6 ms·

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.
  - DeRock 5y ago
    M1 max beats intels best CPU (which spoiler, is not their Xeon line) at both single threaded: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... And multithreaded: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... You go on a diatribe about how it doesn’t compete, but your only source is some proprietary workload that you claim is much faster on your laptop.
    - soylentnewsorg 5y ago
      Which is much better than your source - false information. > intels best CPU (which spoiler, is not their Xeon line) this is simply false. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Xeon-W-11955M-vs-Intel-Core-i9-11980HK/4419vs4355 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Xeon-W-11955M-vs-... wanna make up some more garbage to fit your feelings? you apple people, sitting there "working" at the starbucks with your cracked all-glass slippery phone and your "pro" laptops are funny. You are also conveniently leaving out the main points of the pro laptop. 128GB of RAM. ECC RAM - because it's not a pro anything w/o ECC. If your work matters, you absolutely cannot risk errors and data corruption or wrong calculations. Which you get when you have a lot of RAM that's not ECC. Hey, how about a 4k screen? Because the pro laptops have had them for 5 years. Apple doesn't make any that are 4k. Oh, I do wonder if that boosts their GPU ratings too, since they render under 4k, and the real pro laptops render at 4k. It was funny when iphoneX came out and an apple fanboy showed off his "OLED" awesome screen to me in the elevator. My 3 year old Nexus had an OLED too. But proving to him that Apple's screen wasn't Revolutionary and ahead of everyone was impossible. So I just kept laughing at him. Like I am at you. There is no difference in your thinking, and the "covid is a hoax" thinking. You will twist the laws of physics themselves to fit your feelings.
  - notafraudster 5y ago
    I feel like you have the setup necessary to produce an interesting, compelling argument here -- your benchmark seems, at least to some degree, less synthetic than some do, you have an uncommonly fast workstation which a lot of people doing comparison tests wouldn't be able to do... ... but the way you present it undermines your case a bit. It seems like what you want to say is that if money is no object, weight is no object, heat is no object, battery life is no object, and portability is no object, but the comparison must absolutely be laptop to laptop, then there exists a laptop PC configuration that beats M1. If this is your point, then probably you want to compare an M1 Max to your PC, not your coworker's Macbook Air (which is a fanless laptop...) I think this is a pretty unusual use case and there aren't too many people who are looking for this exact market segment. I definitely think it's fair to admit that Apple isn't intending to operate in this market segment, for better or worse. You'd probably also want to drop the part about game support, since anyone who wants to play games can spend 1/4 what your workbench costs and get a shitkicking fast small form factor PC. But also, like, recompilation isn't what you should highlight -- what you should highlight is performance. If the recompilation is fast enough for users not to notice, then it doesn't matter, and if it's not, then the reason why it matters is performance, not recompilation. Anyway, again, I don't think you're necessarily wrong or whatever here, but you're just presenting your point in a way that I think it's extremely unlikely anyone will care or be convinced. (Also, "discrete")
defaultname 5y ago
Can you name those laptop Xeon CPUs that beat the pants off the M1 Max? [Spoiler because I don't think I'll get a response -- there are none. Even when you get into the "luggable" category of workstation that is ostensibly portable but really needs to be plugged in, there is no competition right now. The upcoming Alder Lake should significantly improve Intel's entrant in this category, and hopefully brings some real competition]
- smoldesu 5y ago
  The upcoming Thinkpad X1 Extreme is going to give it some stiff competition. It's wielding the insurmountable RTX 3080, and it's priced very competitively. But I'm just going to tell it to you now so we don't make the same mistake we have for the past 10 years of computer hardware discussions: specs don't matter. You could tell 90% of the people buying PCs with dGPUs about your 5nm GPU and next-gen power efficiency, but they won't care. They're buying them as gaming devices, general-purpose machines and game development laptops. I'd argue the market for Mac users and PC users has not radically shifted, just the hardware you're using. If we're here to talk smack about hardware superiority, this website would have been insufferable for the past decade, because there was quite literally a complete lack of professional dGPU Macs. Now that the tables have shifted slightly, I don't see why Mac users feel the need to crawl out of the woodwork and declare the game as changed, now that Prometheus gave them the gift of a laptop that doesn't throttle to hell.
  - threeseed 5y ago
    It's using DDR4 versus DDR5 in the Mac and a fraction of the memory bandwidth so will be interesting to see its performance on heavier tasks. Also looks like it has at least half the battery life if not far less when put under heavy load. I do love this review though: "It is a nice laptop but extremely noisy. Even when idle the fans are on all the time."
    - rerx 5y ago
      Which review are you quoting?
paulmd 5y ago
xeon branded workstation laptops aren't using Icelake-SP or similar server chips, they are using Tiger Lake-S or Ice Lake-S or Skylake-S client chips. They are what would previously have been branded as "Xeon E3" series chips - on the desktop platform they used to share a socket and be drop-in upgrades with consumer desktop chips, because they're basically the same chips with "enterprise" features like ECC turned on. An example would be Xeon E3-1285 v3 - which is basically the same thing as an i7 4770. These products are nowhere, nowhere near the M1 Max. They are consumer laptop chips with ECC and vPro turned on.
- soylentnewsorg 5y ago
  Yes, your Xeon from 2013 example would be nowhere near the 2021 CPU from Apple. The outdated Xeon Apple had in their old laptops - a year behind everyone else, is also slower. The Xeon W-11955M however makes the M1 look like a kid's toy. In fact, if you remove 2 cores from that Xeon, you'll have my 6-core Xeon. Which also smokes that 10-core M1 in a bong. I'm also not sure why you're sarcastic about ECC RAM. I have 128GB of RAM in my laptop. If it wasn't ECC, I'd have crashes in my VMs and errors in my calculations. When you go 32GB+ and actually use the RAM, anything that doesn't support ECC cannot be taken seriously for professional use. Like the M1 Max.
  - paulmd 5y ago
    The point is that a laptop Xeon from 2021 is also going to be the same as an 1185G7 or something similar - because they’re the same silicon. It’s not like you’re getting more silicon because it’s a Xeon, it’s not a server chip, it’s just a laptop chip with the enterprise features enabled. So, really no need to test them specifically. Go get an 1185G7 or something and you know what “Mobile Xeon” benches will look like. Anandtech already did those benches. https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17024/117496.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17024/117496.png
    - soylentnewsorg 5y ago
      >enterprise features enabled Right. That's what a pro laptop is. 128G of ECC RAM so you don't get crashes and errors. 24MB of cache. Fast and solid. That's a workstation - we use those for work. But... Now you're saying the xeon I listed is the same as a 1 year old CPU, with half the cache of the Xeon, a lower clock, and half the core count. The mental gymnastics you have to perform are funny as hell to watch. Trump voter?

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.
- DeRock 5y ago
  M1 max beats intels best CPU (which spoiler, is not their Xeon line) at both single threaded: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... And multithreaded: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... You go on a diatribe about how it doesn’t compete, but your only source is some proprietary workload that you claim is much faster on your laptop.
  - soylentnewsorg 5y ago
    Which is much better than your source - false information. > intels best CPU (which spoiler, is not their Xeon line) this is simply false. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Xeon-W-11955M-vs-Intel-Core-i9-11980HK/4419vs4355 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Xeon-W-11955M-vs-... wanna make up some more garbage to fit your feelings? you apple people, sitting there "working" at the starbucks with your cracked all-glass slippery phone and your "pro" laptops are funny. You are also conveniently leaving out the main points of the pro laptop. 128GB of RAM. ECC RAM - because it's not a pro anything w/o ECC. If your work matters, you absolutely cannot risk errors and data corruption or wrong calculations. Which you get when you have a lot of RAM that's not ECC. Hey, how about a 4k screen? Because the pro laptops have had them for 5 years. Apple doesn't make any that are 4k. Oh, I do wonder if that boosts their GPU ratings too, since they render under 4k, and the real pro laptops render at 4k. It was funny when iphoneX came out and an apple fanboy showed off his "OLED" awesome screen to me in the elevator. My 3 year old Nexus had an OLED too. But proving to him that Apple's screen wasn't Revolutionary and ahead of everyone was impossible. So I just kept laughing at him. Like I am at you. There is no difference in your thinking, and the "covid is a hoax" thinking. You will twist the laws of physics themselves to fit your feelings.
- notafraudster 5y ago
  I feel like you have the setup necessary to produce an interesting, compelling argument here -- your benchmark seems, at least to some degree, less synthetic than some do, you have an uncommonly fast workstation which a lot of people doing comparison tests wouldn't be able to do... ... but the way you present it undermines your case a bit. It seems like what you want to say is that if money is no object, weight is no object, heat is no object, battery life is no object, and portability is no object, but the comparison must absolutely be laptop to laptop, then there exists a laptop PC configuration that beats M1. If this is your point, then probably you want to compare an M1 Max to your PC, not your coworker's Macbook Air (which is a fanless laptop...) I think this is a pretty unusual use case and there aren't too many people who are looking for this exact market segment. I definitely think it's fair to admit that Apple isn't intending to operate in this market segment, for better or worse. You'd probably also want to drop the part about game support, since anyone who wants to play games can spend 1/4 what your workbench costs and get a shitkicking fast small form factor PC. But also, like, recompilation isn't what you should highlight -- what you should highlight is performance. If the recompilation is fast enough for users not to notice, then it doesn't matter, and if it's not, then the reason why it matters is performance, not recompilation. Anyway, again, I don't think you're necessarily wrong or whatever here, but you're just presenting your point in a way that I think it's extremely unlikely anyone will care or be convinced. (Also, "discrete")

defaultname 5y ago

Can you name those laptop Xeon CPUs that beat the pants off the M1 Max? [Spoiler because I don't think I'll get a response -- there are none. Even when you get into the "luggable" category of workstation that is ostensibly portable but really needs to be plugged in, there is no competition right now. The upcoming Alder Lake should significantly improve Intel's entrant in this category, and hopefully brings some real competition]

smoldesu 5y ago
The upcoming Thinkpad X1 Extreme is going to give it some stiff competition. It's wielding the insurmountable RTX 3080, and it's priced very competitively. But I'm just going to tell it to you now so we don't make the same mistake we have for the past 10 years of computer hardware discussions: specs don't matter. You could tell 90% of the people buying PCs with dGPUs about your 5nm GPU and next-gen power efficiency, but they won't care. They're buying them as gaming devices, general-purpose machines and game development laptops. I'd argue the market for Mac users and PC users has not radically shifted, just the hardware you're using. If we're here to talk smack about hardware superiority, this website would have been insufferable for the past decade, because there was quite literally a complete lack of professional dGPU Macs. Now that the tables have shifted slightly, I don't see why Mac users feel the need to crawl out of the woodwork and declare the game as changed, now that Prometheus gave them the gift of a laptop that doesn't throttle to hell.
- threeseed 5y ago
  It's using DDR4 versus DDR5 in the Mac and a fraction of the memory bandwidth so will be interesting to see its performance on heavier tasks. Also looks like it has at least half the battery life if not far less when put under heavy load. I do love this review though: "It is a nice laptop but extremely noisy. Even when idle the fans are on all the time."
  - rerx 5y ago
    Which review are you quoting?

paulmd 5y ago

xeon branded workstation laptops aren't using Icelake-SP or similar server chips, they are using Tiger Lake-S or Ice Lake-S or Skylake-S client chips. They are what would previously have been branded as "Xeon E3" series chips - on the desktop platform they used to share a socket and be drop-in upgrades with consumer desktop chips, because they're basically the same chips with "enterprise" features like ECC turned on. An example would be Xeon E3-1285 v3 - which is basically the same thing as an i7 4770. These products are nowhere, nowhere near the M1 Max. They are consumer laptop chips with ECC and vPro turned on.

soylentnewsorg 5y ago
Yes, your Xeon from 2013 example would be nowhere near the 2021 CPU from Apple. The outdated Xeon Apple had in their old laptops - a year behind everyone else, is also slower. The Xeon W-11955M however makes the M1 look like a kid's toy. In fact, if you remove 2 cores from that Xeon, you'll have my 6-core Xeon. Which also smokes that 10-core M1 in a bong. I'm also not sure why you're sarcastic about ECC RAM. I have 128GB of RAM in my laptop. If it wasn't ECC, I'd have crashes in my VMs and errors in my calculations. When you go 32GB+ and actually use the RAM, anything that doesn't support ECC cannot be taken seriously for professional use. Like the M1 Max.
- paulmd 5y ago
  The point is that a laptop Xeon from 2021 is also going to be the same as an 1185G7 or something similar - because they’re the same silicon. It’s not like you’re getting more silicon because it’s a Xeon, it’s not a server chip, it’s just a laptop chip with the enterprise features enabled. So, really no need to test them specifically. Go get an 1185G7 or something and you know what “Mobile Xeon” benches will look like. Anandtech already did those benches. https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17024/117496.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17024/117496.png
  - soylentnewsorg 5y ago
    >enterprise features enabled Right. That's what a pro laptop is. 128G of ECC RAM so you don't get crashes and errors. 24MB of cache. Fast and solid. That's a workstation - we use those for work. But... Now you're saying the xeon I listed is the same as a 1 year old CPU, with half the cache of the Xeon, a lower clock, and half the core count. The mental gymnastics you have to perform are funny as hell to watch. Trump voter?