  Target display mode on the laptop? Where'd you see that?
  - headgasket 5y ago
    I read that Monterrey will Have an AirPlay based feature to do something like TDM. www.macrumors.com/2021/06/09/airplay-mac-to-mac-external-display/amp/
easygenes 5y ago
This puts it at about 3/4 the performance of a 5950X. Not bad for mobile.
oofbey 5y ago
If I’m reading this right, it’s only a tiny bit faster than the existing M1 on single core. 1780 vs 1720 or so. For a lot of tasks, single core is what really matters.
rbanffy 5y ago
All this makes me want to see Geekbench ported to other binary architectures. I'd love to see how POWER9 and POWER10 compare to Xeons and EPYCs.
mindvirus 5y ago
I ordered an M1 Max MacBook, really looking forward to it. It looks like the battery life is fantastic, and it's quiet and cool. Given that, what are some reasons Apple might not have upped the wattage for an even faster chip? Is it just that they are so far ahead of the competition, and these are things that can't easily be matched (fanless operation, long battery life), or is there some physical reason they wouldn't want to run the chip hotter?
Kalanos 5y ago
Hmm. M1 Max = 1783 Single-Core Score 12693 Multi-Core Score Intel Core i9-9900X 3500 MHz (10 cores) October 20th, 2021 = Single-Core Score 1078 Multi-Core Score 11305
reacharavindh 5y ago
What did I miss? Dell XPS 15 with intel CPU has way higher scores… is Geekbench not capable of working correctly on Apple Silicon? https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/16376678 https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/16376678
- unicornfinder 5y ago
  That's a Geekbench v4 score, which isn't comparable to a Geekbench v5 score. You can see the same laptop on Geekbench v5 here, where it scores much, much lower than the M1: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10506812 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10506812
  - jjcm 5y ago
    For those that can't load and are curious, the M1 Max scores about 2x the Intel Core i7-11800H in the Dell laptop on both single core and multi core scores.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      It also costs twice as much, so I should hope I'm getting something for the money.
    - jkeddo 5y ago
      I don't think that was a good sample, most of the XPS 15's I see have a much higher single thread score, almost double the one linked above: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10491562 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10491562
      - snuser 5y ago
        It looks like the original as been updated, the differences don't seem very drastic especially when you consider what the SKU's w/ the m1 max cost guess it's about a 1.5-2x difference in battery life though
  - jkeddo 5y ago
hammock 5y ago
Single core regular M1 Macbook about the same. Multicore the Max is a lot higher.
- tyingq 5y ago
  Looks not the same to me: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10508124?baseline=10496766 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10508124?baseli... Did I pick the wrong regular M1 Macbook? Edit: Hmm. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10508059?baseline=10496766 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10508059?baseli... I guess Geekbench is a little unpredictable? And it looks like HN is pushing their capacity...
  - hammock 5y ago
    Hmm not sure what I was looking at before, that site is not the easiest to navigate.
    - tyingq 5y ago
      My second link shows what you're talking about. I'm not sure which result to trust.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Geekbench has always been a little unpredictable. It was most famously skewed quite heavily in Apple's favor before Geekbench 4, and even the modern scores are pretty opaque. I'd wait to see real-world performance metrics out of it.
- hbOY5ENiZloUfnZ 5y ago
  It should be about the same. It is the same micro-architecture which is why they are still called M1. There are just more of the same cores.
maxpert 5y ago
Site not loading for me :(
e0m 5y ago
Wow does much better than Geekbench's prior top processor (https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks) the Intel Core i9-11900K (https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i9-11900k https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i9-11900...). 10,997 for Intel i9 vs 12,693 for M1 Max
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Per core performance is the most interesting metric. Edit: for relative comparison between CPUs, per core metric is the most interesting unless you also account for heat, price and many other factors. Comparing a 56-core CPU with 10-core M1 is a meaningless comparison.
  - 5faulker 5y ago
    Just when you think things hit the top, another kid's out of the town.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    Not when building large software projects.
    - gchokov 5y ago
      Like… everyone builds large projects all the time?
      - akmarinov 5y ago
        If you don’t then you don’t really need the top end do you?
        ajuc 5y ago
        Most people who buy fast cars don't need them and it's the same with computers.
parhamn 5y ago
Anyone know how this compares to the M1 Pro? Curious if it's worth the additional $400. The search doesn't seem to allow exact matches.
- SegOnMyFault 5y ago
  Should be the same as the difference between the max and the pro lies in the GPU core count.
  - ivalm 5y ago
    Memory bandwidth as well.
  - meepmorp 5y ago
    No, the Max has twice the memory bandwidth as well - 200GB/s vs 400 GB/s, which will have a big impact on anything memory bound.
    - InvaderFizz 5y ago
      How much and on what is the question. I'm not in the market for a laptop, so I can wait and see. That said, if Apple releases a MacMini M1 Max, I'll probably buy it.
      - meepmorp 5y ago
        Yeah, I would've already ordered a MaxMini if it existed. Maybe next year.
    - microtonal 5y ago
      We have to see how much it matters in practice, since the M1 Max has roughly the same single threaded score as the M1.
- czbond 5y ago
  https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10479712 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10479712
jmartrican 5y ago
Anyone know the score for Intel 12th gen Alder Lake?
- mhh__ 5y ago
  I can't check for you due to hug but the 12900K was clocking in at about 1900 ST IIRC Edit: Leaving this up so I can be corrected, don't think I have the right figure.
  - gigatexal 5y ago
    If true I’d be interested to see what that is in points per watt.
    - mhh__ 5y ago
      The points per watt is probably going to be crap but equally I don't care all that much. One thing as well is that there are always headlines complaining about power usage, but the figures are nearly always from extreme stress tests which basically fully saturate the execution units. Geekbench is slightly different to those stresses so not sure.
      - gigatexal 5y ago
        Sure but I’m only asking for Points per watt to use as a baseline for testing Apple’s claims.
        mhh__ 5y ago
        Peak wattage is apparently 330W on a super heavy test, not really sure how to extrapolate that to geekbench.
        jeffbee 5y ago
        Wow, there's a power virus for Alder Lake client that can make it draw 330W? Reference?
websap 5y ago
Looks like Geekbench just got the HN bug of death.
tambourine_man 5y ago
Site is under heavy load: 1783 Single-Core Score 12693 Multi-Core Score
- YetAnotherNick 5y ago
  For comparison, M1 results: 1705 Single core, 7382 multi core
  - M4R5H4LL 5y ago
    For comparison, Mac Pro (Late 2019) 16-core: 1104 Single-Core Score, 15078 Multi-Core Score
    - clarkmoreno 5y ago
      thank you
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bhouston 5y ago
Where is the graphics test? The M1 Max versus an NVIDIA 3080 or similar?
- mhh__ 5y ago
  I'm waiting to be corrected by someone who knows GPU architecture better than me but as far as I can tell the synthetic benchmarks can trade blows with a 3070 or 80 (mobile), but the actual gaming performance isn't going to be as rosy. Also recall that very few games needing that performance actually work on MacOS
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    The gaming performance will be CPU-bottlenecked. Without proper Wine/DXVK support, they have to settle for interpreted HLE or dynamic recompilation, neither of which are very feasible on modern CPUs, much less ARM chips.
    - josephg 5y ago
      From all reports, rosetta2 performs remarkably well. Apparently they added special hardware support for some x86 features to improve the performance of dynamically recompiled code.
  - schleck8 5y ago
    Does someone know how much VRAM the M1X has? Because I bet it's far less than a 3070 or 3080.
    - mhh__ 5y ago
      The memory is unified, and very high bandwidth. No idea what that means in practice, guess we'll find out.
      - pornel 5y ago
        It's very high bandwidth for a CPU, but not that great for a GPU (400GB/s vs 440GB/s in 3070 and 980GB/s in 3090).
ur-whale 5y ago
How does that compare to top of the line AMD Ryzen latest gen (site is dead for me right now)?
- tbob22 5y ago
  Single core is similar to the 5900x but multicore is more in line with 3900x. Quite impressive for a laptop, I'm sure the power consumption will be much higher compared to the M1 but likely no where near desktop parts.
Flatcircle 5y ago
How does this compare to a Mac Pro for video editing
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  Should be better. The discussed how it was even better than MacPro with afterburner.
launchiterate 5y ago
So can someone build a mini cloud service with these machines?
diebeforei485 5y ago
I'm in the situation where I really want to pre-order a 14", but I have no idea if going with the base model would be a mistake. Would upgrading to 32GB RAM make Xcode faster? Or would it be a waste of $400?
- thebean11 5y ago
  16GB of RAM seems so low in 2021. OTOH, hard drives are so fast on these things that maybe 16 is good enough with the SSD as overflow. I ended up shelling out the extra $400 for 32GB, but didn't feel great about it!
  - bluedays 5y ago
    On the other hand I've been running 16GB of ram for a while and I can't conceive of a reason why I would need more. 32GB seems like overkill. What would you do with all of that ram? Open more tabs?
    - darkmatterrat 5y ago
      I've hit 48gb of ram while developing on Debian. Granted I am running about 10 docker containers and 3 IDEs. It depends what you are doing.
    - t-writescode 5y ago
      Compilation, graphics work, heavy-weight IDEs And, if you're spinning on 16GB ram on an M1, you might be eating through the SSD powering your swap space and not know it.
      - EugeneOZ 5y ago
        indeed. From my experience, I see that my MBA uses swap sometimes, but I can't notice it. Still, I want to avoid it.
    - thebean11 5y ago
      Looking at activity monitor, I'm currently using ~19GB, doing nothing special (IntelliJ, 15 chrome tabs, Spotify, Slack). Docker Desktop was using 8GB before I killed it. And this is on an Intel Mac so it doesn't include GPU memory usage I believe, which is shared in M1 Macs. This likely isn't a perfect metric, if I were closer to the limit I think MacOS would get more aggressive about compression and offloading stuff to disk but still.
metahost 5y ago
This is the comparison to a mid 2015 15" MacBook Pro for anyone who is curios: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10513492?baseline=10496766 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10513492?baseli... Summary: single core performance gain is 2x whereas multi-core performance gain is 4x.
- grishka 5y ago
  Comparison with the 2012 macbook I'm typing this on: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10496766?baseline=10517353 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10496766?baseli... I waited for these to come out for a long time, and now "should I upgrade" isn't even a question. It's a "shut up and take my money" situation at this point, but they aren't even taking preorders over here yet. I mean, it could probably run a browser, several electron apps, AND android studio at the same time, how cool is that?!
- hazeii 5y ago
  Over 6 years, 2x the performance in single-core and 4x (for 2.5x the cores, depending how you count) seems surprisingly low compared to stuff I've read (not experienced yet) with the M1.
  - jermaustin1 5y ago
    I think a lot of the perceivable speedup in M1 Macs is less to do with these benchmarks and more to do with optimizing the OS and Apple software for the M1 and the various accelerators on the SoC (video encoding and ML).
    - inkyoto 5y ago
      > perceivable speedup in M1 Macs Perception is key here. Of course M1's are perceived as being faster because: - video camera encoding/decoding is offloaded to a dedicated processor; - disk encryption is offloaded to a dedicated processor; - rendering is offloaded to dedicated GPU's; - matrix multiplication is offloaded to dedicated matrix multiplication processors (neural engines); - no wasteful memory transfers (even though the memory bus is 2048 bit wide anyway) across dedicated processors. Kind of like channel processors running channel programs in IBM mainframes, brought to a mainstream ultraportable laptop. And, on top of that, the screen that drops the refresh rate by a factor of 6 when there is no need to refresh the picture too often. Ironically, the CPU is left with pretty much one job to do: to compute. It is possible to get fast compilation times whilst doing all of the above at once. Or have an app that does all of the above at once, too (no, it won't save Microsoft Teams). And be power efficient, too; hence a long battery life and an Apple marketing team brouhaha: «We can do this all day». They are right – they can actually do all of that, and they can brag about it now because they have a full list from the above fulfilled. System performance is a holistic matter, not just single/multicore comparisons oftetimes taken out of the context.
jkeddo 5y ago
One big thing to consider is that this is just the first m1 Max Geekbench score, compared against the world's greatest 11900Ks. Most 11900K's are nowhere near the levels of the top preforming one. Once Apple starts shipping M1 Max in volume, and as TSMC yields get better, you will see "golden chips" slowly start to score even higher than this one.
- cauk 5y ago
  Golden chips?
  - spacedcowboy 5y ago
    In every manufacturing process there are always chips that perform better than others. They all reach the "bin" that they're designed for, but the actual design is for higher than that, so that even imperfect chips can perform at the required level. The corollary of that is that there are some chips that perform better than the design parameters would have you expect, they're easier to overclock and get higher speeds from. These are the "golden" chips. Having said that, it's not clear to me that the M1* will do that, I don't know if Apple self-tune the chips on boot to extract the best performance, or they just slap in a standard clock-rate and anything that can meet it, does. I'd expect the latter, tbh. It's a lot easier, and it means there's less variation between devices which has lots of knock-on benefits to QA and the company in general, even if it means users can't overclock.
  - trenchgun 5y ago
    There are slight variations in materials, processes, etc. End result: some chips just end up being better than others.
blakesterz 5y ago
I just can't figure out what I'm missing on the "M1 is so fast" side of things. For years I worked* on an Ubuntu desktop machine I built myself. Early this year I switched to a brand new M1 mini and this this is slower and less reliable than the thing I built myself that runs Ubuntu. My Ubuntu machine had a few little issues every no and then. My Mini has weird bugs all the time. e.g. Green Screen Crashes when I have a thumbdrive plugged in. Won't wake from sleep. Loses bluetooth randomly. Not at all what I'd expect from something built by the company with unlimited funds. I would expect those issues from the Ubuntu box, but the problems were small on that thing. *Work... Docker, Ansible, Rails apps, nothing that requires amazing super power. Everything just runs slower.
- majormajor 5y ago
  Running Docker on a Mac vs on Linux is going to be a subpar experience compared to a native x86 Linux box. It would take a LOT to magic around that.
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  MacOS just seems to have a lot of stability problems related to peripherals. I don’t think it’s specific to M1. Even on my late-era Intel MBP, Bluetooth and USB often triggers a kernel panic.
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    When I got my first MacBook Pro, there was actually bug in iPhone USB Tethering that caused a guaranteed kernel panic if you tried to do it. Managed to crash my laptop a few times with my iPhone 3GS.
- perryizgr8 5y ago
  The Intel macs were extremely slow. Even a core i9 16 inch ran hot and noisy. A small xps 13 felt much faster in general use. I don't know if this was deliberate by Apple or just a side effect of the extremely anemic cooling. So all those people who had been using macbooks felt the speed when they used a decently fast laptop. Everybody else knows that M1 laptops are fast, like non-apple laptops have been for quite some time.
celsoazevedo 5y ago
- https://web.archive.org/web/20211020175422if_/https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10496766 https://web.archive.org/web/20211020175422if_/https://browse... - https://archive.md/zQAC3 https://archive.md/zQAC3
starfallg 5y ago
Pretty underwhelming from a pure performance standpoint after all the hype from the launch. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/singlecore https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/singlecore
marcodiego 5y ago
I wonder what Asahi Linux devs can show us.
IceWreck 5y ago
Why does Apple not open up their hardware to other operating systems like Linux. They will already get our money from the hardware purchases, what more do they want. I know Asahi Linux exists but without Apple's (driver) support it will never reach macOS on M1 level performance. (If someone disagrees, please compare Nouveau with proprietary Nvidia drivers.)
- krunkcoin 5y ago
  They did open up their hardware to other operating systems: they engineered a feature into their secure boot system which allows a Mac's owner to attest (with physical presence required) that they'd like to run a kernel not signed by Apple. That's the door Asahi Linux uses. It isn't there on iOS devices, even those also based on M1. Everything else you're asking for would require them to spend significantly more money and/or engineering resources on supporting the port, and that just doesn't seem like a thing Apple's senior management would go for.
- basisword 5y ago
  As cool as that would be, why would they? I mean what do they have to gain from it? Maybe a few more Linux users will buy MacBook's but not enough to impact their bottom line. Plus those users wouldn't be part of the Apple ecosystem and at least since the iPod Apple's goal has been bringing you into the ecosystem.
  - someguydave 5y ago
    Apple could gain some trust and goodwill from the technical user base they have been alienating for 10 years
    - presentation 5y ago
      As though programmers don't use Macs, at least in SV they're by far the device of choice.
    - spacedcowboy 5y ago
      shrug doesn't look like they need it. As long as they keep churning out machines and devices that make people's wallets reflexively open, they don't have to pander to the tiny minorities... Not a particularly nice situation to be in, if you're not in the Apple ecosystem, but there's the world we live in, and the world we wish it to be. Only sometimes do those worlds overlap.
JohnTHaller 5y ago
Looks like it's somewhere between my AMD Ryzen 5800X desktop (paid about $800) and a 5900X.
busymom0 5y ago
For someone with more knowledge- are these scores dependant on the OS? Like would it have different scores if it ran Linux?
- timbit42 5y ago
  On macos, if you are running some x64 apps, they are jit'ed and emulated. On Linux, all your repo and manually compiled apps will be compiled for the native CPU so it would be fast.
lvl100 5y ago
I was dead set on getting a new Mac but I think I will opt for Alder Lake. It appears Apple Silicon for desktop will be pretty much constrained to mobile designs and limitations. Perhaps I will revisit if they decide to release M1 Max inside a Mac Mini but I highly doubt that will happen.
ksec 5y ago
I have seen far too many people making comments on MacPro "Pro" Chip. A hypothetical 32 Core CPU and 64 Core GPU is about the max Apple could make in terms of die size reticle limit without going chiplet and TDP limit without some exotic cooling solution. Which means you cant have some imaginary 64 Core CPU and 128 Core GPU. We can now finally have a Mac Cube, where the vast majority of the Cube will simply be a heat sink and it will still be faster than current Intel Mac Pro. I think this chip makes most sense with the A16 design on 4nm next year [1]. Interesting question would be memory, current Mac Pro support 1.5TB. A 16 Channel DDR5 would be required to feed the GPU, but that also means minimum memory on Mac Pro would be 128GB at 8GB per DIMM. One could use HBM on package, but that doesn't provide ECC Memory protection. [1] TSMC 3nm has been postponed in case anyone not paying attention, so the whole roadmap has been shifted by a year. If this still doesn't keep those repeating Moore's law has not died yet I dont know what will.
- grishka 5y ago
  > about the max Apple could make in terms of die size reticle limit without going chiplet I probably have no idea what I'm talking about as I'm a software guy. But — I remember that company that made that crazy ML accelerator where an entire silicon wafer is one chip. How'd they do that? Why can't Apple and others do the same/similar?
  - zbrozek 5y ago
    Cerebras I'd bet it's the plumbing. Getting data in and out, supplying something around 10-100 kiloamps, attaching it to anything without it ripping itself off via thermal expansion, getting the heat out - all of that sounds miserably difficult. Like sure you can do some outrageous and expensive things to make it all work in small quantities and for huge sums of money. But you can't build a mass-market laptop that way. I'd guess that the upper limit with present-day and near-future packaging technology for commodity hardware is ~1000 mm^2.
  - ksec 5y ago
    As mentioned in your other reply. Cerebras . Wafer Scale Engine doesn't break the reticle limit, if you search for a picture on Cerebras, you can still clearly see the square die within the wafer. From a very high level overview, they are basically doing cross interconnect with each die on wafer. Scribe line used to be physical separation for each die, now they built interconnect on top so the whole wafer becomes a huge mesh of AI chip. It works for because you can think of each die as lots of Neutral Engine and cache only. You can easily rework around each process defects and solve the yield problem. And then you have to solve packaging, power and cooling. >Why can't Apple and others do the same/similar? When you have a complex SoC. Not every defect can be worked around, that is why the larger the die the lower the yield. A reason why you see in GPU they fused off certain GPU core and Memory Controller. It isn't because of market segmentation, it is necessity coming from manufacturing. To avoid this they have chiplet. Making each part a small die and interconnect them together. But as mentioned, chiplet isn't a silver bullet. Your design must have chiplet in mind for interconnect with AMD Zen. You cant just dump two pieces of M1 Max together on the same interposer and expect it to work. They could, but it wouldn't be efficient. And that sort of defeat the purpose. An analogy would be asking the current AMD Ryzen APU, which is an SoC with GPU and Memory controller, you stick two of them together and somehow expect it to work 100% faster.
runeks 5y ago
But does it support running x86 Docker images using hardware emulation? This is what's holding me off buying one since I don't know whether to get 16 GB RAM (if it doesn't work) or 32 GB RAM (if it does work).
- ArchOversight 5y ago
  There is no hardware in the M1's for x86 emulation. Rosetta 2 does on the fly translation for JIT and caches translation for x86_864 binaries on first launch. Docker for Mac runs a VM, inside that VM (which is Linux for ARM) if you run an x86_64 docker image it will use qemu to emulate x86_64 and run Linux Intel ELF binaries as if they were ARM. That means that currently using Docker on macOS if there is a native ARM version available for the docker image, it will use that, but it can and will fall back to using x86_64 docker images. That already works as-is. There is no hardware emulation though, it is all QEMU doing the work.
  - runeks 5y ago
    Thank you for the thorough explanation. Why can’t Rosetta 2 do the x86-to-ARM JIT translation inside the “Docker for Mac” VM instead of using the (presumably slower) QEMU emulation? Or is QEMU smart enough to do the same translation that Rosetta 2 does which, if I recall correctly, only loses about 25% performance compared to native x86?
    - ArchOversight 5y ago
      Rosetta 2 is Apple's product that is specifically geared towards translating Darwin binaries. Inside the VM is standard Linux. Linux can't run Rosetta 2 since that is a macOS tool. QEMU emulates a platform on the fly, it does not attempt to rewrite the code to run on ARM and cache that result. QEMU also emulates all the specific quirks of the x86_64 platform, whereas Rosetta 2 does not. It would be neat if Apple open sourced their Rosetta 2 technology and made it more widely available, but at this time there is no option for 3rd parties to use Rosetta 2, especially from within a Linux VM.
  - krunkcoin 5y ago
m15i 5y ago
How will these chips do for training neural nets? The 64 GB RAM would be awesome for larger models, so I’m willing to sacrifice some training speed.
- cschmid 5y ago
  I know this doesn't answer your question, but can I just ask (out of curiosity) why you're training ML models on a laptop?
  - thom 5y ago
    Is this much different than asking why someone would do _any_ work on a laptop?
  - m15i 5y ago
    It’s all about the RAM. 64GB would allow input of larger image sizes and/or nets with more parameters. Right now, the consumer card with the most RAM is the rtx 3090 which is only 24GB, and in my opinion overpriced and inefficient in terms of wattage (~350W). Even the ~$6000 RTX A6000 cards are only 48GB.
    - cschmid 5y ago
      I don't think replacing a workstation with a Macbook because of RAM makes too much sense: If running one minibatch of your model already takes up all the memory you have, where would the rest of your training data sit? In the M1, you don't have a separate main memory. Also, software support for accelerated training on Apple hardware is extremely limited: Out of the main frameworks, only tensorflow seems to target it, and even there, the issues you'll face won't be high on the priority list. I know that nvidia GPUs are very expensive, but if you're really serious about training a large model, the only alternative would be paying rent to Google.
      - m15i 5y ago
        Good points. I look forward to some benchmarks. Just hoping for an alternative to Nvidia sooner than later. Dreaming apple will solve it and offer a 1.5 TB mac pro.
biosed 5y ago
Compared to my gen 1 M1 macbook pro: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10514397?baseline=10496766 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10514397?baseli...
icosahedron 5y ago
I'm not exactly proficient with GeekBenchery, but what I see here is that the M1 Max per core barely outperforms the M1? https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10496766?baseline=10508059 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10496766?baseli...
- paulmd 5y ago
  they're the same cores as the original M1 architecturally, you just get an 8+2 on a Max instead of 4+4... and also an absolutely titanic iGPU, total transistor count is about twice that of a 3090 and almost all of it lives in the iGPU. the only architectural difference between M1 and M1 Max in the CPU cores, besides the different combination of big/little cores, is that the M1 Max goes from quad channel to hexadecimal-channel DDR5 RAM (note a DDR5 channel is half the width of a DDR4 channel, but has longer burst and higher MT/s). Apple's iGPU approach is real simple: unlike a console where you somewhat gimp the CPU by putting it on high-latency GDDR6 (to get enough bandwidth to feed the iGPU), they just put 16 channels of DDR5 on it, basically it's like an octochannel DDR4 server processor in terms of bandwidth. And the CPU also benefits from that as well, at least a little bit, but internally it's the same core design. It's an absolute meme of a design, Apple just does not give a single fuck about cost here, "server class memory configuration"? sure why not, and we'll stack it on the package so it can go in a laptop.
  - vondro 5y ago
    I believe it's LPDDR5, basically a memory chip for smartphones, not DDR5.
    - paulmd 5y ago
      sure, but it's also running at JEDEC either way, it's actually irrelevant to performance, it's just a matter of packaging (obviously for laptops, stacking the packages is more convenient than DIMMs or soldered modules).
- bichiliad 5y ago
  I think this kinda makes sense to me — the M1 Max has the same cores as the M1, just more of them and more of the performant ones, if I understand it right. The fastest work on the fastest core, when only working on a single core, is probably very similar.
lostmsu 5y ago
I will get one if it can run Windows and nothing comparable released by then.
amatecha 5y ago
You can find more results at https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=Apple+M1+Max https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=Apple+M1+Max (it does, broadly, appear to be pretty comparable to Intel i9-11900K https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=Intel+Core+i9-11900K https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=Intel+Core+i9-... )
- newfonewhodis 5y ago
  i9-11900K is 125W TDP, and the M1 is probably nowhere near that (M1 is 10-15W TDP)
  - amatecha 5y ago
    Yeah, that's one of the most mind-blowing (and awesome) things about these comparisons! So cool :D
  - pja 5y ago
    TDP is the max design power of the platform, not the average though. The M1 maxes out at somewhere just under 30W - Anandtech measaured it at 28W after removing the platform power use. The M1Max will probably run somewhere from 40-50W under max CPU load, more if you load the GPU as well. The M1 is a great chip, but it’s not magic - it appears to be approximately 1.5-2x as efficient on a per core basis? Which is about what we’d expect from a process shrunk + decent optimisation work by a very able team. What absolutely isn’t is 10x more efficient. (Yes, TDP has been gamed somewhat by both Intel & AMD, and might not be the absolute max power over very short timescales, but it’s still intended to be the measure by which you scale your cooling system for extended max cpu usage & on that level the M1 is not a 10 W chip.) For most users, this doesn’t matter - Apple has specced the cooling system in their laptops to cope with typical usage so it can run the M1 at full rate for a few minutes, which is plenty to render a web page or do some other UI work. It’s even enough to run most developers compile jobs. But if we’re comparing processors, then comparing the TDP of an Intel or AMD CPU with Apple’s “typical” power usage is misleading, one might even say disengenuous.
dzink 5y ago
A few days ago there were comments on HN that the Geekbench score on M1 Max was run on an operating system not optimized for M1. Has that changed with this one?
boopmaster 5y ago
This is the first bench I believe might be real. i saw 11542 multi core spammed across news sites a couple days back, but it didn’t align with a 1.7x boost to performance (which this result actually does). The single core was 1749 which also didn’t make sense as I’d imagine there’s maybe a tiny bit more TDP per core in the MBP 14 and 16 than the OG 13” M1 mbp. That and it was on macOS v 12.4… which is maybe nonexistent and thus fake? This score here is believable and incredible.
munro 5y ago
Here's the link to the MacBookPro18,2 OpenCL benchmark: * M1 Max OpenCL https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/3551790 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/3551790 [60,167 OpenCL Score] Comparing to my current MacBook Pro (16-inch Late 2019) & my Hetzner AX101 server: * MacBook Pro (16-inch Late 2019) vs M1 Max - CPU https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10496766?baseline=8962907 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10496766?baseli... [single 163.6%, multi 188.8%] * MacBook Pro (16-inch Late 2019) vs M1 Max - OpenCL https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/3551790?baseline=3139756 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/3551790?bas... [180.8%] * Hetzner AX101 vs M1 Max - CPU https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10496766?baseline=9877701 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10496766?baseli... [single 105.0%, multi 86.4%] * NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 vs M1 Max - OpenCL https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/3551790?baseline=3139796 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/3551790?bas... [80.7%] * NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 vs M1 Max - OpenCL https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/3551790?baseline=3554580 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/3551790?bas... [29.0%, boo] I'm surprised the MacBook holds its own against the Hetzner AX101's AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-core CPU! The multi-core SQLite performance surprises me, I would think the M1 Max's NVMe is faster than my server's SAMSUNG MZQL23T8HCLS-00A07.
- css 5y ago
  Apple compared the M1 Max to the 3080 in the Razer Blade 15 Advanced, saying it outperforms the Nvdia’s GPU [0], but Geekbench seems to disagree [1]. [0]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/10/introducing-m1-pro-and-m1-max-the-most-powerful-chips-apple-has-ever-built/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/10/introducing-m1-pro-an... [1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/3551790?baseline=2747252 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/3551790?bas...
  - interpol_p 5y ago
    I wonder what they were comparing. The Geekbench result is for an OpenCL benchmark, if they were using Metal Compute on the M1 that may explain the different results
  - 5y ago
varjag 5y ago
Someone needs to come up with realistic Mac benchmarks. Like 'seconds it takes for Finder beachball to disappear'. At this metric my M1 sees no improvement over my MB12.
- bborud 5y ago
  Beachball disappears when Apple's developers learn to write asynchronous code. (You can't blaame the hardware for programming decisions that are fundamentally slow or stupid).
EvgeniyZh 5y ago
Top intel mobile processor appears to be https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10431820 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10431820 M1 Max gives 9% boost for single-core and 34% for multicore, with similar or larger (?) TDP -- Intel is 35-45 W, M1 Max is 60W but I assume some of it (a lot?) goes to GPU. Impressive, but probably wouldn't be called revolution if came from Intel.
- Weryj 5y ago
  At first glace yeah, but that's 45W at 2.5Ghz, but TDP isn't the power rating of the CPU. That benchmark lists the Intel CPU as up to 4.9Ghz, I would say it's actual power draw was closer to the 100W mark for CPU only.
  - EvgeniyZh 5y ago
    4.9 GHz should be single-core max freq, not applicable in multicore benchmark. All-core turbo is lower, but also AFAIK there is a limit on time it run on this freq (tau for PL2, i think around half a minute by default).
    - klelatti 5y ago
      Is there any reason why the Intel CPU wouldn’t run at 4.9 GHz for the single core benchmark though - whilst the M1 would be limited to a much lower frequency which it can sustain for much longer?
      - EvgeniyZh 5y ago
        I think, but I'm not 100% sure, that limits are on overall TDP, i.e., single-core workloaad can run on turbo indefinitely. Then aalso I'd assume benchmarks are much longer than any reasonable value of tau which means it integrates out (i.e., Intel performance may be higher in short-term). Edit: that is probably one of the reasons single-core gap is smaller
        5y ago
jccalhoun 5y ago
Is geekbench seen as a valid score? It seems that on the pc hardware sites and youtube channels I frequent that they don't seem to mention it. The only time I seem to see it is for mac stuff.
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  It is one of the few cross-platform benchmarks that can be run on both PCs and Macs, as well as iOS, Android, and Linux.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  Not really. It's nice to run the same benchmark on all platforms but most hardware sites run a game demo that's easily repeatable and take an fps reading or run Cinebench which renders a scene.
raylad 5y ago
Compared to the late 2020 Macbook Air: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10508178?baseline=10496766 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10508178?baseli...
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  This confirms that single-core performance is essentially the same as the basic M1.
simonebrunozzi 5y ago
Wondering if some of the avid videogamers, in need for powerful GPUs, will consider Macbook Pros with M1 Pro or Max as a good option. AFAIK, some of the most popular videogames run on Mac too.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  Almost none of the most popular actually. No Fortnite no warzone
- lghh 5y ago
  Some, but not nearly enough.
DisjointedHunt 5y ago
I’m not sure how Geekbench browser tests hold up to real world usage, but note that Apples ecosystem is WAY different compared to x86. For starters, the chip isn’t general purpose compute, it’s more of an ASIC that is optimized to run the OS abstractions available through the official APIs (Think on screen animation such as rendering an image or detecting things in it. On x86, you implement the code and in some cases, proprietary libraries such as Intels MKL make it seemingly faster to run. On Apple Silicon, for such common use cases there are DEDICATED chip areas. Thus, an ASIC)
badhombres 5y ago
I'm curios on the difference between the 8 cores and 10 cores for the M1 Pro. I'm definitely not going to get the Max, I'm just not the user that needs the GPU's
spitfire 5y ago
What am I missing here? The marketing presentations spoke about 200GB/sec and 400GB/sec parts. Existing CPU's generally have 10s of GB/sec. But I see these parts beating out existing parts by small margins - 100% at best. Where is all that bandwidth going? Are none of these synthetic benchmarks stressing memory IO that much? Surely compression should benefit from 400GB/sec bandwidth? This also raises the question how are those multiple memory channels laid out? Sequentually? Stripped? Bitwise, byte wise or word stripped?
- hajile 5y ago
  They have 5.2 and 10.4 TFLOPS of GPU power to feed in addition to 10 very wide cores.
- kllrnohj 5y ago
  The SoC having 400GB/s of memory bandwidth doesn't mean that any individual CPU core can saturate 400GB/s of memory bandwidth (or even if all the CPU cores combined can achieve that). The SoC's memory bus is also feeding the GPU, and GPUs tend to be _very_ memory bandwidth hungry (see other discreet GPUs pushing over 1TB/s of memory bandwidth). The CPU performance, even where memory IO limited, is more likely limited by how well it can prefetch memory and how many in-flight reads & writes it can do. A straight memcpy benchmark might be part of this suite, but that'd also be basically the only workload where a CPU core (or multiple) could come anywhere close to hitting 400GB/s of bandwidth. Otherwise memory _latency_ will be the bigger memory IO limitation for the CPUs, and that likely hasn't drastically changed with the new M1 Pros & Max's (there may be some cache layout changes which would shift some of the numbers, but DRAM latency is likely unchanged) For an example of this in a different product: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-graviton2-arm-against-intel-and-amd/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav... A single graviton2 CPU can "only" achieve 18-36GB/s of memory bandwidth even though the package in total can hit 200GB/s
  - _kbh_ 5y ago
    A single firestorm (performance) m1 core in the m1 Mac mini can sustain ~60Gb/s read from ram. I have no doubt that 8 of them could come close to if not entirely saturate 400GB/s. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
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robertwt7 5y ago
Is that supposed to be fast guys? Isn't that still slower than some ryzen 5 5600x? (my pc uses this but below is not my benchmark) https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/8238216 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/8238216 I'm not sure how fast or good is that number.. But i've heard good things about m1 and planning to probably upgrade. edit: Not sure what's with the downvotes, i'm genuinely curious. I'm in the apple ecosystem with many apple products, windows pc, basically a tech enthusiast without any hate towards 1 brand. geez
- mciancia 5y ago
  > Base Frequency 4.72 GHz > Maximum Frequency 6.03 GHz This was seriously overclocked, wouldn't be surprised if with liquid nitrogen. So probably poor comparison to laptop CPU ;)
  - jjcon 5y ago
    We're also seeing slower m1max benchmarks though https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10476727 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10476727
  - robertwt7 5y ago
    Ah yes that's true, didn't realise it was overclocked. Probably good to compare to those ryzen in laptop..
- defaultname 5y ago
  It's very fast for a mobile form factor, and still very fast for a desktop processor. The benchmark you linked is grossly overclocked, as are many others people have linked throughout this thread. Which is fundamentally the problem with the Geekbench browser and people searching around for something to prove a point, when the numbers on there are completely unverified (and sometimes wholly fictitious), unproven, and often under ridiculous scenarios. Use actual reviews from credible reviewers and extract the GB results from that. e.g. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-dive-review-5950x-5900x-5800x-and-5700x-tested/17 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di... And FWIW, I don't even put any credibility on these M1 results. I'll just wait until Anandtech or someone similar has a real review with competently created, reproducible benchmarks.
sydthrowaway 5y ago
Wondering whether it will be more profitable to work for AMD or APPLE in the next few years?

488 points by mv9 5y ago

I'm envious. I like the hardware a lot. But at the same time, I can't help but think "This has to be the most powerful computer ever built to run a browser and a terminal". I can't run PyTorch with acceleration, I can't use Numba, or CUDA. It seems it will soon be possible to use Blender, which for my artsy side is a plus, and I know that a few of the other design tools I use work on MacOS with varying degrees of acceleration, so there is that.

sudhirj 5y ago
These are not insurmountable, probably only a matter of time. Tensorflow has already been ported and optimised. https://blog.tensorflow.org/2020/11/accelerating-tensorflow-performance-on-mac.html https://blog.tensorflow.org/2020/11/accelerating-tensorflow-...
ramraj07 5y ago
It’s obviously not for you, yet, then? People who need PyTorch or numba or cuda are a vanishing minority even in the tech scene.

petersellers 5y ago

Pretty impressive, all things considered. Looks like it's roughly on par with an AMD 5800X, which is a Desktop CPU with 8C/16T and a 105W TDP.

Thaxll 5y ago
5800x seems 20% faster for single core: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/5874365 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/5874365 so def not on part.
- tbob22 5y ago
  That's certainly overclocked or very high PBO offsets, at stock the 5800x gets around 1700-1800 ST.
- YetAnotherNick 5y ago
  This is the official score: https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-7-5800x https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-7-5800x
  - tbob22 5y ago
    Yeah, that looks correct. With faster ram and PBO it should hit closer to 1800. Here is my 5600x with PBO enabled and 3800MT/s CL16 DDR4 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10516280 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10516280 5800x would have a max clock of 4950mhz with PBO
- hajile 5y ago
  But if you run TWO single-threaded workloads at once, the clocks dial WAY back. Meanwhile, the M1 can keep all cores at 3.2GHz pretty much indefinitely.
mhh__ 5y ago
Impressive but unbelievably expensive considering what will actually be run on it. I kind of want one, but the 5800x for example is about 10x less expensive than a specced out MacBook Pro
- megablast 5y ago
  Are you comparing the price of a chip to a laptop??
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    Yes. If I bought one of these it would never actually move so I don't actually mind the comparison all that much for my personal use case, obviously it isn't apples to oranges but my point is that this performance is not free.
    - hwita 5y ago
      Then perhaps you may want to wait for Apple to release a desktop-class processor to make the comparison, perhaps early next year?
      - lostmsu 5y ago
        Perhaps. AMD should also release 5nm processors by then too.
      - yazaddaruvala 5y ago
        Its not clear to me that Apple will make a desktop-class processor. The unit economics likely don't make sense for them. All of Apple's innovation seems to be towards better and cheaper AR/VR hardware. Desktop-class processors would be a distraction for them. And with all of the top cloud players building custom silicon these days, there is little room for Apple to sell CPUs to the server market even if they were inclined (which they are not). The only strategic Apple vertical that might align with desktop-class CPUs is the Apple Car initiative and specifically self-driving. Dedicated audio/image/video processing and inference focused hardware could better empower creatives for things like VFX or post-processing or media in general. However, its not clear to me that is enough of a market for Apple's unit economics compared with more iDevice / MacBook sales.
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jb1991 5y ago

Would like to see the Metal benchmark too, but doesn't appear yet on the Geekbench Metal page. That would be interesting to see how Geekbench scores it against many discreet GPUs.

louwrentius 5y ago

The single core performance is still the same as the M1, so frankly, for a laptop that's awesome, but I wish single core performance could hit the AMD Ryzen scores.

gjsman-1000 5y ago
Depends what benchmark you ask. According to Passmark, the M1 is the best single core CPU no question.

habitue 5y ago

Today's the day when people actually check Apple's claims with a graph that didn't originate inside Apple. Remember the reality distortion field guys?

bullen 5y ago

Where are the Gflops/W?

aledthemathguy 5y ago

you guys nitty grit. it's all about efficiency.

Osiris 5y ago

Do we know of the M1 Max in the MacBook can sustain this level of performance without thermal throttling? Mobile phones often have this issue where the benchmark looks gear until you run it for 15 minutes and the thermal throttling kicks in and kills the performance. Thermal throttling is something I'd like to understand when comparing these against a desktop CPU. For example, I just bought a 5900X and the Geekbench scores are very similar. My assumption is that the 5900X will be able to sustain full boost speeds indefinitely because of the additional cooling. I don't know if the MacBook can do the same. If it can sustain mac performance without overheating inside the laptop form factor that'll definitely be a big win for Apple.

jb1991 5y ago
They increased the thermal cooling area inside the laptop by something like 60% if I recall, it’s a whole new design for temperature control. But they were quick to add that most of the time the fans will still not be needed because the chip rarely gets warm enough to require that.

headgasket 5y ago

IMHO, ditching Intel is a smart move for apple but a bad one for hackers. I’m sticking with older intel mbps until decent emulation scores are achieved with qemu, and probably further down the line. Hypervisors (say VBox proxmox combo) are so useful when you have to experiment/test with other platforms. Happy to see HDMI and escape key back tho, and it looks like we’ll even get a Target Display Mode equivalent! We’ll be back to my 2015 setup.:-) My ideal M1 mbp would be this new one with 64gb ram but with a second cheap mid tier i5 with 16gb dedicated, and a rtx2070(cmon NVdia has Cuda —we need that) with 8gb, connected via internal tb3. I don’t care that it would be 700g heavier and a bit bigger or have less battery life when used to the max (idled chips should not eat a lot). It terms of bare costs thats maybe 1000$ more silicon, but it’s a world more of possibilities. What’s wrong with dedicated gpu offering— not for everyone but hackers love it and help the aura. And —-please—- bring back a modular slot (m2?) for (additional?) storage! (Also good for hackers but not for Apple)

alexktz 5y ago
Target display mode on the laptop? Where'd you see that?
- headgasket 5y ago
  I read that Monterrey will Have an AirPlay based feature to do something like TDM. www.macrumors.com/2021/06/09/airplay-mac-to-mac-external-display/amp/

easygenes 5y ago

This puts it at about 3/4 the performance of a 5950X. Not bad for mobile.

oofbey 5y ago

If I’m reading this right, it’s only a tiny bit faster than the existing M1 on single core. 1780 vs 1720 or so. For a lot of tasks, single core is what really matters.

rbanffy 5y ago

All this makes me want to see Geekbench ported to other binary architectures. I'd love to see how POWER9 and POWER10 compare to Xeons and EPYCs.

mindvirus 5y ago

I ordered an M1 Max MacBook, really looking forward to it. It looks like the battery life is fantastic, and it's quiet and cool. Given that, what are some reasons Apple might not have upped the wattage for an even faster chip? Is it just that they are so far ahead of the competition, and these are things that can't easily be matched (fanless operation, long battery life), or is there some physical reason they wouldn't want to run the chip hotter?

Kalanos 5y ago

Hmm. M1 Max = 1783 Single-Core Score 12693 Multi-Core Score Intel Core i9-9900X 3500 MHz (10 cores) October 20th, 2021 = Single-Core Score 1078 Multi-Core Score 11305

reacharavindh 5y ago

What did I miss? Dell XPS 15 with intel CPU has way higher scores… is Geekbench not capable of working correctly on Apple Silicon? https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/16376678 https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/16376678

unicornfinder 5y ago
That's a Geekbench v4 score, which isn't comparable to a Geekbench v5 score. You can see the same laptop on Geekbench v5 here, where it scores much, much lower than the M1: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10506812 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10506812
- jjcm 5y ago
  For those that can't load and are curious, the M1 Max scores about 2x the Intel Core i7-11800H in the Dell laptop on both single core and multi core scores.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    It also costs twice as much, so I should hope I'm getting something for the money.
  - jkeddo 5y ago
    I don't think that was a good sample, most of the XPS 15's I see have a much higher single thread score, almost double the one linked above: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10491562 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10491562
    - snuser 5y ago
      It looks like the original as been updated, the differences don't seem very drastic especially when you consider what the SKU's w/ the m1 max cost guess it's about a 1.5-2x difference in battery life though
- jkeddo 5y ago

hammock 5y ago

Single core regular M1 Macbook about the same. Multicore the Max is a lot higher.

tyingq 5y ago
Looks not the same to me: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10508124?baseline=10496766 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10508124?baseli... Did I pick the wrong regular M1 Macbook? Edit: Hmm. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10508059?baseline=10496766 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10508059?baseli... I guess Geekbench is a little unpredictable? And it looks like HN is pushing their capacity...
- hammock 5y ago
  Hmm not sure what I was looking at before, that site is not the easiest to navigate.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    My second link shows what you're talking about. I'm not sure which result to trust.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Geekbench has always been a little unpredictable. It was most famously skewed quite heavily in Apple's favor before Geekbench 4, and even the modern scores are pretty opaque. I'd wait to see real-world performance metrics out of it.
hbOY5ENiZloUfnZ 5y ago
It should be about the same. It is the same micro-architecture which is why they are still called M1. There are just more of the same cores.

maxpert 5y ago

Site not loading for me :(

e0m 5y ago

Wow does much better than Geekbench's prior top processor (https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks) the Intel Core i9-11900K (https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i9-11900k https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i9-11900...). 10,997 for Intel i9 vs 12,693 for M1 Max

systemvoltage 5y ago
Per core performance is the most interesting metric. Edit: for relative comparison between CPUs, per core metric is the most interesting unless you also account for heat, price and many other factors. Comparing a 56-core CPU with 10-core M1 is a meaningless comparison.
- 5faulker 5y ago
  Just when you think things hit the top, another kid's out of the town.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  Not when building large software projects.
  - gchokov 5y ago
    Like… everyone builds large projects all the time?
    - akmarinov 5y ago
      If you don’t then you don’t really need the top end do you?
      - ajuc 5y ago
        Most people who buy fast cars don't need them and it's the same with computers.

parhamn 5y ago

Anyone know how this compares to the M1 Pro? Curious if it's worth the additional $400. The search doesn't seem to allow exact matches.

SegOnMyFault 5y ago
Should be the same as the difference between the max and the pro lies in the GPU core count.
- ivalm 5y ago
  Memory bandwidth as well.
- meepmorp 5y ago
  No, the Max has twice the memory bandwidth as well - 200GB/s vs 400 GB/s, which will have a big impact on anything memory bound.
  - InvaderFizz 5y ago
    How much and on what is the question. I'm not in the market for a laptop, so I can wait and see. That said, if Apple releases a MacMini M1 Max, I'll probably buy it.
    - meepmorp 5y ago
      Yeah, I would've already ordered a MaxMini if it existed. Maybe next year.
  - microtonal 5y ago
    We have to see how much it matters in practice, since the M1 Max has roughly the same single threaded score as the M1.
czbond 5y ago
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10479712 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10479712

jmartrican 5y ago

Anyone know the score for Intel 12th gen Alder Lake?

mhh__ 5y ago
I can't check for you due to hug but the 12900K was clocking in at about 1900 ST IIRC Edit: Leaving this up so I can be corrected, don't think I have the right figure.
- gigatexal 5y ago
  If true I’d be interested to see what that is in points per watt.
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    The points per watt is probably going to be crap but equally I don't care all that much. One thing as well is that there are always headlines complaining about power usage, but the figures are nearly always from extreme stress tests which basically fully saturate the execution units. Geekbench is slightly different to those stresses so not sure.
    - gigatexal 5y ago
      Sure but I’m only asking for Points per watt to use as a baseline for testing Apple’s claims.
      - mhh__ 5y ago
        Peak wattage is apparently 330W on a super heavy test, not really sure how to extrapolate that to geekbench.
        jeffbee 5y ago
        Wow, there's a power virus for Alder Lake client that can make it draw 330W? Reference?

websap 5y ago

Looks like Geekbench just got the HN bug of death.

tambourine_man 5y ago

Site is under heavy load: 1783 Single-Core Score 12693 Multi-Core Score

YetAnotherNick 5y ago
For comparison, M1 results: 1705 Single core, 7382 multi core
- M4R5H4LL 5y ago
  For comparison, Mac Pro (Late 2019) 16-core: 1104 Single-Core Score, 15078 Multi-Core Score
  - clarkmoreno 5y ago
    thank you

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bhouston 5y ago

Where is the graphics test? The M1 Max versus an NVIDIA 3080 or similar?

mhh__ 5y ago
I'm waiting to be corrected by someone who knows GPU architecture better than me but as far as I can tell the synthetic benchmarks can trade blows with a 3070 or 80 (mobile), but the actual gaming performance isn't going to be as rosy. Also recall that very few games needing that performance actually work on MacOS
- smoldesu 5y ago
  The gaming performance will be CPU-bottlenecked. Without proper Wine/DXVK support, they have to settle for interpreted HLE or dynamic recompilation, neither of which are very feasible on modern CPUs, much less ARM chips.
  - josephg 5y ago
    From all reports, rosetta2 performs remarkably well. Apparently they added special hardware support for some x86 features to improve the performance of dynamically recompiled code.
- schleck8 5y ago
  Does someone know how much VRAM the M1X has? Because I bet it's far less than a 3070 or 3080.
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    The memory is unified, and very high bandwidth. No idea what that means in practice, guess we'll find out.
    - pornel 5y ago
      It's very high bandwidth for a CPU, but not that great for a GPU (400GB/s vs 440GB/s in 3070 and 980GB/s in 3090).

ur-whale 5y ago

How does that compare to top of the line AMD Ryzen latest gen (site is dead for me right now)?

tbob22 5y ago
Single core is similar to the 5900x but multicore is more in line with 3900x. Quite impressive for a laptop, I'm sure the power consumption will be much higher compared to the M1 but likely no where near desktop parts.

Flatcircle 5y ago

How does this compare to a Mac Pro for video editing

vineyardmike 5y ago
Should be better. The discussed how it was even better than MacPro with afterburner.

launchiterate 5y ago

So can someone build a mini cloud service with these machines?

diebeforei485 5y ago

I'm in the situation where I really want to pre-order a 14", but I have no idea if going with the base model would be a mistake. Would upgrading to 32GB RAM make Xcode faster? Or would it be a waste of $400?

thebean11 5y ago
16GB of RAM seems so low in 2021. OTOH, hard drives are so fast on these things that maybe 16 is good enough with the SSD as overflow. I ended up shelling out the extra $400 for 32GB, but didn't feel great about it!
- bluedays 5y ago
  On the other hand I've been running 16GB of ram for a while and I can't conceive of a reason why I would need more. 32GB seems like overkill. What would you do with all of that ram? Open more tabs?
  - darkmatterrat 5y ago
    I've hit 48gb of ram while developing on Debian. Granted I am running about 10 docker containers and 3 IDEs. It depends what you are doing.
  - t-writescode 5y ago
    Compilation, graphics work, heavy-weight IDEs And, if you're spinning on 16GB ram on an M1, you might be eating through the SSD powering your swap space and not know it.
    - EugeneOZ 5y ago
      indeed. From my experience, I see that my MBA uses swap sometimes, but I can't notice it. Still, I want to avoid it.
  - thebean11 5y ago
    Looking at activity monitor, I'm currently using ~19GB, doing nothing special (IntelliJ, 15 chrome tabs, Spotify, Slack). Docker Desktop was using 8GB before I killed it. And this is on an Intel Mac so it doesn't include GPU memory usage I believe, which is shared in M1 Macs. This likely isn't a perfect metric, if I were closer to the limit I think MacOS would get more aggressive about compression and offloading stuff to disk but still.

metahost 5y ago

This is the comparison to a mid 2015 15" MacBook Pro for anyone who is curios: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10513492?baseline=10496766 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10513492?baseli... Summary: single core performance gain is 2x whereas multi-core performance gain is 4x.

grishka 5y ago
Comparison with the 2012 macbook I'm typing this on: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10496766?baseline=10517353 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10496766?baseli... I waited for these to come out for a long time, and now "should I upgrade" isn't even a question. It's a "shut up and take my money" situation at this point, but they aren't even taking preorders over here yet. I mean, it could probably run a browser, several electron apps, AND android studio at the same time, how cool is that?!
hazeii 5y ago
Over 6 years, 2x the performance in single-core and 4x (for 2.5x the cores, depending how you count) seems surprisingly low compared to stuff I've read (not experienced yet) with the M1.
- jermaustin1 5y ago
  I think a lot of the perceivable speedup in M1 Macs is less to do with these benchmarks and more to do with optimizing the OS and Apple software for the M1 and the various accelerators on the SoC (video encoding and ML).
  - inkyoto 5y ago
    > perceivable speedup in M1 Macs Perception is key here. Of course M1's are perceived as being faster because: - video camera encoding/decoding is offloaded to a dedicated processor; - disk encryption is offloaded to a dedicated processor; - rendering is offloaded to dedicated GPU's; - matrix multiplication is offloaded to dedicated matrix multiplication processors (neural engines); - no wasteful memory transfers (even though the memory bus is 2048 bit wide anyway) across dedicated processors. Kind of like channel processors running channel programs in IBM mainframes, brought to a mainstream ultraportable laptop. And, on top of that, the screen that drops the refresh rate by a factor of 6 when there is no need to refresh the picture too often. Ironically, the CPU is left with pretty much one job to do: to compute. It is possible to get fast compilation times whilst doing all of the above at once. Or have an app that does all of the above at once, too (no, it won't save Microsoft Teams). And be power efficient, too; hence a long battery life and an Apple marketing team brouhaha: «We can do this all day». They are right – they can actually do all of that, and they can brag about it now because they have a full list from the above fulfilled. System performance is a holistic matter, not just single/multicore comparisons oftetimes taken out of the context.

jkeddo 5y ago

One big thing to consider is that this is just the first m1 Max Geekbench score, compared against the world's greatest 11900Ks. Most 11900K's are nowhere near the levels of the top preforming one. Once Apple starts shipping M1 Max in volume, and as TSMC yields get better, you will see "golden chips" slowly start to score even higher than this one.

cauk 5y ago
Golden chips?
- spacedcowboy 5y ago
  In every manufacturing process there are always chips that perform better than others. They all reach the "bin" that they're designed for, but the actual design is for higher than that, so that even imperfect chips can perform at the required level. The corollary of that is that there are some chips that perform better than the design parameters would have you expect, they're easier to overclock and get higher speeds from. These are the "golden" chips. Having said that, it's not clear to me that the M1* will do that, I don't know if Apple self-tune the chips on boot to extract the best performance, or they just slap in a standard clock-rate and anything that can meet it, does. I'd expect the latter, tbh. It's a lot easier, and it means there's less variation between devices which has lots of knock-on benefits to QA and the company in general, even if it means users can't overclock.
- trenchgun 5y ago
  There are slight variations in materials, processes, etc. End result: some chips just end up being better than others.

blakesterz 5y ago

I just can't figure out what I'm missing on the "M1 is so fast" side of things. For years I worked* on an Ubuntu desktop machine I built myself. Early this year I switched to a brand new M1 mini and this this is slower and less reliable than the thing I built myself that runs Ubuntu. My Ubuntu machine had a few little issues every no and then. My Mini has weird bugs all the time. e.g. Green Screen Crashes when I have a thumbdrive plugged in. Won't wake from sleep. Loses bluetooth randomly. Not at all what I'd expect from something built by the company with unlimited funds. I would expect those issues from the Ubuntu box, but the problems were small on that thing. *Work... Docker, Ansible, Rails apps, nothing that requires amazing super power. Everything just runs slower.

majormajor 5y ago
Running Docker on a Mac vs on Linux is going to be a subpar experience compared to a native x86 Linux box. It would take a LOT to magic around that.
dcolkitt 5y ago
MacOS just seems to have a lot of stability problems related to peripherals. I don’t think it’s specific to M1. Even on my late-era Intel MBP, Bluetooth and USB often triggers a kernel panic.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  When I got my first MacBook Pro, there was actually bug in iPhone USB Tethering that caused a guaranteed kernel panic if you tried to do it. Managed to crash my laptop a few times with my iPhone 3GS.
perryizgr8 5y ago
The Intel macs were extremely slow. Even a core i9 16 inch ran hot and noisy. A small xps 13 felt much faster in general use. I don't know if this was deliberate by Apple or just a side effect of the extremely anemic cooling. So all those people who had been using macbooks felt the speed when they used a decently fast laptop. Everybody else knows that M1 laptops are fast, like non-apple laptops have been for quite some time.

celsoazevedo 5y ago

- https://web.archive.org/web/20211020175422if_/https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10496766 https://web.archive.org/web/20211020175422if_/https://browse... - https://archive.md/zQAC3 https://archive.md/zQAC3

starfallg 5y ago

Pretty underwhelming from a pure performance standpoint after all the hype from the launch. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/singlecore https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/singlecore

marcodiego 5y ago

I wonder what Asahi Linux devs can show us.

IceWreck 5y ago

Why does Apple not open up their hardware to other operating systems like Linux. They will already get our money from the hardware purchases, what more do they want. I know Asahi Linux exists but without Apple's (driver) support it will never reach macOS on M1 level performance. (If someone disagrees, please compare Nouveau with proprietary Nvidia drivers.)

krunkcoin 5y ago
They did open up their hardware to other operating systems: they engineered a feature into their secure boot system which allows a Mac's owner to attest (with physical presence required) that they'd like to run a kernel not signed by Apple. That's the door Asahi Linux uses. It isn't there on iOS devices, even those also based on M1. Everything else you're asking for would require them to spend significantly more money and/or engineering resources on supporting the port, and that just doesn't seem like a thing Apple's senior management would go for.
basisword 5y ago
As cool as that would be, why would they? I mean what do they have to gain from it? Maybe a few more Linux users will buy MacBook's but not enough to impact their bottom line. Plus those users wouldn't be part of the Apple ecosystem and at least since the iPod Apple's goal has been bringing you into the ecosystem.
- someguydave 5y ago
  Apple could gain some trust and goodwill from the technical user base they have been alienating for 10 years
  - presentation 5y ago
    As though programmers don't use Macs, at least in SV they're by far the device of choice.
  - spacedcowboy 5y ago
    shrug doesn't look like they need it. As long as they keep churning out machines and devices that make people's wallets reflexively open, they don't have to pander to the tiny minorities... Not a particularly nice situation to be in, if you're not in the Apple ecosystem, but there's the world we live in, and the world we wish it to be. Only sometimes do those worlds overlap.

JohnTHaller 5y ago

Looks like it's somewhere between my AMD Ryzen 5800X desktop (paid about $800) and a 5900X.

busymom0 5y ago

For someone with more knowledge- are these scores dependant on the OS? Like would it have different scores if it ran Linux?

timbit42 5y ago
On macos, if you are running some x64 apps, they are jit'ed and emulated. On Linux, all your repo and manually compiled apps will be compiled for the native CPU so it would be fast.

lvl100 5y ago

I was dead set on getting a new Mac but I think I will opt for Alder Lake. It appears Apple Silicon for desktop will be pretty much constrained to mobile designs and limitations. Perhaps I will revisit if they decide to release M1 Max inside a Mac Mini but I highly doubt that will happen.

ksec 5y ago

I have seen far too many people making comments on MacPro "Pro" Chip. A hypothetical 32 Core CPU and 64 Core GPU is about the max Apple could make in terms of die size reticle limit without going chiplet and TDP limit without some exotic cooling solution. Which means you cant have some imaginary 64 Core CPU and 128 Core GPU. We can now finally have a Mac Cube, where the vast majority of the Cube will simply be a heat sink and it will still be faster than current Intel Mac Pro. I think this chip makes most sense with the A16 design on 4nm next year [1]. Interesting question would be memory, current Mac Pro support 1.5TB. A 16 Channel DDR5 would be required to feed the GPU, but that also means minimum memory on Mac Pro would be 128GB at 8GB per DIMM. One could use HBM on package, but that doesn't provide ECC Memory protection. [1] TSMC 3nm has been postponed in case anyone not paying attention, so the whole roadmap has been shifted by a year. If this still doesn't keep those repeating Moore's law has not died yet I dont know what will.

grishka 5y ago
> about the max Apple could make in terms of die size reticle limit without going chiplet I probably have no idea what I'm talking about as I'm a software guy. But — I remember that company that made that crazy ML accelerator where an entire silicon wafer is one chip. How'd they do that? Why can't Apple and others do the same/similar?
- zbrozek 5y ago
  Cerebras I'd bet it's the plumbing. Getting data in and out, supplying something around 10-100 kiloamps, attaching it to anything without it ripping itself off via thermal expansion, getting the heat out - all of that sounds miserably difficult. Like sure you can do some outrageous and expensive things to make it all work in small quantities and for huge sums of money. But you can't build a mass-market laptop that way. I'd guess that the upper limit with present-day and near-future packaging technology for commodity hardware is ~1000 mm^2.
- ksec 5y ago
  As mentioned in your other reply. Cerebras . Wafer Scale Engine doesn't break the reticle limit, if you search for a picture on Cerebras, you can still clearly see the square die within the wafer. From a very high level overview, they are basically doing cross interconnect with each die on wafer. Scribe line used to be physical separation for each die, now they built interconnect on top so the whole wafer becomes a huge mesh of AI chip. It works for because you can think of each die as lots of Neutral Engine and cache only. You can easily rework around each process defects and solve the yield problem. And then you have to solve packaging, power and cooling. >Why can't Apple and others do the same/similar? When you have a complex SoC. Not every defect can be worked around, that is why the larger the die the lower the yield. A reason why you see in GPU they fused off certain GPU core and Memory Controller. It isn't because of market segmentation, it is necessity coming from manufacturing. To avoid this they have chiplet. Making each part a small die and interconnect them together. But as mentioned, chiplet isn't a silver bullet. Your design must have chiplet in mind for interconnect with AMD Zen. You cant just dump two pieces of M1 Max together on the same interposer and expect it to work. They could, but it wouldn't be efficient. And that sort of defeat the purpose. An analogy would be asking the current AMD Ryzen APU, which is an SoC with GPU and Memory controller, you stick two of them together and somehow expect it to work 100% faster.

runeks 5y ago

But does it support running x86 Docker images using hardware emulation? This is what's holding me off buying one since I don't know whether to get 16 GB RAM (if it doesn't work) or 32 GB RAM (if it does work).

ArchOversight 5y ago
There is no hardware in the M1's for x86 emulation. Rosetta 2 does on the fly translation for JIT and caches translation for x86_864 binaries on first launch. Docker for Mac runs a VM, inside that VM (which is Linux for ARM) if you run an x86_64 docker image it will use qemu to emulate x86_64 and run Linux Intel ELF binaries as if they were ARM. That means that currently using Docker on macOS if there is a native ARM version available for the docker image, it will use that, but it can and will fall back to using x86_64 docker images. That already works as-is. There is no hardware emulation though, it is all QEMU doing the work.
- runeks 5y ago
  Thank you for the thorough explanation. Why can’t Rosetta 2 do the x86-to-ARM JIT translation inside the “Docker for Mac” VM instead of using the (presumably slower) QEMU emulation? Or is QEMU smart enough to do the same translation that Rosetta 2 does which, if I recall correctly, only loses about 25% performance compared to native x86?
  - ArchOversight 5y ago
    Rosetta 2 is Apple's product that is specifically geared towards translating Darwin binaries. Inside the VM is standard Linux. Linux can't run Rosetta 2 since that is a macOS tool. QEMU emulates a platform on the fly, it does not attempt to rewrite the code to run on ARM and cache that result. QEMU also emulates all the specific quirks of the x86_64 platform, whereas Rosetta 2 does not. It would be neat if Apple open sourced their Rosetta 2 technology and made it more widely available, but at this time there is no option for 3rd parties to use Rosetta 2, especially from within a Linux VM.
- krunkcoin 5y ago

m15i 5y ago

How will these chips do for training neural nets? The 64 GB RAM would be awesome for larger models, so I’m willing to sacrifice some training speed.

cschmid 5y ago
I know this doesn't answer your question, but can I just ask (out of curiosity) why you're training ML models on a laptop?
- thom 5y ago
  Is this much different than asking why someone would do _any_ work on a laptop?
- m15i 5y ago
  It’s all about the RAM. 64GB would allow input of larger image sizes and/or nets with more parameters. Right now, the consumer card with the most RAM is the rtx 3090 which is only 24GB, and in my opinion overpriced and inefficient in terms of wattage (~350W). Even the ~$6000 RTX A6000 cards are only 48GB.
  - cschmid 5y ago
    I don't think replacing a workstation with a Macbook because of RAM makes too much sense: If running one minibatch of your model already takes up all the memory you have, where would the rest of your training data sit? In the M1, you don't have a separate main memory. Also, software support for accelerated training on Apple hardware is extremely limited: Out of the main frameworks, only tensorflow seems to target it, and even there, the issues you'll face won't be high on the priority list. I know that nvidia GPUs are very expensive, but if you're really serious about training a large model, the only alternative would be paying rent to Google.
    - m15i 5y ago
      Good points. I look forward to some benchmarks. Just hoping for an alternative to Nvidia sooner than later. Dreaming apple will solve it and offer a 1.5 TB mac pro.

biosed 5y ago

Compared to my gen 1 M1 macbook pro: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10514397?baseline=10496766 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10514397?baseli...

icosahedron 5y ago

I'm not exactly proficient with GeekBenchery, but what I see here is that the M1 Max per core barely outperforms the M1? https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10496766?baseline=10508059 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10496766?baseli...

paulmd 5y ago
they're the same cores as the original M1 architecturally, you just get an 8+2 on a Max instead of 4+4... and also an absolutely titanic iGPU, total transistor count is about twice that of a 3090 and almost all of it lives in the iGPU. the only architectural difference between M1 and M1 Max in the CPU cores, besides the different combination of big/little cores, is that the M1 Max goes from quad channel to hexadecimal-channel DDR5 RAM (note a DDR5 channel is half the width of a DDR4 channel, but has longer burst and higher MT/s). Apple's iGPU approach is real simple: unlike a console where you somewhat gimp the CPU by putting it on high-latency GDDR6 (to get enough bandwidth to feed the iGPU), they just put 16 channels of DDR5 on it, basically it's like an octochannel DDR4 server processor in terms of bandwidth. And the CPU also benefits from that as well, at least a little bit, but internally it's the same core design. It's an absolute meme of a design, Apple just does not give a single fuck about cost here, "server class memory configuration"? sure why not, and we'll stack it on the package so it can go in a laptop.
- vondro 5y ago
  I believe it's LPDDR5, basically a memory chip for smartphones, not DDR5.
  - paulmd 5y ago
    sure, but it's also running at JEDEC either way, it's actually irrelevant to performance, it's just a matter of packaging (obviously for laptops, stacking the packages is more convenient than DIMMs or soldered modules).
bichiliad 5y ago
I think this kinda makes sense to me — the M1 Max has the same cores as the M1, just more of them and more of the performant ones, if I understand it right. The fastest work on the fastest core, when only working on a single core, is probably very similar.

lostmsu 5y ago

I will get one if it can run Windows and nothing comparable released by then.

amatecha 5y ago

You can find more results at https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=Apple+M1+Max https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=Apple+M1+Max (it does, broadly, appear to be pretty comparable to Intel i9-11900K https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=Intel+Core+i9-11900K https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=Intel+Core+i9-... )

newfonewhodis 5y ago
i9-11900K is 125W TDP, and the M1 is probably nowhere near that (M1 is 10-15W TDP)
- amatecha 5y ago
  Yeah, that's one of the most mind-blowing (and awesome) things about these comparisons! So cool :D
- pja 5y ago
  TDP is the max design power of the platform, not the average though. The M1 maxes out at somewhere just under 30W - Anandtech measaured it at 28W after removing the platform power use. The M1Max will probably run somewhere from 40-50W under max CPU load, more if you load the GPU as well. The M1 is a great chip, but it’s not magic - it appears to be approximately 1.5-2x as efficient on a per core basis? Which is about what we’d expect from a process shrunk + decent optimisation work by a very able team. What absolutely isn’t is 10x more efficient. (Yes, TDP has been gamed somewhat by both Intel & AMD, and might not be the absolute max power over very short timescales, but it’s still intended to be the measure by which you scale your cooling system for extended max cpu usage & on that level the M1 is not a 10 W chip.) For most users, this doesn’t matter - Apple has specced the cooling system in their laptops to cope with typical usage so it can run the M1 at full rate for a few minutes, which is plenty to render a web page or do some other UI work. It’s even enough to run most developers compile jobs. But if we’re comparing processors, then comparing the TDP of an Intel or AMD CPU with Apple’s “typical” power usage is misleading, one might even say disengenuous.

dzink 5y ago

A few days ago there were comments on HN that the Geekbench score on M1 Max was run on an operating system not optimized for M1. Has that changed with this one?

boopmaster 5y ago

This is the first bench I believe might be real. i saw 11542 multi core spammed across news sites a couple days back, but it didn’t align with a 1.7x boost to performance (which this result actually does). The single core was 1749 which also didn’t make sense as I’d imagine there’s maybe a tiny bit more TDP per core in the MBP 14 and 16 than the OG 13” M1 mbp. That and it was on macOS v 12.4… which is maybe nonexistent and thus fake? This score here is believable and incredible.

munro 5y ago

Here's the link to the MacBookPro18,2 OpenCL benchmark: * M1 Max OpenCL https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/3551790 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/3551790 [60,167 OpenCL Score] Comparing to my current MacBook Pro (16-inch Late 2019) & my Hetzner AX101 server: * MacBook Pro (16-inch Late 2019) vs M1 Max - CPU https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10496766?baseline=8962907 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10496766?baseli... [single 163.6%, multi 188.8%] * MacBook Pro (16-inch Late 2019) vs M1 Max - OpenCL https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/3551790?baseline=3139756 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/3551790?bas... [180.8%] * Hetzner AX101 vs M1 Max - CPU https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10496766?baseline=9877701 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10496766?baseli... [single 105.0%, multi 86.4%] * NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 vs M1 Max - OpenCL https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/3551790?baseline=3139796 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/3551790?bas... [80.7%] * NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 vs M1 Max - OpenCL https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/3551790?baseline=3554580 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/3551790?bas... [29.0%, boo] I'm surprised the MacBook holds its own against the Hetzner AX101's AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-core CPU! The multi-core SQLite performance surprises me, I would think the M1 Max's NVMe is faster than my server's SAMSUNG MZQL23T8HCLS-00A07.

css 5y ago
Apple compared the M1 Max to the 3080 in the Razer Blade 15 Advanced, saying it outperforms the Nvdia’s GPU [0], but Geekbench seems to disagree [1]. [0]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/10/introducing-m1-pro-and-m1-max-the-most-powerful-chips-apple-has-ever-built/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/10/introducing-m1-pro-an... [1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/3551790?baseline=2747252 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/3551790?bas...
- interpol_p 5y ago
  I wonder what they were comparing. The Geekbench result is for an OpenCL benchmark, if they were using Metal Compute on the M1 that may explain the different results
- 5y ago

varjag 5y ago

Someone needs to come up with realistic Mac benchmarks. Like 'seconds it takes for Finder beachball to disappear'. At this metric my M1 sees no improvement over my MB12.

bborud 5y ago
Beachball disappears when Apple's developers learn to write asynchronous code. (You can't blaame the hardware for programming decisions that are fundamentally slow or stupid).

EvgeniyZh 5y ago

Top intel mobile processor appears to be https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10431820 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10431820 M1 Max gives 9% boost for single-core and 34% for multicore, with similar or larger (?) TDP -- Intel is 35-45 W, M1 Max is 60W but I assume some of it (a lot?) goes to GPU. Impressive, but probably wouldn't be called revolution if came from Intel.

Weryj 5y ago
At first glace yeah, but that's 45W at 2.5Ghz, but TDP isn't the power rating of the CPU. That benchmark lists the Intel CPU as up to 4.9Ghz, I would say it's actual power draw was closer to the 100W mark for CPU only.
- EvgeniyZh 5y ago
  4.9 GHz should be single-core max freq, not applicable in multicore benchmark. All-core turbo is lower, but also AFAIK there is a limit on time it run on this freq (tau for PL2, i think around half a minute by default).
  - klelatti 5y ago
    Is there any reason why the Intel CPU wouldn’t run at 4.9 GHz for the single core benchmark though - whilst the M1 would be limited to a much lower frequency which it can sustain for much longer?
    - EvgeniyZh 5y ago
      I think, but I'm not 100% sure, that limits are on overall TDP, i.e., single-core workloaad can run on turbo indefinitely. Then aalso I'd assume benchmarks are much longer than any reasonable value of tau which means it integrates out (i.e., Intel performance may be higher in short-term). Edit: that is probably one of the reasons single-core gap is smaller
      - 5y ago

jccalhoun 5y ago

Is geekbench seen as a valid score? It seems that on the pc hardware sites and youtube channels I frequent that they don't seem to mention it. The only time I seem to see it is for mac stuff.

LeoPanthera 5y ago
It is one of the few cross-platform benchmarks that can be run on both PCs and Macs, as well as iOS, Android, and Linux.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
Not really. It's nice to run the same benchmark on all platforms but most hardware sites run a game demo that's easily repeatable and take an fps reading or run Cinebench which renders a scene.

raylad 5y ago

Compared to the late 2020 Macbook Air: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10508178?baseline=10496766 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10508178?baseli...

LeoPanthera 5y ago
This confirms that single-core performance is essentially the same as the basic M1.

simonebrunozzi 5y ago

Wondering if some of the avid videogamers, in need for powerful GPUs, will consider Macbook Pros with M1 Pro or Max as a good option. AFAIK, some of the most popular videogames run on Mac too.

mhh__ 5y ago
Almost none of the most popular actually. No Fortnite no warzone
lghh 5y ago
Some, but not nearly enough.

DisjointedHunt 5y ago

I’m not sure how Geekbench browser tests hold up to real world usage, but note that Apples ecosystem is WAY different compared to x86. For starters, the chip isn’t general purpose compute, it’s more of an ASIC that is optimized to run the OS abstractions available through the official APIs (Think on screen animation such as rendering an image or detecting things in it. On x86, you implement the code and in some cases, proprietary libraries such as Intels MKL make it seemingly faster to run. On Apple Silicon, for such common use cases there are DEDICATED chip areas. Thus, an ASIC)

badhombres 5y ago

I'm curios on the difference between the 8 cores and 10 cores for the M1 Pro. I'm definitely not going to get the Max, I'm just not the user that needs the GPU's

spitfire 5y ago

What am I missing here? The marketing presentations spoke about 200GB/sec and 400GB/sec parts. Existing CPU's generally have 10s of GB/sec. But I see these parts beating out existing parts by small margins - 100% at best. Where is all that bandwidth going? Are none of these synthetic benchmarks stressing memory IO that much? Surely compression should benefit from 400GB/sec bandwidth? This also raises the question how are those multiple memory channels laid out? Sequentually? Stripped? Bitwise, byte wise or word stripped?

hajile 5y ago
They have 5.2 and 10.4 TFLOPS of GPU power to feed in addition to 10 very wide cores.
kllrnohj 5y ago
The SoC having 400GB/s of memory bandwidth doesn't mean that any individual CPU core can saturate 400GB/s of memory bandwidth (or even if all the CPU cores combined can achieve that). The SoC's memory bus is also feeding the GPU, and GPUs tend to be _very_ memory bandwidth hungry (see other discreet GPUs pushing over 1TB/s of memory bandwidth). The CPU performance, even where memory IO limited, is more likely limited by how well it can prefetch memory and how many in-flight reads & writes it can do. A straight memcpy benchmark might be part of this suite, but that'd also be basically the only workload where a CPU core (or multiple) could come anywhere close to hitting 400GB/s of bandwidth. Otherwise memory _latency_ will be the bigger memory IO limitation for the CPUs, and that likely hasn't drastically changed with the new M1 Pros & Max's (there may be some cache layout changes which would shift some of the numbers, but DRAM latency is likely unchanged) For an example of this in a different product: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-graviton2-arm-against-intel-and-amd/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav... A single graviton2 CPU can "only" achieve 18-36GB/s of memory bandwidth even though the package in total can hit 200GB/s
- _kbh_ 5y ago
  A single firestorm (performance) m1 core in the m1 Mac mini can sustain ~60Gb/s read from ram. I have no doubt that 8 of them could come close to if not entirely saturate 400GB/s. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

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robertwt7 5y ago

Is that supposed to be fast guys? Isn't that still slower than some ryzen 5 5600x? (my pc uses this but below is not my benchmark) https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/8238216 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/8238216 I'm not sure how fast or good is that number.. But i've heard good things about m1 and planning to probably upgrade. edit: Not sure what's with the downvotes, i'm genuinely curious. I'm in the apple ecosystem with many apple products, windows pc, basically a tech enthusiast without any hate towards 1 brand. geez

mciancia 5y ago
> Base Frequency 4.72 GHz > Maximum Frequency 6.03 GHz This was seriously overclocked, wouldn't be surprised if with liquid nitrogen. So probably poor comparison to laptop CPU ;)
- jjcon 5y ago
  We're also seeing slower m1max benchmarks though https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10476727 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10476727
- robertwt7 5y ago
  Ah yes that's true, didn't realise it was overclocked. Probably good to compare to those ryzen in laptop..
defaultname 5y ago
It's very fast for a mobile form factor, and still very fast for a desktop processor. The benchmark you linked is grossly overclocked, as are many others people have linked throughout this thread. Which is fundamentally the problem with the Geekbench browser and people searching around for something to prove a point, when the numbers on there are completely unverified (and sometimes wholly fictitious), unproven, and often under ridiculous scenarios. Use actual reviews from credible reviewers and extract the GB results from that. e.g. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-dive-review-5950x-5900x-5800x-and-5700x-tested/17 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di... And FWIW, I don't even put any credibility on these M1 results. I'll just wait until Anandtech or someone similar has a real review with competently created, reproducible benchmarks.

sydthrowaway 5y ago

Wondering whether it will be more profitable to work for AMD or APPLE in the next few years?