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Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip

365 points by bhouston 5y ago

dnautics 5y ago
> There’s really no way to understate what a colossal achievement Apple’s M1 processor is; compared with almost every modern x86-64 processor in its class On the other hand I'm sure there's more than a few chipheads out there who are saying "it's about time", there was a longstanding prediction that the arm architecture would overtake x86.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > there was a longstanding prediction that the arm architecture would overtake x86. So now the wheel turns and someone will have to predict how long it takes before RISC-V overtakes ARM.
  - rpmisms 5y ago
    I'd be willing to bet Apple will catalyze that change as well.
    - fartcannon 5y ago
      Only if they can lock it down.
      - GoOnThenDoTell 5y ago
        They can make their own extensions
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    I'm not totally convinced that'll happen in the desktop space. Embedded, I completely buy it, but I have read fairly convincing arguments that ARM might be a better ISA for really high-performance architectures. RISC-V also seems to value compressed instructions far too much, so we could see a high-performance fork of RISC-V?
    - urthor 5y ago
      Given how much cruft x86 has, there's a comments about world class experts above saying the gap between ARM and x86 is maybe 5%, at best, and probably less. There's realistically probably no reason RISC-V cannot work, expect that the number of techniques needed to implement a leading edge high performance evaluator is enormous.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    RISC-V has a few ISA advantages over ARM64 (mainly the variable length instructions, which provide instruction density that's comparable with x86 while still being very easy to decode) but meaningful competition would have to come from something more like the upcoming Mill architecture - VLIW-like power efficiency with the same flexibility and IPC as current OOO designs.
    - floatboth 5y ago
      RISC-V has some bad ISA disadvantages like needing three (!) instructions for array indexing: https://gist.github.com/erincandescent/8a10eeeea1918ee4f9d9982f7618ef68 https://gist.github.com/erincandescent/8a10eeeea1918ee4f9d99... Isn't Mill eternal vaporware?
- mhh__ 5y ago
  It is about time, although it is worth saying that a bunch of the chips here are actually basically ancient due to being released years ago, or being fairly old microarchitectures. Hat's off to Apple, of course, but Intel were sort of a victim of their own success in that they nearly beat AMD to extinction over the last decade. I also note that there's no comparison with a properly modern X86 (i.e. an AMD 5000 series). The Apple will still come up on top, most likely, but that Xeon did literally come out in 2012!
  - trissylegs 5y ago
    Almost might see intel actually come out with a new process node in the next year. Which is a long time coming.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  I thought the observation was always that instruction set was not such a big difference in high performance CPUs next to manufacturing technology which was by far the first order effect. It would be expected for a high performance ARM CPU to reach roughly the same performance in that case (AMD is 1 generation behind here, I think Intel is 2). Is there really "chipheads" who are predicting ARM ISA to buck this trend and start pulling ahead at equivalent technology nodes? By what mechanism do they believe this will happen, do you know?
  - entee 5y ago
    Not a chiphead, but saw this in the article that might be a reason ARM is better for this kind of thing: "The theory goes that arm64’s fixed instruction length and relatively simple instructions make implementing extremely wide decoding and execution far more practical for Apple, compared with what Intel and AMD have to do in order to decode x86-64’s variable length, often complex compound instructions." Not sure it's true, not an expert. But it doesn't sound wrong!
    - throwawaylinux 5y ago
      The fixed width decoders have always been a commonly cited advantage of fixed width, and to some degree it must be true. But this is not a recent thing, the "common wisdom" about instruction format not mattering too much still very much applies here. Pre-decode lengths or stop-bits and more recently micro-op caches have been techniques that x86 has used to mitigate this and improve front end widths, for example. People like Jim Keller (who has actually worked and lead teams implementing these very processors at Apple, Intel, and AMD!) basically say as much (while acknowledging decode is a little harder, in the large scheme of things on modern large cores it's not such a big deal): https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-... Andy Glew, one of the architects for Intel's first out of order x86 core (P6) among other things, is another who has said similar. https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch/c/elke1FHfYr0/m/SwW9NT1x2gMJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch/c/elke1FHfYr0/m/SwW9NT...
      - 5y ago
- adfrhgeaq5hy 5y ago
  I think that person meant "overstate". The ISA has relatively little to do with it. Sure, x86 requires power-hungry decoders, but most of the time you'll be running from the uop cache anyway. Plus you get denser code. Arm and x86 aren't all that different under the hood these days and generally RISC vs CISC is a wash. It took heroic engineering to get x86 that fast, but that work is already done.
- acomjean 5y ago
  x86 is quite a bit older instruction set. It has a lot of cruft and the all chips are really backward compatible with older software and many operating systems. Its extremely flexible at a cost to performance. The new Apple chips while impressive, only run new ARM64 instruction set programs compiled for apple machines. Depending on your use case that might not matter, but its still something. And competition is good for a cpu market that was lacking the massive year to year improvements of 20 years ago..
- rob74 5y ago
  Yeah, your quote is a bit unfair to x86 - after all the x86 architecture is hampered by having to maintain compatibility not only with the original 8086, but also with most other instruction set extensions that Intel and/or AMD came up with during the last 40 years. Compared to that, the M1 is almost a "clean sheet" design. So, while still a great achievement, its dramatically better efficiency is not that surprising. I wonder however if Apple leading the way will also enable the PC (Windows/Linux) platform to leave its x86 past behind. Microsoft has been trying to sell ARM-based tablets for years, but without a lot of success, because there's not enough native software available.
  - josephg 5y ago
    > So, while still a great achievement, its dramatically better efficiency is not that surprising. Is it? I was under the impression modern CPUs translate x86 instructions do on the fly translation to something else anyway. I’d be very surprised if that hardware translation process was making their chips 4x less power efficient (or whatever the number is). Also as a consumer, the reasons why x86 stayed around as long as it did sound like a bunch of excuses. If x86 is really as inefficient as you say, then it’s about time the industry started sidelining Intel and moving to a better architecture with or without them. I’m hoping AMD follows suit before long and starts selling competitive arm or risc-v chips.
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    Windows ARM failure to take of so far seems more likely to do with the relative underperformance of Qualcomm chips not the lack of software. Especially since in recent years you've been able to run x86 software anyways. Windows 10/11 on an M1 Mac via parallels however has been the best Windows ARM device I've ever used and I have no trouble using it daily as my main work laptop.
pier25 5y ago
Some of these images look incredibly real. Even knowing those are renders my brain refuses to believe these are not actual photographs. Also, these Xeons are really put to shame here.
- Naac 5y ago
  They are from 2012. They are not "are getting kind of old", but are actually discontinued. https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/64583/intel-xeon-processor-e52680-20m-cache-2-70-ghz-8-00-gts-intel-qpi.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/64583/i...
  - pier25 5y ago
    Not the Intel Xeon W-3245 which is from 2019. https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/193753/intel-xeon-w3245-processor-22m-cache-3-20-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/193753/...
    - tim-- 5y ago
      Still, the going price for a W-3245 is more than $2,000. That's just the CPU, no memory, motherboard or anything else. A 16" MacBook with 16GB of RAM is $2,499. The MacBook comes with a free display, input devices and a UPS :)
      - stemc43 5y ago
        Apple managed to book entire TSMC 5nm production or close to all last year - that's the main reason for this performance. and by managed - its passed on consumer ofc. ill just wait for amd 5nm offering that will also be in ram/cpu upgreadeable form factors and Linux compatible out of the box for half the price.
        tim-- 5y ago
        Sure, it's a reason for the performance. But it's still not a reason for the performance to price comparison that I was making. Surely a CPU that is on an older, more tested node (albeit an Intel node, take that as you will) should have amortized the costs of producing silicon products on that node. The cost of an Apple CPU is cheaper than a worse-performing older CPU. The economics here are surely poor? You can't tell me that Apple of all companies are taking a hit on their new CPUs? I mean, they could be for all I know, but that would be very un-Apple like.
ec109685 5y ago
I always wondered why Apple was pushing so much functionality into the iPhone that almost all users really didn't need. I was thinking it would get them ready for coming AR glasses and whatnot, but it was also preparing them to win on the Mac side as well.
- tommit 5y ago
  You might not need that full power now, but it certainly helps with the longevity of the devices. That's another pretty important factor IMO
  - Razengan 5y ago
    Yep. The 4 (5?) year old iPhone X still feels slick as hell.
MangoCoffee 5y ago
>in order to give the M1 Max some real competition, one has to skip laptop chips entirely and reach for not just high end desktop chips, but for server-class workstation hardware to really beat the M1 Max this is really interesting
- pier25 5y ago
  The AMD Threadripper 3990X costs about $5,000 and I'm guessing that's cheap compared to the Xeons.
  - Thaxll 5y ago
    An AMD Ryzen 9 5950X cost $700 and is almost 2x faster than an m1 max in multi core.
    - glasshead969 5y ago
      It has to be 3x faster to match M1's efficiency given the TDP is 30 vs 105.
      - Thaxll 5y ago
        I could care less about efficiency, it's still 2x faster for 2/3x less expensive. Isn't the m1 max tdp between 60 and 90w?
        glasshead969 5y ago
        Its 60-90w including GPU.
        arcticbull 5y ago
        Well yes but ones a laptop chip with a 17 hour life and the other I’ve got under my desk heating my entire condo lol
        interstice 5y ago
        If you could conceivably run a chip at a much higher TDP before hitting thermal limits you could get significantly more performance. Not that you can (probably) OC these chips at all but it suggests there may be more rabbits in the bag.
Thaxll 5y ago
I mean apple have it "easy", they control the hardware and the software, they don't need to to something that work with pci, old ram, thousands of different configs, different disk etc ... They can do whatever they want with 0 compatibility or backward compatibility. Why is the test not testing against some AMD CPU, CPU that cost $400, 5800x or 5900x for example.
- invalidname 5y ago
  Building from scratch isn't "easy". They still buy a lot of their components off the shelf so they do need to interact with vendors so they can benefit from the economies of scale on the PC side of things. Yes, they can optimize a lot of pipelines but this goes both ways. E.g. they had lightning connector which was good. USB-C beat the pants out of it and now has a much better eco-system. Apple is stuck with their sub-par connector for phones and an unclear strategy (USB-C on macs/iPads but not on phones and low end iPads).
- varenc 5y ago
  > They can do whatever they want with 0 compatibility or backward compatibility. Apple put in quite a bit of effort to make sure x86 binaries still run the ARM Macs. It works for 99.5% of things in my experience. They have even been observed putting in compatibility tweaks for specific applications. Also fun fact: The x86 compatibility software, Rosetta, isn’t distributed with macOS and has to be downloaded once it’s needed. This is likely Apple hedging their bets against possible future patent claims.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  You’ve correctly identified one reason Apple’s hardware is so effective: they have a hardware-accelerated standard library, something that requires cooperation between their software and silicon developers. The nearest comparison is if Dell released a line of servers that, when paired with Ubuntu LTS, provided a hardware-accelerated glibc. They could do this at any time, but it’s not easy; the capital cost is incredibly high and demand is incredibly low. Apple has managed to deliver, and now owns a niche last claimed by Amiga decades ago. The advantages of that niche are exactly as you describe them, but if it were as easy to profit from that niche as your dismissiveness implies, there wouldn’t have been a twenty year gap between Amiga and Apple Silicon.
parhamn 5y ago
I was randomly curious how long it would take to render a full movie at the quality of that forest image, which absolutely blew my mind. At 24fps, a 2h movie has 172800 frames. 21,970,310 M1 seconds or 8.5 M1 months. Which is less than I was expecting. The rendering seems to scale linearly per core too. Presumably bad math or a lot more rendering complexity for the pixar super computer deploys?
- convery 5y ago
  Worth keeping in mind is the similarity of frames. Or, the lack of difference. If you know that the light-source isn't changing then you can get way with just copying the last frame and super-imposing < 300 pixels to reflect what's changed. i.e. there's no need to render the same wall for every frame.
  - bhouston 5y ago
    Nobody does that though. But you can denoise a sequence which is similar.
    - bonestamp2 5y ago
      I'm guessing they don't interpolate frames either, but maybe that would be a good time saving feature if you know the end compression format and you can just interpolate the frames at the render stage instead of re-encoding it again later.
      - bhouston 5y ago
        There are ai upscalers and also ai interpolators to uprez the frame rate. Haven’t heard they used used in film but I suspect they will be as they get better.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    If you're using the same software, you can assume there's no super high-level speedups like that happening on the M1, although it might specifically target speedups on common instructions used in these workloads.
ndm000 5y ago
Is it normal to render using a CPU? Shouldn’t this test be done against GPUs instead?
- gene91 5y ago
  There are two major approaches to rendering: rasterization and ray tracing. The former is faster, the latter is more real. They are completely different approaches. Historically, ray tracing is only used for movies whereas games generally uses rasterization. The former is highly coherent workload, and is great for GPU. The latter is incoherent workload, and generally isn't suitable for GPU. Games have started using ray tracing, and there have been GPU implementation of ray tracing in the past 5 or so years. What I said above may be stale.
  - bhouston 5y ago
    Yeah it is a bit stale. 3D artists these days want their render boxes to be filled with gpus so they can use cycles or redshift or octane to render fast. Old school artists use cpus these days.
    - dagmx 5y ago
      Completely untrue. Most feature films are CPU rendered. Good luck getting a lot of high end production scenes rendering on a GPU.
      - glenneroo 5y ago
        Since when was the discussion purely feature films? Our little studio can't afford racks full of Xeon CPU renderers, so we do as GP said, using redshift, etc. and just have a ton of GPUs.
        dagmx 5y ago
        Because the commenter I replied to said that only old school artists render on the CPU. People pick the renderer that suits their needs, and it's not just a matter of old school people picking CPU pathtracers because it's what they know. You picked GPU rendering because you're, as you said, a smaller studio. That suits your needs. It's however not old school for big studios to use CPU rendering because GPU renderers just can't handle the scene complexity required yet.
PostOnce 5y ago
One of several tradeoffs is that M1-based stuff has a RAM ceiling, which until a few days ago was 16GB, now it's 64GB. If you need more than that, then you can't use M1. Does the performance gap close if Intel starts selling similar on-package RAM to consumers? I suspect yes, and rapidly. They have it, they just apparently don't want to sell it outside of specialized high-margin goods like Xeon Phi.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Do board partners want this, though? Apple only has their own margin to worry about, but when Intel starts putting DIMMs on-chip, now the system integrator doesn't know exactly how much Intel's markup is on their CPU versus their memory modules, so they end up surrendering more margin to Intel, even if it's small (eg. paying 5% more dollars per GB with Intel versus sourcing DIMMs yourself).
- ksec 5y ago
  >Does the performance gap close if Intel starts selling similar on-package RAM to consumers? That assumes on-package RAM is the key to M1 / Apple's SoC performance. And that isn't the case.
  - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
    It partially is. The M1 max comes with integrated hbm, which is way higher bandwidth than ddr4. Modern Intel/AMD processors are memory bottlenecked in multicore workloads (hence why 3d cache for Zen is a 15% improvement). The combination of hbm and on package memory means the M1 has much higher bandwidth and similar latency to anything else on the market (at the cost of not being scalable).
    - ben-schaaf 5y ago
      Do you have any source for Apple using HBM? Even the earliest version of HBM back in 2015 had 512GB/s at 4GB. It's probably just LPDDR5.
m3kw9 5y ago
By the looks of it, 3 more generations before we get 4K 30fps of such realistic looking graphics for games.
wefjioi3223O 5y ago
The new Alder Lake CPU from Intel for laptops is faster than M1 MAX: https://wccftech.com/intel-alder-lake-mobility-cpu-benchmarks-leaked-faster-than-the-apple-m1-max-smokes-amd-5980hx-11980hk/ https://wccftech.com/intel-alder-lake-mobility-cpu-benchmark... So, nothing special about M1, especially if you consider that Adler Lake will use an older manufacturing process (7nm vs 5nm used by Apple).
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  And it devours, what, 5X the power and generates far more heat and fan noise requiring a much thicker machine to house it? Also the integrated graphics will (going from Intel) be nowhere near as impressive as the M1 Max's graphics, so it's hardly competing on that front either. Not really a victory there. Also, it hasn't even been released yet, so comparing hypothetical unreleased products isn't a good comparison to call released products you can actually buy "nothing special."
  - wefjioi3223O 5y ago
    M1 MAX is not a low-power CPU. It consumes the whole 30 WATTs (!!!) and has an active cooling system. H-series CPUs from Intel have a TPD of 35 - 45 WATTS and this is almost the same as M1 MAX. According to your calculation, Intel CPU should consume 150 WATTs which is completely wrong.
    - deleted 5y ago
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    - glasshead969 5y ago
      Intel's Power consumption numbers are ideal case, they routinely go over that. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16680/tiger-lake-h-performance-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16680/tiger-lake-h-performanc...
  - 5y ago
howinteresting 5y ago
The problem with Apple is, and remains, the software, which I find utterly hostile and inflexible for my workflows, and getting worse by the year. Personally, I only consider getting one of these after it is able to a decent Linux distribution well.
- rewtraw 5y ago
  A decent desktop Linux distro needs to be created first though.
  - wincy 5y ago
    Mint is okay. Except the time that grub randomly failed for me and I had to manually fix my boot config. But at least my webcam and brightness buttons worked on my ten year old laptop, which they didn’t when I booted into windows even after spending a few hours trying to find the correct drivers. My wife (who while smart doesn’t like tinkering with computers) has been using Ubuntu for two years now and her only complaint is “my hard drive is full and how the heck do I uninstall applications?” Even things like Microsoft Teams and all the virtual doctors meetings apps work for Ubuntu, which surprised me. I mean Linux distros kinda suck when something goes wrong but I’m honestly impressed how long my wife’s Ubuntu laptop has been working without major issues.
    - howinteresting 5y ago
      Linux distros suck the least when something goes wrong. Both Windows and MacOS fail in inscrutable ways and have required me to do complete reinstalls in the past, whereas on Linux there's usually some sort of forum discussion or Arch wiki page that will get you back on the right track. It's a big reason I like Linux.
  - howinteresting 5y ago
    Thank you for the helpful contribution. Truly extraordinary.
- pabs3 5y ago
qaq 5y ago
I wonder what is the pgbench score for these given M1 notebooks are hitting 100K+ writes per sec. These MBPs might be the best 5K server you can buy for a DB.
deleted 5y ago
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reacharavindh 5y ago
Just for fun, I would run PostgreSQL on this Mac with 64GB of memory and see how it flies. Heck even install Linux on it and then put on Postgres. It might just put some baremetal servers to shame if 64GiB of memory is enough. If only I had enough money to splurge on such curiosity experiments… :-( For my personal machine, I’d wait for Framework with Ryzen 5000 series…
- eertami 5y ago
  >Heck even install Linux on it Good luck with that... it's the one thing that doesn't seem to come up in these comparisons. At least with the Ryzen/Intel CPUs you can easily install Linux - but until this is true of the M1 chips then these benchmarks aren't all that useful.
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    Installing Asahi is pretty straightforward to be honest. The guided installer due soon is a nice to have, not a major roadblock to benchmarking.
  - marcellus23 5y ago
    > it's the one thing that doesn't seem to come up in these comparisons it would be odd for an article about graphical performance benchmarking to start talking about OS compatibility.
tinus_hn 5y ago
What a great look for a ‘hobby’ renderer!
samgranieri 5y ago
Holy shit. It’s absolutely incredible what Apple has cooked up, seeing it in a real life workflow like this. And the bigger iMacs and Mac Pros with even beefier M1 derivates haven’t even been released yet!
Pieman103021 5y ago
I am curious to see how this compares to Graviton2, does anyone have relevant benchmarks/comparisons?
- zamadatix 5y ago
  Not a rendering benchmark but Anandtech has a performance review for each. Looking on the massively multithreaded workload side having 64 cores seems to far outweigh having 8+2 https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15578/115097.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15578/115097.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17024/117494.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17024/117494.png You can dig into other benchmarks in the reviews https://www.anandtech.com/print/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-graviton2-arm-against-intel-and-amd https://www.anandtech.com/print/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-gra... https://www.anandtech.com/print/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review https://www.anandtech.com/print/17024/apple-m1-max-performan...
miqueloc 5y ago
Who else going to the last paragraph? Ooops, this is hackernews

365 points by bhouston 5y ago

> There’s really no way to understate what a colossal achievement Apple’s M1 processor is; compared with almost every modern x86-64 processor in its class On the other hand I'm sure there's more than a few chipheads out there who are saying "it's about time", there was a longstanding prediction that the arm architecture would overtake x86.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> there was a longstanding prediction that the arm architecture would overtake x86. So now the wheel turns and someone will have to predict how long it takes before RISC-V overtakes ARM.
- rpmisms 5y ago
  I'd be willing to bet Apple will catalyze that change as well.
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    Only if they can lock it down.
    - GoOnThenDoTell 5y ago
      They can make their own extensions
- mhh__ 5y ago
  I'm not totally convinced that'll happen in the desktop space. Embedded, I completely buy it, but I have read fairly convincing arguments that ARM might be a better ISA for really high-performance architectures. RISC-V also seems to value compressed instructions far too much, so we could see a high-performance fork of RISC-V?
  - urthor 5y ago
    Given how much cruft x86 has, there's a comments about world class experts above saying the gap between ARM and x86 is maybe 5%, at best, and probably less. There's realistically probably no reason RISC-V cannot work, expect that the number of techniques needed to implement a leading edge high performance evaluator is enormous.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  RISC-V has a few ISA advantages over ARM64 (mainly the variable length instructions, which provide instruction density that's comparable with x86 while still being very easy to decode) but meaningful competition would have to come from something more like the upcoming Mill architecture - VLIW-like power efficiency with the same flexibility and IPC as current OOO designs.
  - floatboth 5y ago
    RISC-V has some bad ISA disadvantages like needing three (!) instructions for array indexing: https://gist.github.com/erincandescent/8a10eeeea1918ee4f9d9982f7618ef68 https://gist.github.com/erincandescent/8a10eeeea1918ee4f9d99... Isn't Mill eternal vaporware?
mhh__ 5y ago
It is about time, although it is worth saying that a bunch of the chips here are actually basically ancient due to being released years ago, or being fairly old microarchitectures. Hat's off to Apple, of course, but Intel were sort of a victim of their own success in that they nearly beat AMD to extinction over the last decade. I also note that there's no comparison with a properly modern X86 (i.e. an AMD 5000 series). The Apple will still come up on top, most likely, but that Xeon did literally come out in 2012!
- trissylegs 5y ago
  Almost might see intel actually come out with a new process node in the next year. Which is a long time coming.
throwawaylinux 5y ago
I thought the observation was always that instruction set was not such a big difference in high performance CPUs next to manufacturing technology which was by far the first order effect. It would be expected for a high performance ARM CPU to reach roughly the same performance in that case (AMD is 1 generation behind here, I think Intel is 2). Is there really "chipheads" who are predicting ARM ISA to buck this trend and start pulling ahead at equivalent technology nodes? By what mechanism do they believe this will happen, do you know?
- entee 5y ago
  Not a chiphead, but saw this in the article that might be a reason ARM is better for this kind of thing: "The theory goes that arm64’s fixed instruction length and relatively simple instructions make implementing extremely wide decoding and execution far more practical for Apple, compared with what Intel and AMD have to do in order to decode x86-64’s variable length, often complex compound instructions." Not sure it's true, not an expert. But it doesn't sound wrong!
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    The fixed width decoders have always been a commonly cited advantage of fixed width, and to some degree it must be true. But this is not a recent thing, the "common wisdom" about instruction format not mattering too much still very much applies here. Pre-decode lengths or stop-bits and more recently micro-op caches have been techniques that x86 has used to mitigate this and improve front end widths, for example. People like Jim Keller (who has actually worked and lead teams implementing these very processors at Apple, Intel, and AMD!) basically say as much (while acknowledging decode is a little harder, in the large scheme of things on modern large cores it's not such a big deal): https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-... Andy Glew, one of the architects for Intel's first out of order x86 core (P6) among other things, is another who has said similar. https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch/c/elke1FHfYr0/m/SwW9NT1x2gMJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch/c/elke1FHfYr0/m/SwW9NT...
    - 5y ago
adfrhgeaq5hy 5y ago
I think that person meant "overstate". The ISA has relatively little to do with it. Sure, x86 requires power-hungry decoders, but most of the time you'll be running from the uop cache anyway. Plus you get denser code. Arm and x86 aren't all that different under the hood these days and generally RISC vs CISC is a wash. It took heroic engineering to get x86 that fast, but that work is already done.
acomjean 5y ago
x86 is quite a bit older instruction set. It has a lot of cruft and the all chips are really backward compatible with older software and many operating systems. Its extremely flexible at a cost to performance. The new Apple chips while impressive, only run new ARM64 instruction set programs compiled for apple machines. Depending on your use case that might not matter, but its still something. And competition is good for a cpu market that was lacking the massive year to year improvements of 20 years ago..
rob74 5y ago
Yeah, your quote is a bit unfair to x86 - after all the x86 architecture is hampered by having to maintain compatibility not only with the original 8086, but also with most other instruction set extensions that Intel and/or AMD came up with during the last 40 years. Compared to that, the M1 is almost a "clean sheet" design. So, while still a great achievement, its dramatically better efficiency is not that surprising. I wonder however if Apple leading the way will also enable the PC (Windows/Linux) platform to leave its x86 past behind. Microsoft has been trying to sell ARM-based tablets for years, but without a lot of success, because there's not enough native software available.
- josephg 5y ago
  > So, while still a great achievement, its dramatically better efficiency is not that surprising. Is it? I was under the impression modern CPUs translate x86 instructions do on the fly translation to something else anyway. I’d be very surprised if that hardware translation process was making their chips 4x less power efficient (or whatever the number is). Also as a consumer, the reasons why x86 stayed around as long as it did sound like a bunch of excuses. If x86 is really as inefficient as you say, then it’s about time the industry started sidelining Intel and moving to a better architecture with or without them. I’m hoping AMD follows suit before long and starts selling competitive arm or risc-v chips.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  Windows ARM failure to take of so far seems more likely to do with the relative underperformance of Qualcomm chips not the lack of software. Especially since in recent years you've been able to run x86 software anyways. Windows 10/11 on an M1 Mac via parallels however has been the best Windows ARM device I've ever used and I have no trouble using it daily as my main work laptop.

pier25 5y ago

Some of these images look incredibly real. Even knowing those are renders my brain refuses to believe these are not actual photographs. Also, these Xeons are really put to shame here.

Naac 5y ago
They are from 2012. They are not "are getting kind of old", but are actually discontinued. https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/64583/intel-xeon-processor-e52680-20m-cache-2-70-ghz-8-00-gts-intel-qpi.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/64583/i...
- pier25 5y ago
  Not the Intel Xeon W-3245 which is from 2019. https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/193753/intel-xeon-w3245-processor-22m-cache-3-20-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/193753/...
  - tim-- 5y ago
    Still, the going price for a W-3245 is more than $2,000. That's just the CPU, no memory, motherboard or anything else. A 16" MacBook with 16GB of RAM is $2,499. The MacBook comes with a free display, input devices and a UPS :)
    - stemc43 5y ago
      Apple managed to book entire TSMC 5nm production or close to all last year - that's the main reason for this performance. and by managed - its passed on consumer ofc. ill just wait for amd 5nm offering that will also be in ram/cpu upgreadeable form factors and Linux compatible out of the box for half the price.
      - tim-- 5y ago
        Sure, it's a reason for the performance. But it's still not a reason for the performance to price comparison that I was making. Surely a CPU that is on an older, more tested node (albeit an Intel node, take that as you will) should have amortized the costs of producing silicon products on that node. The cost of an Apple CPU is cheaper than a worse-performing older CPU. The economics here are surely poor? You can't tell me that Apple of all companies are taking a hit on their new CPUs? I mean, they could be for all I know, but that would be very un-Apple like.

ec109685 5y ago

I always wondered why Apple was pushing so much functionality into the iPhone that almost all users really didn't need. I was thinking it would get them ready for coming AR glasses and whatnot, but it was also preparing them to win on the Mac side as well.

tommit 5y ago
You might not need that full power now, but it certainly helps with the longevity of the devices. That's another pretty important factor IMO
- Razengan 5y ago
  Yep. The 4 (5?) year old iPhone X still feels slick as hell.

MangoCoffee 5y ago

>in order to give the M1 Max some real competition, one has to skip laptop chips entirely and reach for not just high end desktop chips, but for server-class workstation hardware to really beat the M1 Max this is really interesting

pier25 5y ago
The AMD Threadripper 3990X costs about $5,000 and I'm guessing that's cheap compared to the Xeons.
- Thaxll 5y ago
  An AMD Ryzen 9 5950X cost $700 and is almost 2x faster than an m1 max in multi core.
  - glasshead969 5y ago
    It has to be 3x faster to match M1's efficiency given the TDP is 30 vs 105.
    - Thaxll 5y ago
      I could care less about efficiency, it's still 2x faster for 2/3x less expensive. Isn't the m1 max tdp between 60 and 90w?
      - glasshead969 5y ago
        Its 60-90w including GPU.
      - arcticbull 5y ago
        Well yes but ones a laptop chip with a 17 hour life and the other I’ve got under my desk heating my entire condo lol
      - interstice 5y ago
        If you could conceivably run a chip at a much higher TDP before hitting thermal limits you could get significantly more performance. Not that you can (probably) OC these chips at all but it suggests there may be more rabbits in the bag.

Thaxll 5y ago

I mean apple have it "easy", they control the hardware and the software, they don't need to to something that work with pci, old ram, thousands of different configs, different disk etc ... They can do whatever they want with 0 compatibility or backward compatibility. Why is the test not testing against some AMD CPU, CPU that cost $400, 5800x or 5900x for example.

invalidname 5y ago
Building from scratch isn't "easy". They still buy a lot of their components off the shelf so they do need to interact with vendors so they can benefit from the economies of scale on the PC side of things. Yes, they can optimize a lot of pipelines but this goes both ways. E.g. they had lightning connector which was good. USB-C beat the pants out of it and now has a much better eco-system. Apple is stuck with their sub-par connector for phones and an unclear strategy (USB-C on macs/iPads but not on phones and low end iPads).
varenc 5y ago
> They can do whatever they want with 0 compatibility or backward compatibility. Apple put in quite a bit of effort to make sure x86 binaries still run the ARM Macs. It works for 99.5% of things in my experience. They have even been observed putting in compatibility tweaks for specific applications. Also fun fact: The x86 compatibility software, Rosetta, isn’t distributed with macOS and has to be downloaded once it’s needed. This is likely Apple hedging their bets against possible future patent claims.
floatingatoll 5y ago
You’ve correctly identified one reason Apple’s hardware is so effective: they have a hardware-accelerated standard library, something that requires cooperation between their software and silicon developers. The nearest comparison is if Dell released a line of servers that, when paired with Ubuntu LTS, provided a hardware-accelerated glibc. They could do this at any time, but it’s not easy; the capital cost is incredibly high and demand is incredibly low. Apple has managed to deliver, and now owns a niche last claimed by Amiga decades ago. The advantages of that niche are exactly as you describe them, but if it were as easy to profit from that niche as your dismissiveness implies, there wouldn’t have been a twenty year gap between Amiga and Apple Silicon.

parhamn 5y ago

I was randomly curious how long it would take to render a full movie at the quality of that forest image, which absolutely blew my mind. At 24fps, a 2h movie has 172800 frames. 21,970,310 M1 seconds or 8.5 M1 months. Which is less than I was expecting. The rendering seems to scale linearly per core too. Presumably bad math or a lot more rendering complexity for the pixar super computer deploys?

convery 5y ago
Worth keeping in mind is the similarity of frames. Or, the lack of difference. If you know that the light-source isn't changing then you can get way with just copying the last frame and super-imposing < 300 pixels to reflect what's changed. i.e. there's no need to render the same wall for every frame.
- bhouston 5y ago
  Nobody does that though. But you can denoise a sequence which is similar.
  - bonestamp2 5y ago
    I'm guessing they don't interpolate frames either, but maybe that would be a good time saving feature if you know the end compression format and you can just interpolate the frames at the render stage instead of re-encoding it again later.
    - bhouston 5y ago
      There are ai upscalers and also ai interpolators to uprez the frame rate. Haven’t heard they used used in film but I suspect they will be as they get better.
- judge2020 5y ago
  If you're using the same software, you can assume there's no super high-level speedups like that happening on the M1, although it might specifically target speedups on common instructions used in these workloads.

ndm000 5y ago

Is it normal to render using a CPU? Shouldn’t this test be done against GPUs instead?

gene91 5y ago
There are two major approaches to rendering: rasterization and ray tracing. The former is faster, the latter is more real. They are completely different approaches. Historically, ray tracing is only used for movies whereas games generally uses rasterization. The former is highly coherent workload, and is great for GPU. The latter is incoherent workload, and generally isn't suitable for GPU. Games have started using ray tracing, and there have been GPU implementation of ray tracing in the past 5 or so years. What I said above may be stale.
- bhouston 5y ago
  Yeah it is a bit stale. 3D artists these days want their render boxes to be filled with gpus so they can use cycles or redshift or octane to render fast. Old school artists use cpus these days.
  - dagmx 5y ago
    Completely untrue. Most feature films are CPU rendered. Good luck getting a lot of high end production scenes rendering on a GPU.
    - glenneroo 5y ago
      Since when was the discussion purely feature films? Our little studio can't afford racks full of Xeon CPU renderers, so we do as GP said, using redshift, etc. and just have a ton of GPUs.
      - dagmx 5y ago
        Because the commenter I replied to said that only old school artists render on the CPU. People pick the renderer that suits their needs, and it's not just a matter of old school people picking CPU pathtracers because it's what they know. You picked GPU rendering because you're, as you said, a smaller studio. That suits your needs. It's however not old school for big studios to use CPU rendering because GPU renderers just can't handle the scene complexity required yet.

PostOnce 5y ago

One of several tradeoffs is that M1-based stuff has a RAM ceiling, which until a few days ago was 16GB, now it's 64GB. If you need more than that, then you can't use M1. Does the performance gap close if Intel starts selling similar on-package RAM to consumers? I suspect yes, and rapidly. They have it, they just apparently don't want to sell it outside of specialized high-margin goods like Xeon Phi.

judge2020 5y ago
Do board partners want this, though? Apple only has their own margin to worry about, but when Intel starts putting DIMMs on-chip, now the system integrator doesn't know exactly how much Intel's markup is on their CPU versus their memory modules, so they end up surrendering more margin to Intel, even if it's small (eg. paying 5% more dollars per GB with Intel versus sourcing DIMMs yourself).
ksec 5y ago
>Does the performance gap close if Intel starts selling similar on-package RAM to consumers? That assumes on-package RAM is the key to M1 / Apple's SoC performance. And that isn't the case.
- adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
  It partially is. The M1 max comes with integrated hbm, which is way higher bandwidth than ddr4. Modern Intel/AMD processors are memory bottlenecked in multicore workloads (hence why 3d cache for Zen is a 15% improvement). The combination of hbm and on package memory means the M1 has much higher bandwidth and similar latency to anything else on the market (at the cost of not being scalable).
  - ben-schaaf 5y ago
    Do you have any source for Apple using HBM? Even the earliest version of HBM back in 2015 had 512GB/s at 4GB. It's probably just LPDDR5.

m3kw9 5y ago

By the looks of it, 3 more generations before we get 4K 30fps of such realistic looking graphics for games.

wefjioi3223O 5y ago

The new Alder Lake CPU from Intel for laptops is faster than M1 MAX: https://wccftech.com/intel-alder-lake-mobility-cpu-benchmarks-leaked-faster-than-the-apple-m1-max-smokes-amd-5980hx-11980hk/ https://wccftech.com/intel-alder-lake-mobility-cpu-benchmark... So, nothing special about M1, especially if you consider that Adler Lake will use an older manufacturing process (7nm vs 5nm used by Apple).

gjsman-1000 5y ago
And it devours, what, 5X the power and generates far more heat and fan noise requiring a much thicker machine to house it? Also the integrated graphics will (going from Intel) be nowhere near as impressive as the M1 Max's graphics, so it's hardly competing on that front either. Not really a victory there. Also, it hasn't even been released yet, so comparing hypothetical unreleased products isn't a good comparison to call released products you can actually buy "nothing special."
- wefjioi3223O 5y ago
  M1 MAX is not a low-power CPU. It consumes the whole 30 WATTs (!!!) and has an active cooling system. H-series CPUs from Intel have a TPD of 35 - 45 WATTS and this is almost the same as M1 MAX. According to your calculation, Intel CPU should consume 150 WATTs which is completely wrong.
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  - glasshead969 5y ago
    Intel's Power consumption numbers are ideal case, they routinely go over that. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16680/tiger-lake-h-performance-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16680/tiger-lake-h-performanc...
- 5y ago

howinteresting 5y ago

The problem with Apple is, and remains, the software, which I find utterly hostile and inflexible for my workflows, and getting worse by the year. Personally, I only consider getting one of these after it is able to a decent Linux distribution well.

rewtraw 5y ago
A decent desktop Linux distro needs to be created first though.
- wincy 5y ago
  Mint is okay. Except the time that grub randomly failed for me and I had to manually fix my boot config. But at least my webcam and brightness buttons worked on my ten year old laptop, which they didn’t when I booted into windows even after spending a few hours trying to find the correct drivers. My wife (who while smart doesn’t like tinkering with computers) has been using Ubuntu for two years now and her only complaint is “my hard drive is full and how the heck do I uninstall applications?” Even things like Microsoft Teams and all the virtual doctors meetings apps work for Ubuntu, which surprised me. I mean Linux distros kinda suck when something goes wrong but I’m honestly impressed how long my wife’s Ubuntu laptop has been working without major issues.
  - howinteresting 5y ago
    Linux distros suck the least when something goes wrong. Both Windows and MacOS fail in inscrutable ways and have required me to do complete reinstalls in the past, whereas on Linux there's usually some sort of forum discussion or Arch wiki page that will get you back on the right track. It's a big reason I like Linux.
- howinteresting 5y ago
  Thank you for the helpful contribution. Truly extraordinary.
pabs3 5y ago

qaq 5y ago

I wonder what is the pgbench score for these given M1 notebooks are hitting 100K+ writes per sec. These MBPs might be the best 5K server you can buy for a DB.

deleted 5y ago

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reacharavindh 5y ago

Just for fun, I would run PostgreSQL on this Mac with 64GB of memory and see how it flies. Heck even install Linux on it and then put on Postgres. It might just put some baremetal servers to shame if 64GiB of memory is enough. If only I had enough money to splurge on such curiosity experiments… :-( For my personal machine, I’d wait for Framework with Ryzen 5000 series…

eertami 5y ago
>Heck even install Linux on it Good luck with that... it's the one thing that doesn't seem to come up in these comparisons. At least with the Ryzen/Intel CPUs you can easily install Linux - but until this is true of the M1 chips then these benchmarks aren't all that useful.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  Installing Asahi is pretty straightforward to be honest. The guided installer due soon is a nice to have, not a major roadblock to benchmarking.
- marcellus23 5y ago
  > it's the one thing that doesn't seem to come up in these comparisons it would be odd for an article about graphical performance benchmarking to start talking about OS compatibility.

tinus_hn 5y ago

What a great look for a ‘hobby’ renderer!

samgranieri 5y ago

Holy shit. It’s absolutely incredible what Apple has cooked up, seeing it in a real life workflow like this. And the bigger iMacs and Mac Pros with even beefier M1 derivates haven’t even been released yet!

Pieman103021 5y ago

I am curious to see how this compares to Graviton2, does anyone have relevant benchmarks/comparisons?

zamadatix 5y ago
Not a rendering benchmark but Anandtech has a performance review for each. Looking on the massively multithreaded workload side having 64 cores seems to far outweigh having 8+2 https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15578/115097.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15578/115097.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17024/117494.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17024/117494.png You can dig into other benchmarks in the reviews https://www.anandtech.com/print/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-graviton2-arm-against-intel-and-amd https://www.anandtech.com/print/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-gra... https://www.anandtech.com/print/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review https://www.anandtech.com/print/17024/apple-m1-max-performan...

miqueloc 5y ago

Who else going to the last paragraph? Ooops, this is hackernews