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>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 wo

>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.
      - jbverschoor 5y ago
        You're comparing a single CPU with a complete machine
    - speed_spread 5y ago
      If you're plugged in all the time, lower TDP is nice but not critical. And if you live in a cold country, you have to heat up the house six months per year, TDP is just heating with a computing side effect.
      - new_realist 5y ago
        A hot laptop can have significant impacts on fertility in men. And in the summer you have to dissipate that heat. A heat pump is more efficient for heating, to boot.
        uuddlrlr 5y ago
        It's a temporary infertility, at least.
      - TYPE_FASTER 5y ago
        This winter I'm going to experiment with having a Raspberry Pi act as a thermostat that starts/stops containers running on a server in our basement. That, combined with the laptop we just got for gaming that has a 3070 in it, should do nicely to supplement our heating system.
        Uehreka 5y ago
        Watts go in, Watts come out. So basically, find a space heater with the TDP of your server, and that’s the upper bound on what you can expect heating-wise. I know that’s a bummer for people who want to heat their house with their computer, but Thermodynamics is always a bummer, I don’t make the Laws.
        buildbot 5y ago
        That's why I heat my house with a dell C4140! The _lowest_ power throttle it has is 1.4KW.
        matheusmoreira 5y ago
        > So basically, find a space heater with the TDP of your server, and that’s the upper bound on what you can expect heating-wise. I wonder how many CPUs I need to build a cryptocurrency miner water heater... That would be so much better than just wasting energy heating up dumb elements.
  - microtonal 5y ago
    Except in benchmarks outside GeekBench it isn't. See e.g. the last graph in https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... The 5950X is only 55% faster than the M1 Max on multi-threaded integer benchmarks. The M1 Max is even 26% faster than the 5950X on multi-threaded FP benchmarks (maybe it has two AMX units?). The M1 Max is really in 5900X/5950X territory... in a laptop. I agree on the pricing (I also have a 5900X and a 5950X machine). But it is fantastic that we can have that kind of performance in a mobile device and still have many hours of battery life. We should complement both AMD and Apple and be happy that we finally have serious competitors to Intel. AMD has managed to compete with and outrun Intel from the an initial position of an also-ran underdog. I think the M1 line is more impressive technically than Ryzen, given the very low TDPs. But Apple has vastly more budget and much more opportunity for vertical integration. Both companies have done impressive work the last few years.
    - Tade0 5y ago
      > I think the M1 line is more impressive technically than Ryzen, given the very low TDPs. I would say TSMC's 5nm process is more impressive technically than TSMC's 7nm process, which are used here respectively. I think Apple will still win on a per Watt basis even when AMD starts using the current-generation process, but the question is: by how much?
      - guywhocodes 5y ago
        This is the real question, my money is on 5-10%.
    - em500 5y ago
      In Geekbench Multi-Core, the 5950X is only 33% faster (at 16.6k) than the M1 Max (which benches around 12.5k). So the difference is actually smaller than in SPEC that Anandtech uses. For all the dissing of Geekbench, I found it to actually correlate pretty closely with supposedly more elaborate benchmarks like SPEC. (The writing was on the wall for Apple Silicon performance for many years, when the iPhone/iPad Ax CPUs where catching up and surpassing laptop CPUs in Geekbench, but lots of people dismissed it because it was just Geekbench...). To get some context of the M1 Pro/Max perf, people should take a look at https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks, sort by Multi-Core, and slot the M1 Pro/Max in at around 12500.
  - mmgutz 5y ago
    I'm an AMD fan. The comparison should not even be close TBH. We're talking about a laptop chip that can run on battery for an extended period of time that performs as well and sometimes better than the high end consumer AMD desktop chip. Kudos to Apple. I'm not suprised. Apple has the lead in the fabrication process, 5nm vs 7nm. I eagerly await a true apples to apples comparison when AMD uses the same 5nm process.
    - pmontra 5y ago
      I'm definitely not an Apple fan but what's available on the market at any given moment is an apple to apple comparison of what companies are able to do. I mean: any modern army (or pary of) would crush Roman legions, but they had to do it 2000 years ago. The article ends wondering about the impact on PC OEMs. I presume they are extrapolating the performance improvement curves, talking with Microsoft about Windows on ARM and working at HW contingency plans in case they have to leave a sinking x86 ship. I don't think they are resting on promises of big improvements from AMD and Intel.
  - Dagonfly 5y ago
    Ok, lets build an equivalent PC. These are prices in Germany (incl. VAT): A 14' Macbook Pro (M1 Max with 32 GPU cores, 32 GB RAM, 512 GB storage) is 3440€. A PC: 5950X (750€), 32GB RAM (150€), Mainboard (130€), WD SN850 500GB (90€). Now if you build from scratch you need a PSU, CPU cooler and a case (~200€ together). That's 1320€ without a GPU. Depending on your workload the GPU performance seems to be between a desktop 3060 and 3080. So between 700€ and 1400€. Tl;dr: A 3440€ Macbook competes with a 2000-2700€ desktop depending on your workload. The desktop has no peripherals and no USB4/TB4.
    - salamandersauce 5y ago
      TBF GPU prices are nonsensical at this point in time. The MSRP of a 3060 Ti is $400, a 3080 should be $700.
    - carlob 5y ago
      I wonder how much a comparable desktop monitor would add to that. On the other hand I really want to give the keyboard a shot before I pull the trigger, after 3 years of Thinkpad I think that will be the real pain point...
    - pier25 5y ago
      You'd need to add a HiDPI HDR screen too.
  - beowulfey 5y ago
    That’s amazing that it’s not even twice as good!
- vmception 5y ago
  And then you have to buy the rest of the machine With Apple they are just overcharging for solid state drives, which I’m cool with these days (because at least I’ll get them)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
soylentnewsorg 5y ago
and quite false. there are many laptop xeon CPUs. while costing more than the M1 Max, they beat the pants off it.
- rsynnott 5y ago
  Laptop Xeons generally won't be doing too well here; I'm fairly certain they're _all_ smaller than the Xeon in the Mac Pro mentioned in the article.
- DeRock 5y ago
  Can you share a laptop with one of them for comparison?
  - soylentnewsorg 5y ago
    One of my laptops is a Dell Precision 7760. Xeon W-11855M, NVIDIA RTX, 128GB ECC RAM. I don't need too much storage, but you can get it with 14TB if you want. Note mine is a 6-core. There is an 8-core available w/ the Xeon W-11955M, which is faster than mine. It's only a little thicker than the macbook pro. It's keyboard doesn't break, and the product line has had a 4k screen since 5 years ago. It's 120Hz refresh rate. It has a very large power brick - 240W, it gets hot and loud with a huge fan exhaust. It's thick metal and about 7-9lb - you can run over it with a car. It only gets 9 hours battery w/ regular usage, and about 3 hours of "fan on time." Keep in mind, with the large and loud fan on, it can stay at 5GHz. This is called a pro laptop - a workstation. When I travel, I bring a 65W PSU, and it runs fine on that, just w/o turbo boost. No, don't point to the lower "geekbench" score for this laptop - that's not a CPU test. GPU performance is a large part of that test, and they run the test on the default GPU. The M1 only has a single GPU. The Precision's default is the low power integrated graphics, not the discreet GPU. If you have a test where they assign the discreet GPU, please feel free to point it out. As I've discussed before here, I have a shell script that runs in parallel with a bunch of VMs. My coworkers air (yes, I know it's not the max) runs it in 8-10 hours overnight. I run it over lunch. It loads, does calculations on, and creates graphs from several gig of ascii performance data. What does compare in performance to the M1 air is my Latitude w/ the I7 in it. The M1 "max" is "max for apple" but competes with mid-tier laptops from everyone else. And that's ignoring the fact that it can't run pretty much any of the useful industry tools or games w/o recompiling x86 to arm on the fly. Yes, I think my Dell cost the company $7-8k, without support. That's why it's called a pro laptop.
partiallypro 5y ago
Intel's Alder Lake benchmarks show that their new mobile processor is faster than the M1 Max. So, this domination doesn't seem to be a long term thing.
- sydthrowaway 5y ago
  Finally some objectivity to stop the M1 love fest
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    And it will probably devour a ridiculous amount of power and generate a thermos of heat to be marginally overall faster. It also won’t have a comparable GPU. M1 Max still is the better experience and innovation.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      If you don't require a laptop then an alder lake chip doesn't take anything close to a ridiculous amount of power, nor is it hard to cool. Edit: I know this discussion is partly focused on laptops, but the overall comparison is including server chips so it's clearly not just about laptops. And 60 or 100 watts is child's play in even a tiny desktop.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    Yeah the 12900HK beats the Max by 3%, even though the M1 Max is way more power efficient and likely utterly smoked it on GPU. After all it’s 8% faster than a mobile 3060. The 3060 alone is a 60W TGP. The M1 Max running Cinebench consumes 9W while the 11980HK (previous gen) consumes 45W. Perf/W Is about 3X higher for the M1 Max on CPU alone and I suspect factoring in graphics we’ve got a breakaway here. Intel will catch up but not today.
    - valzam 5y ago
      Just FYI because I've seent that a few times already: A 60W/70W 3060 is -very slow-. There are many laptops that supply much more power and conversely also get better results.
bonestamp2 5y ago
When these chips hit the rackmount Mac Pro, the server competition will be very interesting. It's kind of a unique package for a server, which such a powerful GPU, but that has advantages for some compute types too of course.
- jbverschoor 5y ago
  Wait max 2 years when the AWS contracts expire
  - bradknowles 5y ago
    Apple has many different types of data centers. Some are actually hosted in a cloud provider like Google, Microsoft, or AWS. But they also have a fair amount of their own physical data centers, and I would not be surprised to find that they start filling them out with Apple Silicon hardware. And they might roll out a lot of services on AWS using Apple Silicon hardware, because AWS has recently made available actual Apple hardware in some of their regions. I think this could potentially be a precursor, but this is just my own personal hunch and I have no information outside my own brain towards this end.
- grp000 5y ago
  Would be cool if they try to decouple the GPU and CPU for server units somehow.
  - bredren 5y ago
    I think they will with a new release of the “Afterburner” card, this time powered by Apple Silicon instead of FPGAs. https://www.gettingtechnologyright.com/apples-mac-pro-wheels-are-optional/ https://www.gettingtechnologyright.com/apples-mac-pro-wheels... >The second bit of design is in the optional “Afterburner” video editing card. The discussion of it starts at around the 1hr. 26 min. point in the Keynote. It is described as a custom FPGA-based HW accelerator. It is claimed to be capable of processing 6 billion pixels per second. The silicon is not Apple’s but the design is.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
Not really, because the first Xeon CPU he compares against is ten years old. That kind of system isn't worth the cost of shipping it somewhere. A current generation desktop i3 is likely faster in almost any workload. It's not even interesting that the M1 is "slightly" beaten by a Mac Pro's Xeon, because nobody is doing raytracing on CPUs. A Pascal nvidia GPU will render scenes in Blender faster than a current mid-tier AMD CPU, and it's two generations old. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=blender-290-rtx3080&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=blender-... It takes an RTX 3080 card (not even the fastest consumer Ampere card) 11 seconds to render a scene that the fastest Pascal card (1080) took 94 seconds. That's nearly an order of magnitude faster. I saw an article comparing the M1 Max to a high end AMD card, but that's also meh. AMDs's GPUs don't perform anywhere near as well as Ampere and they use far more power, so they're an easy target to compare against. AMD fakes their benchmarks by overclocking the cards depending on temperature, and the benchmarks they run to tout performance figures are just shy of where the card starts to throttle back for thermals. An AMD GPU that has been running for an hour will perform substantially worse compared to an Ampere card.
- dagmx 5y ago
  Almost every Blockbuster film you watch has raytracing done on the CPU. A lot of studios have dabbled with GPU pathtracing, and indeed it works for smaller projects like commercials and TV. However big set pieces just don't jive well with GPU rendering, and most GPU path tracers are too young to feature all the bells and whistles productions want.
- hunterloftis 5y ago
  > It's not even interesting that the M1 is "slightly" beaten by a Mac Pro's Xeon, because _nobody is doing raytracing on CPUs._ This is backwards - Nearly all major raytracing workloads today are done primarily on CPUs: vfx, animated film and tv, etc. There are several reasons for this, including memory limits and the lack of coherence in both path tracing algorithms and common acceleration structures. GPU-based tracing is currently a small subset of rendering tasks (primarily those with real-time requirements). As GPU memory increases, GPUs will become more attractive in this space - likely in the next few years.
zbobet2012 5y ago
>this is really interesting Sadly this is not really interesting, it's disingenuous. He benchmarked against a ten year old (03/06/2012) server CPU. My two year old intel laptop cpu (i7-9750H) also outperforms the xeon's he's comparing against by almost 40%. The M1 is a great chip, it's sad that this got published with a "server chip" comparison at all. A real server class CPU from the modern era, at a comparable price point, is the AMD EPYC 7443P, which is 400% faster on cpu bench.
- girvo 5y ago
  He also benchmarked it against the Intel Xeon W-3245 which is what that referred to. It's not disingenuous at all: the old Xeon is explicitly called out as old, which is why he compared it to the 2019 Xeon in the Mac Pro as well.
- ykl 5y ago
  Hello, author here! I'm aware that that the Xeon E5-2680 is ancient, which is why I also included comparisons with the Xeon W-3245 that is in the current 2019 Mac Pro, and with the Threadripper 3990X, which came out in February 2020. Unfortunately I don't exactly have access to piles of fancy server chips sitting around, so I had to make do with just testing against what I have access to, and that's all I had access to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - muybasado 5y ago
    You should feel bad for luring retards like this. Well, maybe not.
  - zbobet2012 5y ago
    Yeah, but you don't need to "reach for not just high end desktop chips, but for server-class workstation hardware to really beat the M1 Max". Low-market CPU's for desktop will like the Ryzen 5 3600 (newegg for 240$) surpass it on CPU bench. Likely they also surpass it on on raytracing as well. And chips like the AMD Ryzen 7 4800H, which is a "big laptop" CPU, also beat it. The M1 Pro 10 manages to best that, but not by a huge margin on passmark. None of them beat an actual, modern, mid-market desktop CPU. And none of those compare to the likes of the threadripper. The test results are amazing, the exposition here is simply inaccurate. Again, you don't need a "server-class highend workstation" CPU to best the M1 in raw performance. Nothing on the planet beats the m1 in tpd/performance. That's amazing enough on its own.

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.
    - jbverschoor 5y ago
      You're comparing a single CPU with a complete machine
  - speed_spread 5y ago
    If you're plugged in all the time, lower TDP is nice but not critical. And if you live in a cold country, you have to heat up the house six months per year, TDP is just heating with a computing side effect.
    - new_realist 5y ago
      A hot laptop can have significant impacts on fertility in men. And in the summer you have to dissipate that heat. A heat pump is more efficient for heating, to boot.
      - uuddlrlr 5y ago
        It's a temporary infertility, at least.
    - TYPE_FASTER 5y ago
      This winter I'm going to experiment with having a Raspberry Pi act as a thermostat that starts/stops containers running on a server in our basement. That, combined with the laptop we just got for gaming that has a 3070 in it, should do nicely to supplement our heating system.
      - Uehreka 5y ago
        Watts go in, Watts come out. So basically, find a space heater with the TDP of your server, and that’s the upper bound on what you can expect heating-wise. I know that’s a bummer for people who want to heat their house with their computer, but Thermodynamics is always a bummer, I don’t make the Laws.
        buildbot 5y ago
        That's why I heat my house with a dell C4140! The _lowest_ power throttle it has is 1.4KW.
        matheusmoreira 5y ago
        > So basically, find a space heater with the TDP of your server, and that’s the upper bound on what you can expect heating-wise. I wonder how many CPUs I need to build a cryptocurrency miner water heater... That would be so much better than just wasting energy heating up dumb elements.
- microtonal 5y ago
  Except in benchmarks outside GeekBench it isn't. See e.g. the last graph in https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... The 5950X is only 55% faster than the M1 Max on multi-threaded integer benchmarks. The M1 Max is even 26% faster than the 5950X on multi-threaded FP benchmarks (maybe it has two AMX units?). The M1 Max is really in 5900X/5950X territory... in a laptop. I agree on the pricing (I also have a 5900X and a 5950X machine). But it is fantastic that we can have that kind of performance in a mobile device and still have many hours of battery life. We should complement both AMD and Apple and be happy that we finally have serious competitors to Intel. AMD has managed to compete with and outrun Intel from the an initial position of an also-ran underdog. I think the M1 line is more impressive technically than Ryzen, given the very low TDPs. But Apple has vastly more budget and much more opportunity for vertical integration. Both companies have done impressive work the last few years.
  - Tade0 5y ago
    > I think the M1 line is more impressive technically than Ryzen, given the very low TDPs. I would say TSMC's 5nm process is more impressive technically than TSMC's 7nm process, which are used here respectively. I think Apple will still win on a per Watt basis even when AMD starts using the current-generation process, but the question is: by how much?
    - guywhocodes 5y ago
      This is the real question, my money is on 5-10%.
  - em500 5y ago
    In Geekbench Multi-Core, the 5950X is only 33% faster (at 16.6k) than the M1 Max (which benches around 12.5k). So the difference is actually smaller than in SPEC that Anandtech uses. For all the dissing of Geekbench, I found it to actually correlate pretty closely with supposedly more elaborate benchmarks like SPEC. (The writing was on the wall for Apple Silicon performance for many years, when the iPhone/iPad Ax CPUs where catching up and surpassing laptop CPUs in Geekbench, but lots of people dismissed it because it was just Geekbench...). To get some context of the M1 Pro/Max perf, people should take a look at https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks, sort by Multi-Core, and slot the M1 Pro/Max in at around 12500.
- mmgutz 5y ago
  I'm an AMD fan. The comparison should not even be close TBH. We're talking about a laptop chip that can run on battery for an extended period of time that performs as well and sometimes better than the high end consumer AMD desktop chip. Kudos to Apple. I'm not suprised. Apple has the lead in the fabrication process, 5nm vs 7nm. I eagerly await a true apples to apples comparison when AMD uses the same 5nm process.
  - pmontra 5y ago
    I'm definitely not an Apple fan but what's available on the market at any given moment is an apple to apple comparison of what companies are able to do. I mean: any modern army (or pary of) would crush Roman legions, but they had to do it 2000 years ago. The article ends wondering about the impact on PC OEMs. I presume they are extrapolating the performance improvement curves, talking with Microsoft about Windows on ARM and working at HW contingency plans in case they have to leave a sinking x86 ship. I don't think they are resting on promises of big improvements from AMD and Intel.
- Dagonfly 5y ago
  Ok, lets build an equivalent PC. These are prices in Germany (incl. VAT): A 14' Macbook Pro (M1 Max with 32 GPU cores, 32 GB RAM, 512 GB storage) is 3440€. A PC: 5950X (750€), 32GB RAM (150€), Mainboard (130€), WD SN850 500GB (90€). Now if you build from scratch you need a PSU, CPU cooler and a case (~200€ together). That's 1320€ without a GPU. Depending on your workload the GPU performance seems to be between a desktop 3060 and 3080. So between 700€ and 1400€. Tl;dr: A 3440€ Macbook competes with a 2000-2700€ desktop depending on your workload. The desktop has no peripherals and no USB4/TB4.
  - salamandersauce 5y ago
    TBF GPU prices are nonsensical at this point in time. The MSRP of a 3060 Ti is $400, a 3080 should be $700.
  - carlob 5y ago
    I wonder how much a comparable desktop monitor would add to that. On the other hand I really want to give the keyboard a shot before I pull the trigger, after 3 years of Thinkpad I think that will be the real pain point...
  - pier25 5y ago
    You'd need to add a HiDPI HDR screen too.
- beowulfey 5y ago
  That’s amazing that it’s not even twice as good!
vmception 5y ago
And then you have to buy the rest of the machine With Apple they are just overcharging for solid state drives, which I’m cool with these days (because at least I’ll get them)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

soylentnewsorg 5y ago

and quite false. there are many laptop xeon CPUs. while costing more than the M1 Max, they beat the pants off it.

rsynnott 5y ago
Laptop Xeons generally won't be doing too well here; I'm fairly certain they're _all_ smaller than the Xeon in the Mac Pro mentioned in the article.
DeRock 5y ago
Can you share a laptop with one of them for comparison?
- soylentnewsorg 5y ago
  One of my laptops is a Dell Precision 7760. Xeon W-11855M, NVIDIA RTX, 128GB ECC RAM. I don't need too much storage, but you can get it with 14TB if you want. Note mine is a 6-core. There is an 8-core available w/ the Xeon W-11955M, which is faster than mine. It's only a little thicker than the macbook pro. It's keyboard doesn't break, and the product line has had a 4k screen since 5 years ago. It's 120Hz refresh rate. It has a very large power brick - 240W, it gets hot and loud with a huge fan exhaust. It's thick metal and about 7-9lb - you can run over it with a car. It only gets 9 hours battery w/ regular usage, and about 3 hours of "fan on time." Keep in mind, with the large and loud fan on, it can stay at 5GHz. This is called a pro laptop - a workstation. When I travel, I bring a 65W PSU, and it runs fine on that, just w/o turbo boost. No, don't point to the lower "geekbench" score for this laptop - that's not a CPU test. GPU performance is a large part of that test, and they run the test on the default GPU. The M1 only has a single GPU. The Precision's default is the low power integrated graphics, not the discreet GPU. If you have a test where they assign the discreet GPU, please feel free to point it out. As I've discussed before here, I have a shell script that runs in parallel with a bunch of VMs. My coworkers air (yes, I know it's not the max) runs it in 8-10 hours overnight. I run it over lunch. It loads, does calculations on, and creates graphs from several gig of ascii performance data. What does compare in performance to the M1 air is my Latitude w/ the I7 in it. The M1 "max" is "max for apple" but competes with mid-tier laptops from everyone else. And that's ignoring the fact that it can't run pretty much any of the useful industry tools or games w/o recompiling x86 to arm on the fly. Yes, I think my Dell cost the company $7-8k, without support. That's why it's called a pro laptop.

partiallypro 5y ago

Intel's Alder Lake benchmarks show that their new mobile processor is faster than the M1 Max. So, this domination doesn't seem to be a long term thing.

sydthrowaway 5y ago
Finally some objectivity to stop the M1 love fest
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  And it will probably devour a ridiculous amount of power and generate a thermos of heat to be marginally overall faster. It also won’t have a comparable GPU. M1 Max still is the better experience and innovation.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    If you don't require a laptop then an alder lake chip doesn't take anything close to a ridiculous amount of power, nor is it hard to cool. Edit: I know this discussion is partly focused on laptops, but the overall comparison is including server chips so it's clearly not just about laptops. And 60 or 100 watts is child's play in even a tiny desktop.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Yeah the 12900HK beats the Max by 3%, even though the M1 Max is way more power efficient and likely utterly smoked it on GPU. After all it’s 8% faster than a mobile 3060. The 3060 alone is a 60W TGP. The M1 Max running Cinebench consumes 9W while the 11980HK (previous gen) consumes 45W. Perf/W Is about 3X higher for the M1 Max on CPU alone and I suspect factoring in graphics we’ve got a breakaway here. Intel will catch up but not today.
  - valzam 5y ago
    Just FYI because I've seent that a few times already: A 60W/70W 3060 is -very slow-. There are many laptops that supply much more power and conversely also get better results.

bonestamp2 5y ago

When these chips hit the rackmount Mac Pro, the server competition will be very interesting. It's kind of a unique package for a server, which such a powerful GPU, but that has advantages for some compute types too of course.

jbverschoor 5y ago
Wait max 2 years when the AWS contracts expire
- bradknowles 5y ago
  Apple has many different types of data centers. Some are actually hosted in a cloud provider like Google, Microsoft, or AWS. But they also have a fair amount of their own physical data centers, and I would not be surprised to find that they start filling them out with Apple Silicon hardware. And they might roll out a lot of services on AWS using Apple Silicon hardware, because AWS has recently made available actual Apple hardware in some of their regions. I think this could potentially be a precursor, but this is just my own personal hunch and I have no information outside my own brain towards this end.
grp000 5y ago
Would be cool if they try to decouple the GPU and CPU for server units somehow.
- bredren 5y ago
  I think they will with a new release of the “Afterburner” card, this time powered by Apple Silicon instead of FPGAs. https://www.gettingtechnologyright.com/apples-mac-pro-wheels-are-optional/ https://www.gettingtechnologyright.com/apples-mac-pro-wheels... >The second bit of design is in the optional “Afterburner” video editing card. The discussion of it starts at around the 1hr. 26 min. point in the Keynote. It is described as a custom FPGA-based HW accelerator. It is claimed to be capable of processing 6 billion pixels per second. The silicon is not Apple’s but the design is.

KennyBlanken 5y ago

Not really, because the first Xeon CPU he compares against is ten years old. That kind of system isn't worth the cost of shipping it somewhere. A current generation desktop i3 is likely faster in almost any workload. It's not even interesting that the M1 is "slightly" beaten by a Mac Pro's Xeon, because nobody is doing raytracing on CPUs. A Pascal nvidia GPU will render scenes in Blender faster than a current mid-tier AMD CPU, and it's two generations old. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=blender-290-rtx3080&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=blender-... It takes an RTX 3080 card (not even the fastest consumer Ampere card) 11 seconds to render a scene that the fastest Pascal card (1080) took 94 seconds. That's nearly an order of magnitude faster. I saw an article comparing the M1 Max to a high end AMD card, but that's also meh. AMDs's GPUs don't perform anywhere near as well as Ampere and they use far more power, so they're an easy target to compare against. AMD fakes their benchmarks by overclocking the cards depending on temperature, and the benchmarks they run to tout performance figures are just shy of where the card starts to throttle back for thermals. An AMD GPU that has been running for an hour will perform substantially worse compared to an Ampere card.

dagmx 5y ago
Almost every Blockbuster film you watch has raytracing done on the CPU. A lot of studios have dabbled with GPU pathtracing, and indeed it works for smaller projects like commercials and TV. However big set pieces just don't jive well with GPU rendering, and most GPU path tracers are too young to feature all the bells and whistles productions want.
hunterloftis 5y ago
> It's not even interesting that the M1 is "slightly" beaten by a Mac Pro's Xeon, because _nobody is doing raytracing on CPUs._ This is backwards - Nearly all major raytracing workloads today are done primarily on CPUs: vfx, animated film and tv, etc. There are several reasons for this, including memory limits and the lack of coherence in both path tracing algorithms and common acceleration structures. GPU-based tracing is currently a small subset of rendering tasks (primarily those with real-time requirements). As GPU memory increases, GPUs will become more attractive in this space - likely in the next few years.

zbobet2012 5y ago

>this is really interesting Sadly this is not really interesting, it's disingenuous. He benchmarked against a ten year old (03/06/2012) server CPU. My two year old intel laptop cpu (i7-9750H) also outperforms the xeon's he's comparing against by almost 40%. The M1 is a great chip, it's sad that this got published with a "server chip" comparison at all. A real server class CPU from the modern era, at a comparable price point, is the AMD EPYC 7443P, which is 400% faster on cpu bench.

girvo 5y ago
He also benchmarked it against the Intel Xeon W-3245 which is what that referred to. It's not disingenuous at all: the old Xeon is explicitly called out as old, which is why he compared it to the 2019 Xeon in the Mac Pro as well.
ykl 5y ago
Hello, author here! I'm aware that that the Xeon E5-2680 is ancient, which is why I also included comparisons with the Xeon W-3245 that is in the current 2019 Mac Pro, and with the Threadripper 3990X, which came out in February 2020. Unfortunately I don't exactly have access to piles of fancy server chips sitting around, so I had to make do with just testing against what I have access to, and that's all I had access to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- muybasado 5y ago
  You should feel bad for luring retards like this. Well, maybe not.
- zbobet2012 5y ago
  Yeah, but you don't need to "reach for not just high end desktop chips, but for server-class workstation hardware to really beat the M1 Max". Low-market CPU's for desktop will like the Ryzen 5 3600 (newegg for 240$) surpass it on CPU bench. Likely they also surpass it on on raytracing as well. And chips like the AMD Ryzen 7 4800H, which is a "big laptop" CPU, also beat it. The M1 Pro 10 manages to best that, but not by a huge margin on passmark. None of them beat an actual, modern, mid-market desktop CPU. And none of those compare to the likes of the threadripper. The test results are amazing, the exposition here is simply inaccurate. Again, you don't need a "server-class highend workstation" CPU to best the M1 in raw performance. Nothing on the planet beats the m1 in tpd/performance. That's amazing enough on its own.