10 ms·

But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing. Like that's the rhetoric--holy shit your lap

But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing. Like that's the rhetoric--holy shit your laptop is doing this. Apple hasn't even released the Pro desktop stuff yet.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
I doubt that they can make another giant performance leap. I wager that most of their gains are from being a node ahead of the competition (5nm vs 7nm TSMC) and placing RAM on package for much fatter bandwidth. I am, however, very interested in seeing what the competition does in response.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  Yeah. I'm worried that they may have played their trump cards already, so to speak. I wonder if future perf gains will come, game console-style, from areas besides general purpose computation -- specialized instructions / cores for specialized tasks. Imagine an entire core optimized for Safari and its Javascript engine. Their next chip is called the "M1 Marathon Edition" and you get 36 hours of real-world battery life with Safari. And/or the iWork suite. And maybe they have a behind the scenes collab with Slack and select other app makers so that they can be a part of the "Marathon" program too. I dunno, just spitballing. Not saying that's likely or even what I'm pining for, just one possible avenue once they've plucked all the low-hanging general purpose computing fruit.
  - vel0city 5y ago
    Sounds like a nightmare to me. Want to change browsers? Buy a new device with a different processor or suffer massive battery or performance penalties. Want to change media players? Buy a new device with a different processor or suffer massive battery or performance penalties.
    - JohnBooty 5y ago
      By that logic, any time anybody optimizes for anything, they're somehow punishing everybody else with "penalties." What if somebody on the Intel/AMD side of things includes some optimizations for SSE, AVX, etc? Are they punishing everybody else? At any rate, my idea was less than half baked and again, not exactly something I'm pining for. Was just thinking about things Apple might conceivably be able to try with their unique vertical integration.
      - vel0city 5y ago
        SSE/AVX/etc aren't optimizations for a single application, they're optimizations for specific kinds of math instructions. Any application using that processor can use them, and they're overall pretty general instructions. Hyper-optimizing for a particular application means the way that particular application works gets accelerated, but not things in general. Sure, if a browser behaved identically to Safari, it too would potentially experience the speed up barring any weird microcode/firmware that only allows those extensions to be used by Apple-signed binaries which is a whole 'nother level of nightmare. Stepping outside of that highly optimized path is essentially a penalty though as it by definition wouldn't be so highly optimized. And once that optimized path has been etched into the silicon, there's no real updating it unless we move to CPUs being more like FPGAs which isn't likely to happen.
      - FireBeyond 5y ago
        When they make optimizations for something, and then _artificially limit_ access to those optimizations (for applications that absolutely could utilize them) for purely commercial or marketing reasons, then yes, absolutely they're punishing. Intel doesn't forbid compilers from generating code for SSE or AVX. Apple _does_ forbid Chrome from using energy management and other APIs for no other reason than to keep it less efficient than Safari.
        JohnBooty 5y ago
        I didn't realize Safari made such heavy use of private APIs. That is unfair and I would not support that behavior whether talking about private software APIs or private hardware instructions. What I was half-assedly imagining wouldn't be anything like that. (Although, FWIW, Chrome has private APIs too: https://blog.chromium.org/2021/01/limiting-private-api-availability-in.html https://blog.chromium.org/2021/01/limiting-private-api-avail... Different use case, but still.)
  - kmeisthax 5y ago
    The things that take up time and energy in browsers - i.e. things like garbage collection, JIT compilation, and so on - are already things that CPUs are hyper-specialized for. And the code that is ultimately intended to execute is also well-specialized for CPUs. It's already possible to target GPUs in-browser directly; and most older HTML primitives were recast in terms of GPU operations around the time of the original iPhone. The only thing I can think of that's still been left on the table is rendering vector geometry on-GPU; but most sites don't redraw so much as to make this a huge performance win. Video decode has been offloaded to hardware for decades as well. The only reason to decode video on-CPU is if you're decoding crazy-old formats[0] that don't have hardware decoder blocks present for them. The other huge problem is networking - which is also heavily hardware-optimized and has been for a while. Large assets mean keeping your Wi-Fi or LTE baseband on for longer. You could mitigate this with compression; which can be hardware optimized... though I'm not sure how much of a benefit that provides outside of game consoles[1]. [0] In my personal experience: I wrote a Sorenson H.263 decoder for Ruffle. Right now it not only executes on-CPU, but blocks the event loop main thread. However, the video files in question are so low-quality that this isn't a significant problem for most Flash movies and everything works fine (though I do want to try on-GPU video decoding at some point). [1] Current-gen game consoles (PS5/XSeries) have hardware decompression blocks. However, the intent is to quickly decompress gigabytes worth of data quickly; most websites aren't nearly that bloated.
    - JohnBooty 5y ago
      This is a wonderful and informative reply. Thank you so much - i really appreciate the time you spent writing this.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    > I'm worried that they may have played their trump cards already, so to speak. I'm not. Let them all scramble and pull out the big guns to try to compete. That's capitalism at it's finest, which isn't exactly what we've been seeing in the CPU space for the prior decades. We got lucky that AMD caught Intel with their pants down recently (if only because it strengthens AMD and makes them a better competitor), but a duopoly isn't necessarily what I would consider a good market condition for progress (as we've seen with iOS vs Android). Lots of different experiments with feedback from people on what they find good would be much preferable, and while a constrained CPU such as Apple's isn't perfect, it does represent more choice and pressure on other players to evolve in ways they may have been resistant to previously. > And maybe they have a behind the scenes collab with Slack and select other app makers so that they can be a part of the "Marathon" program too. RIP the general purpose computer. :(
    - JohnBooty 5y ago
      > And maybe they have a behind the scenes collab with > Slack and select other app makers so that they can > be a part of the "Marathon" program too. RIP the general purpose computer. :( Haha. I was truly truly not thinking along any such lines. Since heterogenuous cores are now a mainstream thing, with a mixture of full-throttle and performance-minded cores on a single die, and the performance cores may be hitting a wall until we get to smaller processes, perhaps the next frontier could be efficiency. Remember how some software proudly displayed those "optimized for MMX" or "optimized for 3DNow!" badges back in the day? What if there was something like that for apps that optimized for those efficiency cores, and what if the efficiency cores met them halfway by implementing some app-friendly stuff in hardware? Sort of like how some common Javascript string ops have dedicated CPU hardware dedicated to them now. Anyway, yeah. I'm probably just re-inventing CISC all over again, badly.
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    > Imagine an entire core optimized for Safari and its Javascript engine. Their next chip is called the "M1 Marathon Edition" and you get 36 hours of real-world battery life with Safari. I don't think that would be worth it. What's the point of 36 hours of battery life? How often do you need more than 12 hours of life on battery? Increasing the maximum battery life only makes sense when it also increases battery life for the more power-hungry workload (which is where you're likely to reach the limit), why bother building dedicated hardware for a specific workload that's already beyond what you need?
    - azinman2 5y ago
      Many parts of the world don't have stable electricity, reducing electricity usage reduces costs and overall emissions in to the planet, and as you approach much longer periods you massively increase convenience.
      - jensensbutton 5y ago
        Those parts of the world aren't generally spending multiple thousands of American dollars on a laptop.
        azinman2 5y ago
        You'd be surprised. Additionally, that also includes parts of the US as well.
      - edgyquant 5y ago
        I don’t think regions susceptible to black/brown outs and power outages are the intended market of an M1 Mac, though that could change.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        graftak 5y ago
        Aren’t many companies normally located in the Silicon Valley now migrating to Texas, where the electricity infrastructure is wonky at best.
- madeofpalk 5y ago
  We know (more or less) exactly what the Pro desktop chips will be, in the same way that these laptop chips weren't much of a surprise - they'll be basically exactly this, but bigger. More of it.
  - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
    They can't get that much bigger. The Max is already over 400mm^2. For comparison, the biggest chips are around 600. Apple can't realistically get much bigger than this since yield already drops off a cliff at 600. Getting bigger than that will be tough for them since it isn't clear that apple has put R&D into interconnect tech needed to make effective multi-chip modules.
    - rsanheim 5y ago
      They are probably going to do two M1 Max chips in the imac, so basically take the existing m1 max, and double it (at least for multicore perf, who knows how single-threaded will play out).
      - foobiekr 5y ago
        They almost certainly will not do this and it would be a NUMA nightmare if they did.
        bogantech 5y ago
        Not sure why you were downvoted for this. Considering that some of the magic in these things is the shared, local memory with a very wide bus it would seem obvious that trying to go multi chip would indeed be a massive headache in this regard
        mrkstu 5y ago
        Check out this[0] link to see why the thought is Apple is doing exactly that. [0]: https://architosh.com/2021/10/apples-new-m1-pro-is-chop-version-of-m1-max-die/ https://architosh.com/2021/10/apples-new-m1-pro-is-chop-vers...
- dhosek 5y ago
  There were a lot of people saying things like this after the M1 too. I'm not expecting another huge leap with whatever comes next in the M-series, but I won't be surprised if there is one either.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    They didn't really improve the M1 with the Pro and Max chips though. They really just added more cores to the SIP, which doesn't necessarily improve performance so much as it makes more performance available.
  - dtech 5y ago
    I wouldn't say M1 max is another leap. It's mostly scaling for linear performance gains.
    - MR4D 5y ago
      When you look at it from a compute perspective, sure. But from a power perspective, it is indeed a leap.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  Maybe not next year, but TSMC’s 3nm isn’t that far off.
- ls612 5y ago
  The rumors are that the M1 supersized version they are putting in the new Mac Pro is 20 CPU cores and 128 GPU cores, which would place it at a little under twice the performance of a 3090. Not saying that Nvidia can't catch up with a hypothetical 4090 next year but it'll be a tall order.
  - xoac 5y ago
    I'll believe it when I see it.
  - opencl 5y ago
    The M1 Max 32 core GPU is ~1/8 the performance of the 3090. 4x the core count should put it half of 3090 performance, not double.
    - wincy 5y ago
      The path forward is simple then. 512 GPU cores.
    - tehnub 5y ago
      Dumb question here: Can you get more performance from the same number of cores by giving them more power?
      - throw868788 5y ago
        Not a dumb question at all. You can to an extent, but the returns diminish quickly. It isn't linear. This fact however makes "performance per watt" comparisons misleading between different processors designed for different environments (e.g. M1 vs AMD Desktop). It takes a more power to get that much extra perf, conversely and the more under-appreciate part IMO reducing the speed a little can save a ton of power/heat if the chip is currently running at the higher power portion of the curve. On a desktop machine most people would want them to tune for performance at quite a substantial power efficiency cost so of course a desktop chip most probably is less power efficient per unit of compute. You don't need to power it with a battery after all and there's heaps more cooling capacity in a bigger form factor so why optimise for that?
- mehrdada 5y ago
  RAM is not on package in the way iPhones are. Bandwidth should not be meaningfully affected by the placement of RAMs; perhaps slight latency improvement. It simply has many memory channels.
- hajile 5y ago
  They got something like 15% increase in integer performance, up to 37% increase some benchmarks, and 8% overall performance increase. Zen 2 was a must-have upgrade over Zen+ and it was a 10% IPC increase.
neogodless 5y ago
There were really similar discussions in mid-2020 when the Ryzen 4000 mobile chips launched, because they were beating Intel desktop chips. That doesn't diminish how excellent Apple Silicon is for Macbook users (and Mac Mini users). It's just an exciting time when laptops (with the right silicon) can do more than ever before, reducing the need to have a desktop for a lot of tasks, and also... largely not a great time to be using Intel chips. (Alder Lake is very high performing, but power hungry and desktop only.)
p1necone 5y ago
They're mentioning their desktop because Apples marketing hype mentions the desktop, not because the comparison is actually valid. As you can see in the benchmark - lower power, proportionally lower performance. To be clear - Apples M1 hardware is good, even great. It's just that Apples marketing hype is so over the top, and so many people buy into it so hard that people (such as me) still feel the need to bring it down to earth.
- jshier 5y ago
  Apple's marketing page for the new MacBook Pros with the M1 Pro and M1 Max strictly mentions laptops and laptop GPUs in its comparisons. Apple makes no comparison to desktop systems directly. At most they make general comparisons to the power curves of PC CPUs and GPUs, but mostly when introducing the M1 and explaining why they built it.
- minhazm 5y ago
  > lower power, proportionally lower performance Except it's not. The performance per watt is significantly better on average. Only one of the examples in this post really talked about power usage and that example also says that the 3090 is using a special compiler and gets to use the special tensor cores in the 3090, but for the M1 Max it wasn't able to use the neural cores or the special compiler and still achieves a similar performance per watt. If you look at more detailed benchmarks from Anandtech: > In the SPECfp suite, the M1 Max is in its own category of silicon with no comparison in the market. It completely demolishes any laptop contender, showcasing 2.2x performance of the second-best laptop chip. The M1 Max even manages to outperform the 16-core 5950X – a chip whose package power is at 142W, with rest of system even quite above that. It’s an absolutely absurd comparison and a situation we haven’t seen the likes of. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    For laptop usage, it's an amazing feat. But it's kind of a strained comparison. Power usage doesn't scale linearly with performance for any CPU (power consumption scales with the square of voltage) so squeezing the last 20% of performance out of a desktop chip could require doubling the power consumption. Which is actually find for a desktop because I really don't care if my CPU consumes 100-200W for a few minutes while doing a compile. But trying to compare performance-per-watt between two parts tuned for different parts of the power/efficiency curve is always going to be misleading. If we wanted to compare straight across, comparing to AMD's mobile Ryzen parts would make more sense. AMD has a 35W mobile part that isn't all that far behind the M1 parts: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/11001445 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/11001445
ziml77 5y ago
Not just that it's even comparable to a desktop but that it also has excellent battery life. You've been able to get portable desktop replacements before, but they were power hungry even when barely doing anything.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing. Right, and I acknowledged the battery life as amazing. But currently, I can't buy an M1 Max desktop if I wanted to. So instead I have a 16" MacBook Pro semi-permanently attached to my monitor and keyboard at my desk. It's basically a desktop for me. I don't expect a laptop to outperform my AMD/nVidia desktop workstation. And sure enough, it doesn't! But it comes surprisingly close for common tasks and I'm very happy to have it.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing. Like that's the rhetoric--holy shit your laptop is doing this. The problem with this take is this: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2685?vs=2613 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2685?vs=2613 This is mobile vs. desktop Zen 2 with the same number of cores. You give a CPU three times the power budget and it gets marginally faster. Because the last few hundred MHz of clock speed uses a ton of power, and that's it. But then you have this: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2613?vs=2666 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2613?vs=2666 Nearly double the multi-threaded performance at the same TDP, because it has twice as many cores and it only has to give back the last few hundred MHz of base clock to do it. A laptop with performance largely equivalent to <= 8-core desktops wasn't a novelty. What a desktop really gets you is the ability to have a lot more cores.
- whynotminot 5y ago
  I don't really understand your point. The impressiveness of M1/Pro/Max is what they do holistically for the power draw. The CPU + GPU + other accelerators combined and across the board approach what powerful desktops can do even with discrete power guzzling components. This is not about a single aspect of the silicon. So sure, you can cherry pick one part of the SoC, match it up against one aspect of Chip X and try to make a point. OK, you win that one. I'm talking about what the SoC as a whole does while running near-silently off a battery. Yes, a desktop gives you the ability to have more CPU cores. I'm sure that's what we'll get from whatever Apple decides to ship for its true Pro desktops.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    The point is that we already had this. Both the CPU and GPU are competitive with existing CPUs and GPUs. Which is a first in a long time for anybody outside of AMD/Intel/Nvidia. But "competitive" and "dramatically better" are not the same thing. People were primarily comparing it to desktop CPUs because of where we were in the release cycle. How does it compare to Zen 3? Well, Zen 3 laptops were still a few months away when the M1 was released, but Zen 2 desktops were only a single digit percentage faster than Zen 2 laptops, so how does it compare to Zen 3 desktops? Meanwhile the primary real advantage of the M1 is that it uses less power. Compared to PC laptops, it's a somewhat less power. There are already PC laptops with 9+ hours of battery life (and no matter how little the CPU uses, you still have to run the screen and everything else), so the practical impact of this isn't enormous, but it's there. But if you compare the power consumption to PC desktops, OMFG! Except that nobody really cares about the power consumption of PC desktops. That's why they triple the power consumption to eek out 8% more performance. A lot of this is also attributable to how good Apple's marketing is. I don't know if they did this on purpose, but people keep publishing SPEC benchmarks for comparison with PCs. Part of this is that a lot of the ordinary benchmark software either doesn't run on Mac at all or there was no native ARM version available yet. But SPEC was put together by a consortium of server vendors. Their incentive is show that their POWER and Xeon processors are worth the fat premium over regular desktop CPUs. So the suite skews heavy to benchmarks limited by memory bandwidth, because big servers will have like 16 times more memory channels than a desktop. Then Apple shows up with this SoC that has a ton of memory bandwidth because it's necessary to feed the GPU and it stomps all over those specific benchmarks. Then it's OMFG again even though those results aren't actually typical because most workloads aren't limited by memory bandwidth. It's not a bad chip. The level of hype is just extraordinary.
deleted 5y ago
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sudosysgen 5y ago
Laptop Zen and desktop Zen are basically the same in single core. The big difference is you're not more than 8 fast cores. The M1 Max also has basically 8 fast cores. It used to be different, but now frequency is so close to the absolute limits that adding more power doesn't help single core performance that much.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

I doubt that they can make another giant performance leap. I wager that most of their gains are from being a node ahead of the competition (5nm vs 7nm TSMC) and placing RAM on package for much fatter bandwidth. I am, however, very interested in seeing what the competition does in response.

JohnBooty 5y ago
Yeah. I'm worried that they may have played their trump cards already, so to speak. I wonder if future perf gains will come, game console-style, from areas besides general purpose computation -- specialized instructions / cores for specialized tasks. Imagine an entire core optimized for Safari and its Javascript engine. Their next chip is called the "M1 Marathon Edition" and you get 36 hours of real-world battery life with Safari. And/or the iWork suite. And maybe they have a behind the scenes collab with Slack and select other app makers so that they can be a part of the "Marathon" program too. I dunno, just spitballing. Not saying that's likely or even what I'm pining for, just one possible avenue once they've plucked all the low-hanging general purpose computing fruit.
- vel0city 5y ago
  Sounds like a nightmare to me. Want to change browsers? Buy a new device with a different processor or suffer massive battery or performance penalties. Want to change media players? Buy a new device with a different processor or suffer massive battery or performance penalties.
  - JohnBooty 5y ago
    By that logic, any time anybody optimizes for anything, they're somehow punishing everybody else with "penalties." What if somebody on the Intel/AMD side of things includes some optimizations for SSE, AVX, etc? Are they punishing everybody else? At any rate, my idea was less than half baked and again, not exactly something I'm pining for. Was just thinking about things Apple might conceivably be able to try with their unique vertical integration.
    - vel0city 5y ago
      SSE/AVX/etc aren't optimizations for a single application, they're optimizations for specific kinds of math instructions. Any application using that processor can use them, and they're overall pretty general instructions. Hyper-optimizing for a particular application means the way that particular application works gets accelerated, but not things in general. Sure, if a browser behaved identically to Safari, it too would potentially experience the speed up barring any weird microcode/firmware that only allows those extensions to be used by Apple-signed binaries which is a whole 'nother level of nightmare. Stepping outside of that highly optimized path is essentially a penalty though as it by definition wouldn't be so highly optimized. And once that optimized path has been etched into the silicon, there's no real updating it unless we move to CPUs being more like FPGAs which isn't likely to happen.
    - FireBeyond 5y ago
      When they make optimizations for something, and then _artificially limit_ access to those optimizations (for applications that absolutely could utilize them) for purely commercial or marketing reasons, then yes, absolutely they're punishing. Intel doesn't forbid compilers from generating code for SSE or AVX. Apple _does_ forbid Chrome from using energy management and other APIs for no other reason than to keep it less efficient than Safari.
      - JohnBooty 5y ago
        I didn't realize Safari made such heavy use of private APIs. That is unfair and I would not support that behavior whether talking about private software APIs or private hardware instructions. What I was half-assedly imagining wouldn't be anything like that. (Although, FWIW, Chrome has private APIs too: https://blog.chromium.org/2021/01/limiting-private-api-availability-in.html https://blog.chromium.org/2021/01/limiting-private-api-avail... Different use case, but still.)
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  The things that take up time and energy in browsers - i.e. things like garbage collection, JIT compilation, and so on - are already things that CPUs are hyper-specialized for. And the code that is ultimately intended to execute is also well-specialized for CPUs. It's already possible to target GPUs in-browser directly; and most older HTML primitives were recast in terms of GPU operations around the time of the original iPhone. The only thing I can think of that's still been left on the table is rendering vector geometry on-GPU; but most sites don't redraw so much as to make this a huge performance win. Video decode has been offloaded to hardware for decades as well. The only reason to decode video on-CPU is if you're decoding crazy-old formats[0] that don't have hardware decoder blocks present for them. The other huge problem is networking - which is also heavily hardware-optimized and has been for a while. Large assets mean keeping your Wi-Fi or LTE baseband on for longer. You could mitigate this with compression; which can be hardware optimized... though I'm not sure how much of a benefit that provides outside of game consoles[1]. [0] In my personal experience: I wrote a Sorenson H.263 decoder for Ruffle. Right now it not only executes on-CPU, but blocks the event loop main thread. However, the video files in question are so low-quality that this isn't a significant problem for most Flash movies and everything works fine (though I do want to try on-GPU video decoding at some point). [1] Current-gen game consoles (PS5/XSeries) have hardware decompression blocks. However, the intent is to quickly decompress gigabytes worth of data quickly; most websites aren't nearly that bloated.
  - JohnBooty 5y ago
    This is a wonderful and informative reply. Thank you so much - i really appreciate the time you spent writing this.
- kbenson 5y ago
  > I'm worried that they may have played their trump cards already, so to speak. I'm not. Let them all scramble and pull out the big guns to try to compete. That's capitalism at it's finest, which isn't exactly what we've been seeing in the CPU space for the prior decades. We got lucky that AMD caught Intel with their pants down recently (if only because it strengthens AMD and makes them a better competitor), but a duopoly isn't necessarily what I would consider a good market condition for progress (as we've seen with iOS vs Android). Lots of different experiments with feedback from people on what they find good would be much preferable, and while a constrained CPU such as Apple's isn't perfect, it does represent more choice and pressure on other players to evolve in ways they may have been resistant to previously. > And maybe they have a behind the scenes collab with Slack and select other app makers so that they can be a part of the "Marathon" program too. RIP the general purpose computer. :(
  - JohnBooty 5y ago
    > And maybe they have a behind the scenes collab with > Slack and select other app makers so that they can > be a part of the "Marathon" program too. RIP the general purpose computer. :( Haha. I was truly truly not thinking along any such lines. Since heterogenuous cores are now a mainstream thing, with a mixture of full-throttle and performance-minded cores on a single die, and the performance cores may be hitting a wall until we get to smaller processes, perhaps the next frontier could be efficiency. Remember how some software proudly displayed those "optimized for MMX" or "optimized for 3DNow!" badges back in the day? What if there was something like that for apps that optimized for those efficiency cores, and what if the efficiency cores met them halfway by implementing some app-friendly stuff in hardware? Sort of like how some common Javascript string ops have dedicated CPU hardware dedicated to them now. Anyway, yeah. I'm probably just re-inventing CISC all over again, badly.
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  > Imagine an entire core optimized for Safari and its Javascript engine. Their next chip is called the "M1 Marathon Edition" and you get 36 hours of real-world battery life with Safari. I don't think that would be worth it. What's the point of 36 hours of battery life? How often do you need more than 12 hours of life on battery? Increasing the maximum battery life only makes sense when it also increases battery life for the more power-hungry workload (which is where you're likely to reach the limit), why bother building dedicated hardware for a specific workload that's already beyond what you need?
  - azinman2 5y ago
    Many parts of the world don't have stable electricity, reducing electricity usage reduces costs and overall emissions in to the planet, and as you approach much longer periods you massively increase convenience.
    - jensensbutton 5y ago
      Those parts of the world aren't generally spending multiple thousands of American dollars on a laptop.
      - azinman2 5y ago
        You'd be surprised. Additionally, that also includes parts of the US as well.
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      I don’t think regions susceptible to black/brown outs and power outages are the intended market of an M1 Mac, though that could change.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - graftak 5y ago
        Aren’t many companies normally located in the Silicon Valley now migrating to Texas, where the electricity infrastructure is wonky at best.
madeofpalk 5y ago
We know (more or less) exactly what the Pro desktop chips will be, in the same way that these laptop chips weren't much of a surprise - they'll be basically exactly this, but bigger. More of it.
- adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
  They can't get that much bigger. The Max is already over 400mm^2. For comparison, the biggest chips are around 600. Apple can't realistically get much bigger than this since yield already drops off a cliff at 600. Getting bigger than that will be tough for them since it isn't clear that apple has put R&D into interconnect tech needed to make effective multi-chip modules.
  - rsanheim 5y ago
    They are probably going to do two M1 Max chips in the imac, so basically take the existing m1 max, and double it (at least for multicore perf, who knows how single-threaded will play out).
    - foobiekr 5y ago
      They almost certainly will not do this and it would be a NUMA nightmare if they did.
      - bogantech 5y ago
        Not sure why you were downvoted for this. Considering that some of the magic in these things is the shared, local memory with a very wide bus it would seem obvious that trying to go multi chip would indeed be a massive headache in this regard
        mrkstu 5y ago
        Check out this[0] link to see why the thought is Apple is doing exactly that. [0]: https://architosh.com/2021/10/apples-new-m1-pro-is-chop-version-of-m1-max-die/ https://architosh.com/2021/10/apples-new-m1-pro-is-chop-vers...
dhosek 5y ago
There were a lot of people saying things like this after the M1 too. I'm not expecting another huge leap with whatever comes next in the M-series, but I won't be surprised if there is one either.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  They didn't really improve the M1 with the Pro and Max chips though. They really just added more cores to the SIP, which doesn't necessarily improve performance so much as it makes more performance available.
- dtech 5y ago
  I wouldn't say M1 max is another leap. It's mostly scaling for linear performance gains.
  - MR4D 5y ago
    When you look at it from a compute perspective, sure. But from a power perspective, it is indeed a leap.
nicoburns 5y ago
Maybe not next year, but TSMC’s 3nm isn’t that far off.
ls612 5y ago
The rumors are that the M1 supersized version they are putting in the new Mac Pro is 20 CPU cores and 128 GPU cores, which would place it at a little under twice the performance of a 3090. Not saying that Nvidia can't catch up with a hypothetical 4090 next year but it'll be a tall order.
- xoac 5y ago
  I'll believe it when I see it.
- opencl 5y ago
  The M1 Max 32 core GPU is ~1/8 the performance of the 3090. 4x the core count should put it half of 3090 performance, not double.
  - wincy 5y ago
    The path forward is simple then. 512 GPU cores.
  - tehnub 5y ago
    Dumb question here: Can you get more performance from the same number of cores by giving them more power?
    - throw868788 5y ago
      Not a dumb question at all. You can to an extent, but the returns diminish quickly. It isn't linear. This fact however makes "performance per watt" comparisons misleading between different processors designed for different environments (e.g. M1 vs AMD Desktop). It takes a more power to get that much extra perf, conversely and the more under-appreciate part IMO reducing the speed a little can save a ton of power/heat if the chip is currently running at the higher power portion of the curve. On a desktop machine most people would want them to tune for performance at quite a substantial power efficiency cost so of course a desktop chip most probably is less power efficient per unit of compute. You don't need to power it with a battery after all and there's heaps more cooling capacity in a bigger form factor so why optimise for that?
mehrdada 5y ago
RAM is not on package in the way iPhones are. Bandwidth should not be meaningfully affected by the placement of RAMs; perhaps slight latency improvement. It simply has many memory channels.
hajile 5y ago
They got something like 15% increase in integer performance, up to 37% increase some benchmarks, and 8% overall performance increase. Zen 2 was a must-have upgrade over Zen+ and it was a 10% IPC increase.

neogodless 5y ago

There were really similar discussions in mid-2020 when the Ryzen 4000 mobile chips launched, because they were beating Intel desktop chips. That doesn't diminish how excellent Apple Silicon is for Macbook users (and Mac Mini users). It's just an exciting time when laptops (with the right silicon) can do more than ever before, reducing the need to have a desktop for a lot of tasks, and also... largely not a great time to be using Intel chips. (Alder Lake is very high performing, but power hungry and desktop only.)

p1necone 5y ago

They're mentioning their desktop because Apples marketing hype mentions the desktop, not because the comparison is actually valid. As you can see in the benchmark - lower power, proportionally lower performance. To be clear - Apples M1 hardware is good, even great. It's just that Apples marketing hype is so over the top, and so many people buy into it so hard that people (such as me) still feel the need to bring it down to earth.

jshier 5y ago
Apple's marketing page for the new MacBook Pros with the M1 Pro and M1 Max strictly mentions laptops and laptop GPUs in its comparisons. Apple makes no comparison to desktop systems directly. At most they make general comparisons to the power curves of PC CPUs and GPUs, but mostly when introducing the M1 and explaining why they built it.
minhazm 5y ago
> lower power, proportionally lower performance Except it's not. The performance per watt is significantly better on average. Only one of the examples in this post really talked about power usage and that example also says that the 3090 is using a special compiler and gets to use the special tensor cores in the 3090, but for the M1 Max it wasn't able to use the neural cores or the special compiler and still achieves a similar performance per watt. If you look at more detailed benchmarks from Anandtech: > In the SPECfp suite, the M1 Max is in its own category of silicon with no comparison in the market. It completely demolishes any laptop contender, showcasing 2.2x performance of the second-best laptop chip. The M1 Max even manages to outperform the 16-core 5950X – a chip whose package power is at 142W, with rest of system even quite above that. It’s an absolutely absurd comparison and a situation we haven’t seen the likes of. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  For laptop usage, it's an amazing feat. But it's kind of a strained comparison. Power usage doesn't scale linearly with performance for any CPU (power consumption scales with the square of voltage) so squeezing the last 20% of performance out of a desktop chip could require doubling the power consumption. Which is actually find for a desktop because I really don't care if my CPU consumes 100-200W for a few minutes while doing a compile. But trying to compare performance-per-watt between two parts tuned for different parts of the power/efficiency curve is always going to be misleading. If we wanted to compare straight across, comparing to AMD's mobile Ryzen parts would make more sense. AMD has a 35W mobile part that isn't all that far behind the M1 parts: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/11001445 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/11001445

ziml77 5y ago

Not just that it's even comparable to a desktop but that it also has excellent battery life. You've been able to get portable desktop replacements before, but they were power hungry even when barely doing anything.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing. Right, and I acknowledged the battery life as amazing. But currently, I can't buy an M1 Max desktop if I wanted to. So instead I have a 16" MacBook Pro semi-permanently attached to my monitor and keyboard at my desk. It's basically a desktop for me. I don't expect a laptop to outperform my AMD/nVidia desktop workstation. And sure enough, it doesn't! But it comes surprisingly close for common tasks and I'm very happy to have it.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

> But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing. Like that's the rhetoric--holy shit your laptop is doing this. The problem with this take is this: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2685?vs=2613 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2685?vs=2613 This is mobile vs. desktop Zen 2 with the same number of cores. You give a CPU three times the power budget and it gets marginally faster. Because the last few hundred MHz of clock speed uses a ton of power, and that's it. But then you have this: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2613?vs=2666 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2613?vs=2666 Nearly double the multi-threaded performance at the same TDP, because it has twice as many cores and it only has to give back the last few hundred MHz of base clock to do it. A laptop with performance largely equivalent to <= 8-core desktops wasn't a novelty. What a desktop really gets you is the ability to have a lot more cores.

whynotminot 5y ago
I don't really understand your point. The impressiveness of M1/Pro/Max is what they do holistically for the power draw. The CPU + GPU + other accelerators combined and across the board approach what powerful desktops can do even with discrete power guzzling components. This is not about a single aspect of the silicon. So sure, you can cherry pick one part of the SoC, match it up against one aspect of Chip X and try to make a point. OK, you win that one. I'm talking about what the SoC as a whole does while running near-silently off a battery. Yes, a desktop gives you the ability to have more CPU cores. I'm sure that's what we'll get from whatever Apple decides to ship for its true Pro desktops.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  The point is that we already had this. Both the CPU and GPU are competitive with existing CPUs and GPUs. Which is a first in a long time for anybody outside of AMD/Intel/Nvidia. But "competitive" and "dramatically better" are not the same thing. People were primarily comparing it to desktop CPUs because of where we were in the release cycle. How does it compare to Zen 3? Well, Zen 3 laptops were still a few months away when the M1 was released, but Zen 2 desktops were only a single digit percentage faster than Zen 2 laptops, so how does it compare to Zen 3 desktops? Meanwhile the primary real advantage of the M1 is that it uses less power. Compared to PC laptops, it's a somewhat less power. There are already PC laptops with 9+ hours of battery life (and no matter how little the CPU uses, you still have to run the screen and everything else), so the practical impact of this isn't enormous, but it's there. But if you compare the power consumption to PC desktops, OMFG! Except that nobody really cares about the power consumption of PC desktops. That's why they triple the power consumption to eek out 8% more performance. A lot of this is also attributable to how good Apple's marketing is. I don't know if they did this on purpose, but people keep publishing SPEC benchmarks for comparison with PCs. Part of this is that a lot of the ordinary benchmark software either doesn't run on Mac at all or there was no native ARM version available yet. But SPEC was put together by a consortium of server vendors. Their incentive is show that their POWER and Xeon processors are worth the fat premium over regular desktop CPUs. So the suite skews heavy to benchmarks limited by memory bandwidth, because big servers will have like 16 times more memory channels than a desktop. Then Apple shows up with this SoC that has a ton of memory bandwidth because it's necessary to feed the GPU and it stomps all over those specific benchmarks. Then it's OMFG again even though those results aren't actually typical because most workloads aren't limited by memory bandwidth. It's not a bad chip. The level of hype is just extraordinary.

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sudosysgen 5y ago

Laptop Zen and desktop Zen are basically the same in single core. The big difference is you're not more than 8 fast cores. The M1 Max also has basically 8 fast cores. It used to be different, but now frequency is so close to the absolute limits that adding more power doesn't help single core performance that much.