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Apple's M1 Pro, M1 Max SoCs Investigated

287 points by defaultname 5y ago

rowanG077 5y ago
A shame that thermal/power limitations aren't investigated. That is the most deciding factor for me getting a Pro or Max. And something Apple has historically had a lot of trouble with.
- neogodless 5y ago
  If I'm understanding you correctly, you're thinking of previous issues with thermals and throttling, but this has been an issue over the past several years due to Intel falling behind AMD and TSMC, and thus driving power through their chips in order to stay competitive, but that generates heat, and ultimately ends up triggering throttling. If you read about these particular chips, it should be startlingly clear that they are much more efficient than the Intel chips they replace. In this article: > Apple doesn’t advertise any TDP for the chips of the devices – it’s our understanding that simply doesn’t exist, and the only limitation to the power draw of the chips and laptops are simply thermals. As long as temperature is kept in check, the silicon will not throttle or not limit itself in terms of power draw. > The perf/W differences here are 4-6x in favour of the M1 Max, all whilst posting significantly better performance Read page 3 of this article. They really do cover a lot of this.
  - rowanG077 5y ago
    It is much more efficient. It's also more powerful. You can see in one of their benchmarks they hit 90+W of package power. I doubt it can sustain this. The "turbo-mode" Apple has announced for the 16-inch version also indicates that it will be significantly thermally limited.
    - neogodless 5y ago
      In my Lenovo Legion 5, in performance mode, the CPU is configured to draw up to 70W, and the GPU is configured to draw up to 115W. It's able to do this just fine for gaming sessions. Yes, the fans are quite audible while doing this. I think in contrast, having to handle about half that power draw overall should be attainable. For sure, it's now a very large SoC, so the heat might be a bit more concentrated and require some engineering to cool. But it doesn't seem like it should be a showstopping concern. Of course, you can wait for additional reviews and see if anyone addresses longer, more sustained load testing.
      - rowanG077 5y ago
        I don't doubt it's physically possible. I doubt Apple implemented it. So I rather wait till there is some hard data. Apple could also have implemented proper cooling for their Intel laptops but they didn't.
        neogodless 5y ago
        That's perfectly understandable. It's a major purchase decision. But also, I'm not aware of anyone that implemented "proper cooling" sufficient to handle the last few generations of Intel chips (at least at the high end.) I read reviews of a variety of machines. All of them had issues with throttling. I was so happy when the Ryzen 4000 mobile chips were reviewed and did not require elaborate cooling systems just to perform their regular duties. I would be shocked if the 2021 Macbook Pro 14/16" have issues with thermal throttling.
        holmium 5y ago
        I haven't seen too many benchmarks yet, but Dave2D ran a "Cinebench R23" test in a both a single benchmark and thirty minute loop. [1] He saw that the score remained the same after the 30 minutes. He also reported that the loudest fan noise he could get was 38dB, with typical loads under 30dB. [2] ----- [1] - https://youtu.be/IhqCC70ZfDM?t=360 https://youtu.be/IhqCC70ZfDM?t=360 [2] - https://youtu.be/IhqCC70ZfDM?t=438 https://youtu.be/IhqCC70ZfDM?t=438
  - capableweb 5y ago
    > As long as temperature is kept in check, the silicon will not throttle or not limit itself in terms of power draw. Apple laptops has, for as long as I know, had issues with just thermals. Sometimes they get so hot you can't even have them in your lap, so they are just "tops" at that point. Has this issue been solved with these new models?
    - zepto 5y ago
      Yes
    - MikusR 5y ago
      It was solved with M1 last year
    - friedman23 5y ago
      The m1 macs do not have this problem, they draw a fraction of the power of the old laptops even when boosting.
    - fomine3 5y ago
      Since M1 is designed to low power (but still impressive performance), it's unsure that M1 Max machine getting very hotter like Intel era or not. It uses 145W AC adapter so I suspect they getting very hotter if it utilized extremely.
    - rsynnott 5y ago
      This wasn't really a _huge_ problem if you didn't need fast graphics until the 2016 15"es. With the switch to Ice Lake, they had to add a discrete GPU even to the base model of the 15" (due to lack of appropriate GPUs in Intel's bigger mobile chips in that generation), and things got very bad. I've got a personal 13" 2016 MBP, and a work 15" one. The 13" is _fine_; it doesn't show significant thermal throttling in normal use. The 15"... not so much.
      - capableweb 5y ago
        I had every model of the MBP that was released between 2012-2016 and they consistently got too warm to have in my lap, every single one of them. Some of them even when just browsing the web. Fresh install every time I got a new model. After that I simply got tired of not being able to use my laptop as a laptop and jumped ship.
- perardi 5y ago
  Did you even bother to read the article? They have an entire page on power consumption under various workloads. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
  - rowanG077 5y ago
    Can you please quote the part which discusses power and thermal limitations backed up with tests because I don't see any of it on that page. As far as I read it these test only report package power and wall power used under certain loads. It doesn't say anything about any limitations. No long term tests or temperature graphs. No information at what temperature throttling kicks in. Is CPU temperature truly the only limiting factor or are the VRMs also a pain point? I could go on but I think this illustrates enough of what I want to see.
    - ksec 5y ago
      What you are looking for is a Laptop Review, how M1 Pro / Max under the MacBook Pro 14 / 16 cooling works with maximum possible TDP and cooling. But this isn't a Laptop Review, it is an SoC review. My guess Dave2D will look into these sort of thing since he cares about it before anyone on the internet actually test these sort of things for Laptop. ( Possibly due to various PR restrictions )
    - GeekyBear 5y ago
      Their stories span multiple pages, but for some reason people on mobile frequently seem to miss the other pages. Here's the whole story on one page. https://www.anandtech.com/print/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review https://www.anandtech.com/print/17024/apple-m1-max-performan...
      - rowanG077 5y ago
        Yes I read everything. There is no concrete information or tests about thermal or power limit throttling.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  >A shame that thermal/power limitations aren't investigated. It's covered in the comments, along with when the "crank up the fans" mode would be useful. >Any pure CPU or GPU workload doesn't come close to the thermal limits of the machine. And even a moderate mixed workload like Premiere Pro didn't benefit from High Power mode. It has a reason to exist, but that reason is close to rendering a video overnight - as in a very hard and very sustained total system workload. https://www.anandtech.com/comments/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/760361 https://www.anandtech.com/comments/17024/apple-m1-max-perfor...
Leherenn 5y ago
If people are wondering about why some people in the comments are reporting 3080 vs 3060 levels of performance, it's based on the workload. On synthetic (native I assume) benchmarks, the M1 Max reaches 3080 levels, but in gaming benchmarks (using x86) it reaches 3060 levels.
- marricks 5y ago
  It's interesting especially since it sounds like the reason it doesn't reach "close to 3080" in many games is because it's CPU bound, specifically because it's emulating x86. Once we get more benchmarks with non-rosetta apps the picture may be rosier? That said, it's not like Apple was every the company for gaming machines so perhaps that will just be the state of things.
  - lowbloodsugar 5y ago
    TFA also compares games at 4k, where it is very much GPU bound, and it is about half the speed of a laptop 6800. Which is not great. (And I am speaking as someone whose M1 Max arrives tomorrow). The M1 GPU is vastly different than an AMD or nVidia GPU, and I suspect it will have not-great scores until someone writes a game and optimizes it specifically for the M1. Which is most likely never.
    - xoa 5y ago
      >and I suspect it will have not-great scores until someone writes a game and optimizes it specifically for the M1. Which is most likely never. Don't forget that these days few demanding games are "optimized for Platform XYZ", they're generally using one a small set of middleware/engine they license. So it's more a question of if Unreal Engine and Unity and so on get optimizations aimed at Apple's M-series chips. That isn't out of the question at all, given that they definitely have optimization aimed at Apple's A-series chips. Once they do, everything going forward that uses them will be better "for free". Even if they don't hit the performance of something truly hand tuned just to make max use of the arch it won't be entirely ignored either. May not even be that much work. That's another potential non-technical performance advantage in moving the Mac from x86, they get to piggyback in some areas off the enormously higher market share iDevices. We'll see how it works out of course.
xqcgrek2 5y ago
Seems the CPU cluster saturates at about 240 GB/s and can't utilize the full memory bandwidth. This bodes well for future clusters with double the number of CPU cores at a node shrink (M2 Max?) or for a Mac Pro (Mac Quadra?).
- makomk 5y ago
  Maybe. This seems like a cluster-wide limitation - the individual CPU cores can utilize enough memory bandwidth that together they should be able to saturate the bus, but there's some kind of bottleneck on the entire CPU section of the SoCs and who knows how easy or difficult it would be to alleviate that.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- sliken 5y ago
  Sure, keep in mind that most competing laptops max at 70GB/sec (the never to exceed number), and most desktops are slower than that with 2 channels of DDR4-3200 to 4200 (41-67GB/sec). So while it's "only" 240, that's an excellent number. Keep in mind that you generally never see 100% of theoretical bandwidth.
whatever1 5y ago
Performance-wise they seem to be on par with the high-end intel 11th gen mobile processors and nvidia 3060. Power-wise these chips look like they landed from a different planet. 50% less power draw for most workloads. Will we get such efficiencies when intel hits 5nm?
- dangus 5y ago
  > Will we get such efficiencies when intel hits 5nm? I think the answer is "maybe," "probably," or "sort of." But I also wonder if x86 can ever truly outdo ARM on power efficiency. If we want potential evidence, we could look at what AMD is able to do on TSMC's manufacturing: better than Intel, but still short of Apple. Then again, AMD is tiny compared to Apple and Intel. Granted, I think I'm vastly oversimplifying processor architecture. I know it's way more complicated than "x86 vs. ARM."
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    Isn't AMD still a node behind Apple? They both use TSMC, but my impression was that Apple was the largest customer bankrolling the leading node and therefore got first crack at it.
    - eightysixfour 5y ago
      Yes, AMD is still a full TSMC node behind.
    - laydn 5y ago
      I am surprised that Apple sources more wafers than AMD from TSMC. Are they really the largest customer in terms of wafers, or are they getting better deals thanks to their enormous cash reserves and financing abilities?
      - jjoonathan 5y ago
        Yep, Apple is the biggest customer. Apple is 25% of TSMC's revenue, AMD is only 10% -- and that's after the recent growth spurt. Just one year ago, AMD was behind Apple, Huawei, Qualcomm, Broadcomm, and NVidia.
GeekyBear 5y ago
The money quote from testing vs Intel's 11980HK: The perf/W differences here are 4-6x in favour of the M1 Max, all whilst posting significantly better performance, meaning the perf/W at ISO-perf would be even higher than this. and >On the GPU side, the GE76 Raider comes with a GTX 3080 mobile. On Aztec High, this uses a total of 200W power for 266fps, while the M1 Max beats it at 307fps with just 70W wall active power. https://www.anandtech.com/print/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review https://www.anandtech.com/print/17024/apple-m1-max-performan...
- kcb 5y ago
  GFXBench is meaningless.
  - dsr_ 5y ago
    A pointer to an article on why it is meaningless is better than the raw assertion.
    - ac29 5y ago
      This article shows why - actual performance in games isn't great. Yes, its partially held back by x86->ARM translation, but if you are a gamer, this isnt a particularly compelling system.
      - Aissen 5y ago
        This part of the article was particularly cringe. People don't seem to realize how much of a tech prowess it is that x86 builds of those two games are even running at an acceptable framerate. That said, it's been a year since the M1 release, and Apple could have paid a few hundreds/millions for a few AAA game ports. They didn't, and that says how much they care about gaming on these devices.
        GeekyBear 5y ago
        >This part of the article was particularly cringe. People don't seem to realize how much of a tech prowess it is that x86 builds of those two games are even running at an acceptable framerate. Spoken like someone who has never seen how poorly Microsoft's x86 to ARM emulation works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhESSZIXvCA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhESSZIXvCA They had difficulty getting programs to work at all, much less have acceptable performance under emulation.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lnxg33k1 5y ago
I would really love to experiment with one of those CPUs, too bad Apple just really sucks as a company / ethics
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  Except for, say, Purism and Framework and a few others, every company sucks with ethics. Except Purism even had the idea to make their own products which were based on free, open-source code, charge for them, and then give no attribution before apologizing after blowback. So even for those companies their Ethics are suspect.
  - mrtranscendence 5y ago
    > Except for, say, Purism and Framework and a few others, every company sucks with ethics. Basically. If I wanted to stay ethically pure in all my purchases I'd be in trouble, unfortunately. It's not like Apple is ethically "worse" than Google or Samsung or other major phone manufacturers.
    - noizejoy 5y ago
      Arguably approaching 100% ethical purity would also approach involve not being born in the first place. Related note: I think that leading large numbers of people as well as having very large numbers of customers also reduces your chances of doing well for all of them.
  - masterof0 5y ago
    > Except Purism even had the idea to make their own products which were based on free, open-source code, charge for them And then charging 2000 dollars for a barely functional brick. I think the only ethical hardware companies I know would be System76, Framework, and Fairphone.
  - tcbawo 5y ago
    Honest question: for someone whose priority is maintaining an ecosystem of general computing devices with freedom to run software of my choice (rather than privacy paranoia), what companies should I get behind and/or avoid? Between custom processors, comprehensive SoC, and secure boot, I'm a little afraid getting caged in over the long term with practically any offerings out there right now.
sz4kerto 5y ago
Looks like it doesn't worth buying the Max if you don't need a powerful GPU.
- kabes 5y ago
  I don't need a powerful GPU, but I do need the additional RAM the max supports..
- sudhirj 5y ago
  Yeah, the Max has exactly the same CPU as the Pro. Only reason I picked it is because I wanted the 32GB RAM, and only the Max has that by default — customised orders take a long time deliver in India.
  - glhaynes 5y ago
    Believe the Max also has twice the memory bandwidth as the Pro. EDIT, upon reading the bottom part of the first page of the linked article: And double the cache, more cores on the Neural Engine, and maybe doubled media processing, assuming I'm reading all of that correctly.
- sylens 5y ago
  or if you want to have 3-4 monitors
  - joshstrange 5y ago
    Yep, this is what pushed me to the Max. I think the GPU is going to be overkill for my other needs (though I'm looking forward to trying some gaming) but first and foremost I needed support for my monitors (the only thing that kept me from the first M1s).
    - dmix 5y ago
      Im curious, what kind of monitor set up needs that kind of power?
OldHand2018 5y ago
It's been a while since I bought a "Pro" computer from Apple. I am kind of wondering about the perf-per-$$$ factor. With a starting price of $2000, these are expensive computers. But maybe they are worth it! The M1 computers seemed like an absolute bargain for the performance.
- cududa 5y ago
  Depends what you need them for. On a music video set my 2010 MBP survived a drop from a second story balcony (three stories in a normal home), onto a marble floor. Got dented as hell, but only functional damage was to the ethernet port. I'm excited to get one of these new ones. Imagine it'll last at least 5 years.
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  They're definitely pricey, but CPU performance is out of this world. GPU's pretty good too, though not as impressive, I understand. Alas, it'll probably be a few years before I can get one (I use my work machine for almost everything and I just got this one).
  - f6v 5y ago
    It’s not that GPU isn’t impressive. Rather that you can’t put it to use in games.
    - mrtranscendence 5y ago
      Fair enough! It doesn't really bother me either way, since I don't really make use of the GPU on my laptop. Curious to try out Tensorflow on one of the new machines, though.
      - rezahussain 5y ago
        Yes, I just want to see some tensorflow specific benchmarks on the m1 max with 32 gpu cores vs 3080.
- 5y ago
tromp 5y ago
> I’ve had extreme trouble to find workloads that would stress the GPU sufficiently to take advantage of the available bandwidth. Would love to see how well the GPU runs a memory-bound Proof-of-Work like Cuckatoo Cycle [1]. [1] https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo
lmilcin 5y ago
> Power Behaviour: No Real TDP, but Wide Range Actually, TDP stands for "Thermal Design Power" and is not a range. It means "I, the designer, designed it so that this is maximum amount of waste heat as it can safely produce continuously in normal use". It is mainly limited by its physical package and maximum temperature at which the internal components can run. That you can't observe that max power is due to the fact that those various applications stress the CPU in various ways, not always being able to exercise all internal structures to their maximum potential, at the same time. > One should probably assume a 90% efficiency figure in the AC-to-DC conversion chain from 230V wall to 28V USB-C MagSafe to whatever the internal PMIC usage voltage of the device is. (This was regarding idle power usage) Highly unlikely. I design AC switching power supplies from first principles (and stacks of books). Efficiencies above 90% are normal for newer designs but the PSUs are designed to achieve these efficiencies above significant percentage of their design power. High efficiency at design power is important because it limits worst case waste heat which in turn makes it possible to create smaller PSU. But as PSU is a lot of tradeoffs, one of the tradeoffs that is taken is lesser efficiency at lower power where it doesn't matter as much. Typically, the lower load on the PSU as portion of design power the lower the efficiency. If the PSU is designed for 140 watt 90% efficiency, I would expect that at 7 watt it is actually much less efficient probably somewhere between 70 and 80 percent.
crateless 5y ago
Now that Apple has taken the lead in performance/battery life tradeoff, are there any machines which come close to the M1 for software dev? Specifically, compiling Rust, Android development etc. without giving up too much on battery life? Also, the last time I checked, CPUs were reporting high performance but only under light load. Has the whole throttling situation changed or should I just expect to get 2 hours battery life in exchange for extreme CPU performance? Edit: I should have specified machines that can run Linux.
- wayneftw 5y ago
  > ...any machines which come close to the M1 for software dev? If you can stand using macOS, that is. Personally, I'll continue using Linux because that's where all my software gets deployed to and macOS simply can't approach the value of that or the value of open source. On a Mac, you'll be fighting the OS the whole time. If speed was all that mattered, Mac users would have left Apple a long time ago because this is the first time they're faster than a PC.
- raydev 5y ago
  Panzerino tested WebKit compiles on the first run of M1 machines last year, and it seems like the battery held up really well on those. > After a single build of WebKit, the M1 MacBook Pro had a massive 91% of its battery left. I tried multiple tests here and I could have easily run a full build of WebKit 8-9 times on one charge of the M1 MacBook’s battery. https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro-is-powerful-but-its-the-battery-life-that-will-blow-you-away/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro... I'm looking forward to the MBP compile benchmarks.
- ac29 5y ago
  Today? Probably not. Intel's Alder Lake is moving to a Performance + Efficiency core setup, which should help overall with battery life. But they are still behind on manufacturing process (Alder Lake is "Intel 7", supposedly roughly comparable to TSMC N7), so Apple will quite likely maintain their lead in power consumption. Alder Lake is getting announced in 2 days, but rumors have it as a desktop-first product launch, so laptops may be another quarter or two out.
jb1991 5y ago
> GPU-accelerated machine learning, and more have all been developed or first implemented by Apple Did not realize Apple was first in that area in previous decades.
perfopt 5y ago
Why do the graphs say "Estimated" in their title

287 points by defaultname 5y ago

A shame that thermal/power limitations aren't investigated. That is the most deciding factor for me getting a Pro or Max. And something Apple has historically had a lot of trouble with.

neogodless 5y ago
If I'm understanding you correctly, you're thinking of previous issues with thermals and throttling, but this has been an issue over the past several years due to Intel falling behind AMD and TSMC, and thus driving power through their chips in order to stay competitive, but that generates heat, and ultimately ends up triggering throttling. If you read about these particular chips, it should be startlingly clear that they are much more efficient than the Intel chips they replace. In this article: > Apple doesn’t advertise any TDP for the chips of the devices – it’s our understanding that simply doesn’t exist, and the only limitation to the power draw of the chips and laptops are simply thermals. As long as temperature is kept in check, the silicon will not throttle or not limit itself in terms of power draw. > The perf/W differences here are 4-6x in favour of the M1 Max, all whilst posting significantly better performance Read page 3 of this article. They really do cover a lot of this.
- rowanG077 5y ago
  It is much more efficient. It's also more powerful. You can see in one of their benchmarks they hit 90+W of package power. I doubt it can sustain this. The "turbo-mode" Apple has announced for the 16-inch version also indicates that it will be significantly thermally limited.
  - neogodless 5y ago
    In my Lenovo Legion 5, in performance mode, the CPU is configured to draw up to 70W, and the GPU is configured to draw up to 115W. It's able to do this just fine for gaming sessions. Yes, the fans are quite audible while doing this. I think in contrast, having to handle about half that power draw overall should be attainable. For sure, it's now a very large SoC, so the heat might be a bit more concentrated and require some engineering to cool. But it doesn't seem like it should be a showstopping concern. Of course, you can wait for additional reviews and see if anyone addresses longer, more sustained load testing.
    - rowanG077 5y ago
      I don't doubt it's physically possible. I doubt Apple implemented it. So I rather wait till there is some hard data. Apple could also have implemented proper cooling for their Intel laptops but they didn't.
      - neogodless 5y ago
        That's perfectly understandable. It's a major purchase decision. But also, I'm not aware of anyone that implemented "proper cooling" sufficient to handle the last few generations of Intel chips (at least at the high end.) I read reviews of a variety of machines. All of them had issues with throttling. I was so happy when the Ryzen 4000 mobile chips were reviewed and did not require elaborate cooling systems just to perform their regular duties. I would be shocked if the 2021 Macbook Pro 14/16" have issues with thermal throttling.
      - holmium 5y ago
        I haven't seen too many benchmarks yet, but Dave2D ran a "Cinebench R23" test in a both a single benchmark and thirty minute loop. [1] He saw that the score remained the same after the 30 minutes. He also reported that the loudest fan noise he could get was 38dB, with typical loads under 30dB. [2] ----- [1] - https://youtu.be/IhqCC70ZfDM?t=360 https://youtu.be/IhqCC70ZfDM?t=360 [2] - https://youtu.be/IhqCC70ZfDM?t=438 https://youtu.be/IhqCC70ZfDM?t=438
- capableweb 5y ago
  > As long as temperature is kept in check, the silicon will not throttle or not limit itself in terms of power draw. Apple laptops has, for as long as I know, had issues with just thermals. Sometimes they get so hot you can't even have them in your lap, so they are just "tops" at that point. Has this issue been solved with these new models?
  - zepto 5y ago
    Yes
  - MikusR 5y ago
    It was solved with M1 last year
  - friedman23 5y ago
    The m1 macs do not have this problem, they draw a fraction of the power of the old laptops even when boosting.
  - fomine3 5y ago
    Since M1 is designed to low power (but still impressive performance), it's unsure that M1 Max machine getting very hotter like Intel era or not. It uses 145W AC adapter so I suspect they getting very hotter if it utilized extremely.
  - rsynnott 5y ago
    This wasn't really a _huge_ problem if you didn't need fast graphics until the 2016 15"es. With the switch to Ice Lake, they had to add a discrete GPU even to the base model of the 15" (due to lack of appropriate GPUs in Intel's bigger mobile chips in that generation), and things got very bad. I've got a personal 13" 2016 MBP, and a work 15" one. The 13" is _fine_; it doesn't show significant thermal throttling in normal use. The 15"... not so much.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      I had every model of the MBP that was released between 2012-2016 and they consistently got too warm to have in my lap, every single one of them. Some of them even when just browsing the web. Fresh install every time I got a new model. After that I simply got tired of not being able to use my laptop as a laptop and jumped ship.
perardi 5y ago
Did you even bother to read the article? They have an entire page on power consumption under various workloads. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
- rowanG077 5y ago
  Can you please quote the part which discusses power and thermal limitations backed up with tests because I don't see any of it on that page. As far as I read it these test only report package power and wall power used under certain loads. It doesn't say anything about any limitations. No long term tests or temperature graphs. No information at what temperature throttling kicks in. Is CPU temperature truly the only limiting factor or are the VRMs also a pain point? I could go on but I think this illustrates enough of what I want to see.
  - ksec 5y ago
    What you are looking for is a Laptop Review, how M1 Pro / Max under the MacBook Pro 14 / 16 cooling works with maximum possible TDP and cooling. But this isn't a Laptop Review, it is an SoC review. My guess Dave2D will look into these sort of thing since he cares about it before anyone on the internet actually test these sort of things for Laptop. ( Possibly due to various PR restrictions )
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    Their stories span multiple pages, but for some reason people on mobile frequently seem to miss the other pages. Here's the whole story on one page. https://www.anandtech.com/print/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review https://www.anandtech.com/print/17024/apple-m1-max-performan...
    - rowanG077 5y ago
      Yes I read everything. There is no concrete information or tests about thermal or power limit throttling.
GeekyBear 5y ago
>A shame that thermal/power limitations aren't investigated. It's covered in the comments, along with when the "crank up the fans" mode would be useful. >Any pure CPU or GPU workload doesn't come close to the thermal limits of the machine. And even a moderate mixed workload like Premiere Pro didn't benefit from High Power mode. It has a reason to exist, but that reason is close to rendering a video overnight - as in a very hard and very sustained total system workload. https://www.anandtech.com/comments/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/760361 https://www.anandtech.com/comments/17024/apple-m1-max-perfor...

Leherenn 5y ago

If people are wondering about why some people in the comments are reporting 3080 vs 3060 levels of performance, it's based on the workload. On synthetic (native I assume) benchmarks, the M1 Max reaches 3080 levels, but in gaming benchmarks (using x86) it reaches 3060 levels.

marricks 5y ago
It's interesting especially since it sounds like the reason it doesn't reach "close to 3080" in many games is because it's CPU bound, specifically because it's emulating x86. Once we get more benchmarks with non-rosetta apps the picture may be rosier? That said, it's not like Apple was every the company for gaming machines so perhaps that will just be the state of things.
- lowbloodsugar 5y ago
  TFA also compares games at 4k, where it is very much GPU bound, and it is about half the speed of a laptop 6800. Which is not great. (And I am speaking as someone whose M1 Max arrives tomorrow). The M1 GPU is vastly different than an AMD or nVidia GPU, and I suspect it will have not-great scores until someone writes a game and optimizes it specifically for the M1. Which is most likely never.
  - xoa 5y ago
    >and I suspect it will have not-great scores until someone writes a game and optimizes it specifically for the M1. Which is most likely never. Don't forget that these days few demanding games are "optimized for Platform XYZ", they're generally using one a small set of middleware/engine they license. So it's more a question of if Unreal Engine and Unity and so on get optimizations aimed at Apple's M-series chips. That isn't out of the question at all, given that they definitely have optimization aimed at Apple's A-series chips. Once they do, everything going forward that uses them will be better "for free". Even if they don't hit the performance of something truly hand tuned just to make max use of the arch it won't be entirely ignored either. May not even be that much work. That's another potential non-technical performance advantage in moving the Mac from x86, they get to piggyback in some areas off the enormously higher market share iDevices. We'll see how it works out of course.

xqcgrek2 5y ago

Seems the CPU cluster saturates at about 240 GB/s and can't utilize the full memory bandwidth. This bodes well for future clusters with double the number of CPU cores at a node shrink (M2 Max?) or for a Mac Pro (Mac Quadra?).

makomk 5y ago
Maybe. This seems like a cluster-wide limitation - the individual CPU cores can utilize enough memory bandwidth that together they should be able to saturate the bus, but there's some kind of bottleneck on the entire CPU section of the SoCs and who knows how easy or difficult it would be to alleviate that.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
sliken 5y ago
Sure, keep in mind that most competing laptops max at 70GB/sec (the never to exceed number), and most desktops are slower than that with 2 channels of DDR4-3200 to 4200 (41-67GB/sec). So while it's "only" 240, that's an excellent number. Keep in mind that you generally never see 100% of theoretical bandwidth.

whatever1 5y ago

Performance-wise they seem to be on par with the high-end intel 11th gen mobile processors and nvidia 3060. Power-wise these chips look like they landed from a different planet. 50% less power draw for most workloads. Will we get such efficiencies when intel hits 5nm?

dangus 5y ago
> Will we get such efficiencies when intel hits 5nm? I think the answer is "maybe," "probably," or "sort of." But I also wonder if x86 can ever truly outdo ARM on power efficiency. If we want potential evidence, we could look at what AMD is able to do on TSMC's manufacturing: better than Intel, but still short of Apple. Then again, AMD is tiny compared to Apple and Intel. Granted, I think I'm vastly oversimplifying processor architecture. I know it's way more complicated than "x86 vs. ARM."
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Isn't AMD still a node behind Apple? They both use TSMC, but my impression was that Apple was the largest customer bankrolling the leading node and therefore got first crack at it.
  - eightysixfour 5y ago
    Yes, AMD is still a full TSMC node behind.
  - laydn 5y ago
    I am surprised that Apple sources more wafers than AMD from TSMC. Are they really the largest customer in terms of wafers, or are they getting better deals thanks to their enormous cash reserves and financing abilities?
    - jjoonathan 5y ago
      Yep, Apple is the biggest customer. Apple is 25% of TSMC's revenue, AMD is only 10% -- and that's after the recent growth spurt. Just one year ago, AMD was behind Apple, Huawei, Qualcomm, Broadcomm, and NVidia.

GeekyBear 5y ago

The money quote from testing vs Intel's 11980HK: The perf/W differences here are 4-6x in favour of the M1 Max, all whilst posting significantly better performance, meaning the perf/W at ISO-perf would be even higher than this. and >On the GPU side, the GE76 Raider comes with a GTX 3080 mobile. On Aztec High, this uses a total of 200W power for 266fps, while the M1 Max beats it at 307fps with just 70W wall active power. https://www.anandtech.com/print/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review https://www.anandtech.com/print/17024/apple-m1-max-performan...

kcb 5y ago
GFXBench is meaningless.
- dsr_ 5y ago
  A pointer to an article on why it is meaningless is better than the raw assertion.
  - ac29 5y ago
    This article shows why - actual performance in games isn't great. Yes, its partially held back by x86->ARM translation, but if you are a gamer, this isnt a particularly compelling system.
    - Aissen 5y ago
      This part of the article was particularly cringe. People don't seem to realize how much of a tech prowess it is that x86 builds of those two games are even running at an acceptable framerate. That said, it's been a year since the M1 release, and Apple could have paid a few hundreds/millions for a few AAA game ports. They didn't, and that says how much they care about gaming on these devices.
      - GeekyBear 5y ago
        >This part of the article was particularly cringe. People don't seem to realize how much of a tech prowess it is that x86 builds of those two games are even running at an acceptable framerate. Spoken like someone who has never seen how poorly Microsoft's x86 to ARM emulation works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhESSZIXvCA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhESSZIXvCA They had difficulty getting programs to work at all, much less have acceptable performance under emulation.

deleted 5y ago

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lnxg33k1 5y ago

I would really love to experiment with one of those CPUs, too bad Apple just really sucks as a company / ethics

gjsman-1000 5y ago
Except for, say, Purism and Framework and a few others, every company sucks with ethics. Except Purism even had the idea to make their own products which were based on free, open-source code, charge for them, and then give no attribution before apologizing after blowback. So even for those companies their Ethics are suspect.
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  > Except for, say, Purism and Framework and a few others, every company sucks with ethics. Basically. If I wanted to stay ethically pure in all my purchases I'd be in trouble, unfortunately. It's not like Apple is ethically "worse" than Google or Samsung or other major phone manufacturers.
  - noizejoy 5y ago
    Arguably approaching 100% ethical purity would also approach involve not being born in the first place. Related note: I think that leading large numbers of people as well as having very large numbers of customers also reduces your chances of doing well for all of them.
- masterof0 5y ago
  > Except Purism even had the idea to make their own products which were based on free, open-source code, charge for them And then charging 2000 dollars for a barely functional brick. I think the only ethical hardware companies I know would be System76, Framework, and Fairphone.
- tcbawo 5y ago
  Honest question: for someone whose priority is maintaining an ecosystem of general computing devices with freedom to run software of my choice (rather than privacy paranoia), what companies should I get behind and/or avoid? Between custom processors, comprehensive SoC, and secure boot, I'm a little afraid getting caged in over the long term with practically any offerings out there right now.

sz4kerto 5y ago

Looks like it doesn't worth buying the Max if you don't need a powerful GPU.

kabes 5y ago
I don't need a powerful GPU, but I do need the additional RAM the max supports..
sudhirj 5y ago
Yeah, the Max has exactly the same CPU as the Pro. Only reason I picked it is because I wanted the 32GB RAM, and only the Max has that by default — customised orders take a long time deliver in India.
- glhaynes 5y ago
  Believe the Max also has twice the memory bandwidth as the Pro. EDIT, upon reading the bottom part of the first page of the linked article: And double the cache, more cores on the Neural Engine, and maybe doubled media processing, assuming I'm reading all of that correctly.
sylens 5y ago
or if you want to have 3-4 monitors
- joshstrange 5y ago
  Yep, this is what pushed me to the Max. I think the GPU is going to be overkill for my other needs (though I'm looking forward to trying some gaming) but first and foremost I needed support for my monitors (the only thing that kept me from the first M1s).
  - dmix 5y ago
    Im curious, what kind of monitor set up needs that kind of power?

OldHand2018 5y ago

It's been a while since I bought a "Pro" computer from Apple. I am kind of wondering about the perf-per-$$$ factor. With a starting price of $2000, these are expensive computers. But maybe they are worth it! The M1 computers seemed like an absolute bargain for the performance.

cududa 5y ago
Depends what you need them for. On a music video set my 2010 MBP survived a drop from a second story balcony (three stories in a normal home), onto a marble floor. Got dented as hell, but only functional damage was to the ethernet port. I'm excited to get one of these new ones. Imagine it'll last at least 5 years.
mrtranscendence 5y ago
They're definitely pricey, but CPU performance is out of this world. GPU's pretty good too, though not as impressive, I understand. Alas, it'll probably be a few years before I can get one (I use my work machine for almost everything and I just got this one).
- f6v 5y ago
  It’s not that GPU isn’t impressive. Rather that you can’t put it to use in games.
  - mrtranscendence 5y ago
    Fair enough! It doesn't really bother me either way, since I don't really make use of the GPU on my laptop. Curious to try out Tensorflow on one of the new machines, though.
    - rezahussain 5y ago
      Yes, I just want to see some tensorflow specific benchmarks on the m1 max with 32 gpu cores vs 3080.
5y ago

tromp 5y ago

> I’ve had extreme trouble to find workloads that would stress the GPU sufficiently to take advantage of the available bandwidth. Would love to see how well the GPU runs a memory-bound Proof-of-Work like Cuckatoo Cycle [1]. [1] https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo

lmilcin 5y ago

> Power Behaviour: No Real TDP, but Wide Range Actually, TDP stands for "Thermal Design Power" and is not a range. It means "I, the designer, designed it so that this is maximum amount of waste heat as it can safely produce continuously in normal use". It is mainly limited by its physical package and maximum temperature at which the internal components can run. That you can't observe that max power is due to the fact that those various applications stress the CPU in various ways, not always being able to exercise all internal structures to their maximum potential, at the same time. > One should probably assume a 90% efficiency figure in the AC-to-DC conversion chain from 230V wall to 28V USB-C MagSafe to whatever the internal PMIC usage voltage of the device is. (This was regarding idle power usage) Highly unlikely. I design AC switching power supplies from first principles (and stacks of books). Efficiencies above 90% are normal for newer designs but the PSUs are designed to achieve these efficiencies above significant percentage of their design power. High efficiency at design power is important because it limits worst case waste heat which in turn makes it possible to create smaller PSU. But as PSU is a lot of tradeoffs, one of the tradeoffs that is taken is lesser efficiency at lower power where it doesn't matter as much. Typically, the lower load on the PSU as portion of design power the lower the efficiency. If the PSU is designed for 140 watt 90% efficiency, I would expect that at 7 watt it is actually much less efficient probably somewhere between 70 and 80 percent.

crateless 5y ago

Now that Apple has taken the lead in performance/battery life tradeoff, are there any machines which come close to the M1 for software dev? Specifically, compiling Rust, Android development etc. without giving up too much on battery life? Also, the last time I checked, CPUs were reporting high performance but only under light load. Has the whole throttling situation changed or should I just expect to get 2 hours battery life in exchange for extreme CPU performance? Edit: I should have specified machines that can run Linux.

wayneftw 5y ago
> ...any machines which come close to the M1 for software dev? If you can stand using macOS, that is. Personally, I'll continue using Linux because that's where all my software gets deployed to and macOS simply can't approach the value of that or the value of open source. On a Mac, you'll be fighting the OS the whole time. If speed was all that mattered, Mac users would have left Apple a long time ago because this is the first time they're faster than a PC.
raydev 5y ago
Panzerino tested WebKit compiles on the first run of M1 machines last year, and it seems like the battery held up really well on those. > After a single build of WebKit, the M1 MacBook Pro had a massive 91% of its battery left. I tried multiple tests here and I could have easily run a full build of WebKit 8-9 times on one charge of the M1 MacBook’s battery. https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro-is-powerful-but-its-the-battery-life-that-will-blow-you-away/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro... I'm looking forward to the MBP compile benchmarks.
ac29 5y ago
Today? Probably not. Intel's Alder Lake is moving to a Performance + Efficiency core setup, which should help overall with battery life. But they are still behind on manufacturing process (Alder Lake is "Intel 7", supposedly roughly comparable to TSMC N7), so Apple will quite likely maintain their lead in power consumption. Alder Lake is getting announced in 2 days, but rumors have it as a desktop-first product launch, so laptops may be another quarter or two out.

jb1991 5y ago

> GPU-accelerated machine learning, and more have all been developed or first implemented by Apple Did not realize Apple was first in that area in previous decades.

perfopt 5y ago

Why do the graphs say "Estimated" in their title