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Apple M1 Ultra
- slapslash 5y agoThe word ULTRA appears 82 times on that page.
- pantalaimon 5y agoThe very same dual-chiplet design marcan predicted - nice!
- renewiltord 5y agoHaha, bloody hell, what a monster of a chip. I find my M1 Max already remarkably fast. The change is so huge. It's like in the old days when you'd get a new computer and it felt like it could do things before you could think of doing them. But surely the GPU things can't be real? The GPU in the M1 Ultra beats the top-of-the-line Nvidia? That's nuts.
- teilo 5y agoGiven that it's basically double the performance of the Max, with massive memory bandwidth, seems reasonable to me. But Apple always fudges things a bit. Like, which Nvidia exactly is this being compared to, and under what workload exactly?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- thfuran 5y agoThat thing has four times as many transistors as a 3090.
- maronato 5y agoAlthough true, transistor count is only tangentially related to performance
- davrosthedalek 5y agoThat counts memory, right?
- wmf 5y agoNo, but it does include cache; the M1 Ultra should have 96MB of cache (>6B transistors) while Nvidia GPUs have relatively little cache. 128GB of DRAM has 1 trillion transistors.
- lastdong 5y agoNvidia 3090, I wonder what Relative Performance equates to. Can't wait for the (real world) reviews to be published
- lastdong 5y agoJust to add in any case Apple is solving a big problem related to limited GPU memory, which is quite cool Hopefully AMD, Nvidia, others can follow the trend
- bkyiuuMbF 5y ago> But surely the GPU things can't be real? The GPU in the M1 Ultra beats the top-of-the-line Nvidia? Dubious. https://www.pcgamer.com/apple-m1-max-nvidia-rtx-3080-performance/ https://www.pcgamer.com/apple-m1-max-nvidia-rtx-3080-perform...
- brutal_boi 5y agoFrom the article: > Apple even says its new GPU is a match for Nvidia's RTX 3080 mobile chip, though you'll have to take Apple's word for it on that one. We've also reached out to Nvidia to see what it might have to say on the matter. > RTX 3080 mobile chip > mobile chip There's a 50%[1] (!) difference with mobile and non-mobile versions of the chip. So that's hardly a deal breaker. [1] https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
- gowld 5y agoThe "mobile" scam in GPUs is terrible. Nvidia flat out lies about Mobile performance by giving misleading product names (same as the desktop names).
- LegitShady 5y agoits beyond that. the same chip might have several tdps and drastic performance differences between models, such that a high tdp 3070 mobile is faster than a low tdp 3080. you end up having to get benchmarks for each particular laptop configuration.
- xsmasher 5y agoJust for clarity, that article is about the M1 Pro and the M1 Max chips from October.
- Omniusaspirer 5y agoBased on Anandtech benchmarks the M1 Max GPU is basically on par with a mobile 3080, which a quick search tells me is about 60% as fast as a desktop 3080. Not unreasonable to believe 2 of them combined will outperform a 3090- with nearly 128 GB of VRAM to boot. Even more incredible Anandtech reports the M1 max GPU block maxing at 43W in their testing. So a 90W GPU in the M1 Ultra is trading blows with a 350+ watt 3090. 1) https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/6 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
- Macha 5y agoGPU scaling is absolutely not linear in that way. nvidia gave up on that in recent generations as without software support to match, you had situations where double 1080s were 95% as fast as one 1080 with worse frame times. Might be nice for e.g. ML where you can effectively treat them as entirely independent GPUs but for games I would be surprised if this matches a high end GPU.
- cassac 5y agoWhat on earth are you talking about. That link shows it’s not even half as fast as the 3060, let alone the 3080. In borderlands it got 24 FPS while the 3080 got 52 FPS. How is that on par?
- squeaky-clean 5y ago
- Thaxll 5y ago> But surely the GPU things can't be real? The GPU in the M1 Ultra beats the top-of-the-line Nvidia? That's nuts. People that game on Mac know it's a lie, GPU for gaming on mac is vastly slower than recent graphic cards.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jlouis 5y agoInsane claims requires insane evidence. We don't have that there. For some workloads i would not be surprised at all. But for all workloads, ...
- make3 5y agothe problem on mac is the super tiny game selection
- acchow 5y ago> The GPU in the M1 Ultra beats the top-of-the-line Nvidia? That's nuts. We don't know yet. Apple is benchmarking against Workstation graphics cards "production 2.5GHz 28-core Intel Xeon W-based Mac Pro systems with 384GB of RAM and AMD Radeon Pro W6900X graphics with 32GB of GDDR6"
- sercand 5y ago> Highest-end discrete GPU performance data tested from Core i9-12900K with DDR5 memory and GeForce RTX 3090. From the linked article. Apple is comparing against RTX 3090.
- cube2222 5y agoLooks like all the people saying "just start fusing those M1 CPU's into bigger ones" were right, that's basically what they did here (fused two M1 Max'es together). And since the presenter mentioned the Mac Pro would come on another day, I wonder if they'll just do 4x M1 Max for that.
- ksec 5y ago>Looks like all the people saying "just start fusing those M1 CPU's into bigger ones" were right, Well they were only correct that Apple managed to hide a whole section of Die Image. ( Which is actually genius ) Otherwise it wouldn't have made any sense. Likely to be using CoWoS from TSMC [1] since the bandwidth numbers fits. But needs further confirmation. [1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/tsmc/cowos https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/tsmc/cowos
- kodah 5y agoI've been using a Vega-M for some time which I think follows this model. It's really great.
- kalleboo 5y agoThe interconnect area was already known from third-party die photos of the M1 Max https://twitter.com/vadimyuryev/status/1466526403331952644 https://twitter.com/vadimyuryev/status/1466526403331952644
- ksec 5y agoThey were not known when people keep rampling about the the Mark Gurman report on "just start fusing those M1 CPU's into bigger ones". I wrote about it three months ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29430817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29430817
- wilg 5y agohttps://hypercritical.co/2021/05/21/images/city-of-chiplets.png https://hypercritical.co/2021/05/21/images/city-of-chiplets....
- superkuh 5y agoIt sounds like the chip is fast but I wonder, if like other M1 products, the computers built with it will be fairly restricted, like a console, in terms of the hardware they're able to use (not being able to boot off external HDDs, problems with thunderbolt 3 compatibility in peripherals, having to use abstraction layers to run most of the software world indirectly or have specific porting projects dedicated to M1, etc).
- aaomidi 5y ago> having to use abstraction layers to run most of the software world indirectly Nearly everything I use daily is built for M1 now. https://isapplesiliconready.com/ https://isapplesiliconready.com/ And honestly, if it's not, its a good indication that it's time to move away from that product as they don't care about a huge segment of their users.
- thfuran 5y agoOr it's actually a tiny segment of their users.
- drcongo 5y agoDropbox and Signal are the only two I ever use, and yeah, the lack of interest in porting to M1 from both of those companies is increasing my lack of interest in their apps.
- nintendo1889 5y agoThat page says that both of those apps are supported.
- MBCook 5y agoI believe Dropbox was in the last few months. Which was still over a year after public release of the M1.
- 5y ago
- klelatti 5y agoI wonder if the max 128GB graphics memory opens up some applications that would not have been viable before?
- freemint 5y agoNot really. Thanks to the GPU interconnect NVLINK we have system 320GB. https://www.deltacomputer.com/nvidia-dgx-a100-320gb-3ys-edu.html https://www.deltacomputer.com/nvidia-dgx-a100-320gb-3ys-edu.... There are even some with 640GB. This is at a different price point though.
- klelatti 5y agoNot on a single GPU though and it’s 40x the cost!
- freemint 5y agoRewriting a CUDA application to use NVLINK is a lot easier then rewriting it for Apples GPU.
- 314 5y ago640GB should be enough for anyone.
- yisonPylkita 5y agoBill said it 40 years ago and here we are with 2 orders of prefix more of memory. I wonder if in next 40 years we'll get to 640 peta bytes
- wpm 5y agoFinally, enough RAM for Microsoft Teams!
- manquer 5y agoPerhaps until VR becomes more main stream and gets higher frame rates, resolutions etc. Rendering in VR takes a lot of memory at higher resolutions.
- teilo 5y agoAnd overnight, Intel's Ice Lake is again way behind.
- pjmlp 5y ago80% of the desktop market and 100% of cloud deployments won't care.
- brailsafe 5y agoWould 80% of "the desktop market"—whatever that means—care about Ice Lake to begin with, or any high end chip at all?
- pjmlp 5y agoWhat they definitely won't care is Apple hardware at Apple prices, specially outside first world countries.
- brailsafe 5y agoYa but they never have, and it seems a bit irrelevant in the context of this particular product. I'd see that being relevant if it was supposed to be a product with extremely broad appeal, but it isn't that even for first world countries.
- pjmlp 5y agoIt it relevant in the context that people keep celebrating M1 as if Apple would take over the whole computing world.
- fastball 5y agoI dunno, I think cloud is starting to think more and more about power consumption of the chips used, where Apple Silicon blows the competition out of the water.
- nonameiguess 5y ago> M1 Ultra features an extraordinarily powerful 20-core CPU with 16 high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores. It delivers 90 percent higher multi-threaded performance than the fastest available 16-core PC desktop chip in the same power envelope. Maybe not a huge caveat, as 16-core chips in the same power envelope probably covers most of what an average PC user is going to have, but there are 64-core Threadrippers out there available for a PC (putting aside that it's entirely possible to put a server motherboard and thus a server chip in a desktop PC case).
- hoistbypetard 5y agoIs that Threadripper in anything like the "same power envelope"?
- ollien 5y agoIf I'm reading the graph in the press release right, M1 Ultra will have a TDP of 60W, right? A 3990X has a TDP of 280W. I know TDP != power draw, and that everyone calculates TDP differently, but looking purely at orders of magnitude, no, it's not even close.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- eloff 5y ago"in the same power envelope" is a pretty big caveat. Desktop chips aren't very optimized for power consumption. I'd like to see the actual performance comparison.
- adfgadfgaery 5y agoThat line is blatantly dishonest, but not for the reasons you pointed out. While the i9-12900K is a 16-core processor, it uses Intel's version of big.LITTLE. Eight of its 16 cores are relatively low performance 'E' cores. This means it has only half the performance cores of the M1 Ultra, yet it achieves 3/4 of the performance by Apple's own graphic. Alder Lake has been repeatedly shown to outperform M1 core-per-core. The M1 Ultra is just way bigger. (And way more power efficient, which is a tremendous achievement for laptops but irrelevant for desktops.)
- lend000 5y agoAre the neural engines actually used for anything, to anyone's knowledge? Edit: Apparently in iPhones, they are used for FaceID.
- can16358p 5y agoProbably object tracking in videos will be the best use of them. Or, there will be some new form of video generation (like the ones generating video from Deep Dream etc, but something aimed at studio production) using ML that wasn't practically usable before. It opens many doors, but it will take at least many months, if not years, to see some new "kind" of software to emerge that efficiently makes use of them.
- acchow 5y agoI thought it's also used to activate Siri by voice without any CPU usage
- sharikous 5y agoCoreML models may run on them to macOS's discretion. If you manage to get your neural network in CoreML's format you may use it.
- daggersandscars 5y agoAdobe uses them Lightroom / Photoshop for some functions. https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/apple-m1-chip-makes-adobe-apps-80-faster-and-some-gains-are-bigger-still https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/apple-m1-chip-makes-...
- bm-rf 5y agoWould something like huggingface transformers ever be able to support this? Or is it best fit to just use the GPU.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoAdobe Photoshop, Premiere etc make use of it for scene detection, content aware fill, "neural filters" and so on
- xiphias2 5y agoDidn't AMD do something similar with putting 2 CPU chips together with cache in-between? What's the difference here in packaging technology? (maybe there is no shared cache here)
- MBCook 5y agoThis doesn’t seem to be two cores connected in standard SMP configuration, or with a shared cache between them. Apple claims there were like 10,000 connection points. It sounds like this operates as if it was one giant physical chip, not two separate processors that can talk very fast. I can’t wait to see benchmarks.
- haneefmubarak 5y agoModern SMP systems have NUMA behavior mostly not because of a lack of bandwidth but because of latency. At the speeds modern hardware operates at, the combination of distance, SerDes, and other transmission factors result in high latencies when you cross dies - this can't be ameliorated by massively increasing bandwidth via parallel lanes. For context, some server chips which have all the cores on a single die exhibit NUMA behavior purely because there's too many cores to all be physically close to each other geometrically (IIRC the first time I saw this was on an 18 core Xeon, with cores that themselves were a good bit smaller than these). It's probably best to think of this chip as an extremely fast double socket SMP where the two sockets have much lower latency than normal. Software written with that in mind or multiple programs operating fully independent of each other will be able to take massive advantage of this, but most parallel code written for single socket systems will experience reduced gains or even potential losses depending on their parallelism model.
- adfgadfgaery 5y agoAMD is currently shipping high-end CPUs built with up to nine dies. Their ordinary desktop parts have up to three. They are not built with "cache in-between". There is one special I/O die but it does not contain any cache. Each compute die contains its own cache.
- diamondlovesyou 5y ago
- alberth 5y agoI'm cross posting a question I had from the Mac Studio thread (currently unanswered). ---- Mac Pro scale up? How is this going to scale up to a Mac Pro, especially related to RAM? The Ultra caps at 128 GB of RAM (which isn't much for video editing, especially given that the GPU uses the system RAM). Today's Mac Pro goes up to 1.5TB (and has dedicated video RAM above this). If the Mac Pro is say, 4 Ultra's stacked together - that means the new Mac Pro will be capped at 512GB of RAM. Would Apple stack 12 Ultra's together to get to 1.5TB of RAM? Seems unlikely.
- can16358p 5y agoI think they will unveil M2 which can probably at least double the 64GB max to 128GB max RAM of M1-series. Then, on the highest configuration, I think they actually can put 6 M2-top-specced or more into the Mac Pro.
- bpicolo 5y agoDoes the mac studio potentially replace the mac pro concept? It seems targeted at exactly the audience that mac pros targeted (ridiculous amounts of video simul-editing)
- alberth 5y agoTo me, this seems to have killed the iMac Pro not the Mac Pro.
- zitterbewegung 5y agoNo this looks like a modular replacement of the iMac Pro. If it was to replace the Mac Pro they wouldn't have said at the end of the event "the Mac Pro will have to wait until next time".
- sharikous 5y agoThe presentor very explicitly said they are not done and they will replace the Mac Pro. But yes, I see a lot of folks replacing current Mac Pros with Studios.
- dagmx 5y ago
- contingencies 5y agoDesktop marketing seems to be getting desperate. Few people use the apps they show in the Mac Studio benchmarks. Fewer still care that their chips use less power... if they did, they would stay on their phones.
- Spooky23 5y agoLarge businesses do. I bet in some places you could get grant/loan incentives to replace a PC fleet with these things. Back in the Pentium-4 days, iirc I was able to get almost $250k in grants and $1.5M in subsidized loans to do accelerated refresh of a PC fleet and small datacenter, all through a utility's peak load reduction program.
- contingencies 5y agoI don't deny such things happen but it's illogical. If you have 20 people on desktops a small fraction of them will use more energy for microwaving lunch, making coffee or on air conditioning than they will save in aggregate on this nominal reduction in power draw.
- AdrianB1 5y agoMicrowaving lunch: 2 minutes at 800W; desktop with monitor: 8 hours at 150W, that is 45 times higher. Similar for coffee, no simple math for AC. If you can reduce 150W to 80W, it is both significant and achievable - this is what my desktop usually draws.
- contingencies 5y agoYou forget these things sit ~idle (or at browser load) 99% of the time. The magnitude of difference only expresses at peak consumption. Furthermore, what about the lost time/hassle for changeover plus embodied energy in throwing out the last system? It's insanity.
- Spooky23 5y ago
- ostenning 5y agoI read “Apple unveils MK ULTRA”
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- yurishimo 5y agoLow key what if this was planned to change Google results to "Did you mean M1 Ultra?" when searching for the experiment? The CIA is using all that money for something consumers can use now! /takes off foil hat
- nintendo1889 5y agoDoes it mine bitcoin well?
- cosmotic 5y agoI'm sure an ASIC would best the M1.
- judge2020 5y agoNot Bitcoin but Ethereum https://9to5mac.com/2021/11/10/m1-pro-macbook-pro-cryptocurrency-mining/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/11/10/m1-pro-macbook-pro-cryptocurr... M1 Pro -> 5.8 MH/s, with a 17w draw, means $12.82 a month profit. I don't imagine the M1 Ultra is too much better, maybe 20 MH/s at absolute most, but we'll see. It definitely won't be as economical as 3070 or 3080 FE cards at current profitability levels.
- vmception 5y ago& $.10 per KwH, many residences are often higher but professional operations are closer to $.03 per KwH or sometimes even zero or negative also note that mining calculator they used assumes 2 Ether per block paid to miners In Ethereum it can be much much higher because people pay to use that blockchain. Mining can be insanely profitable and I’m not aware of any calculator that shows it. Everyone is operating on bad data. A cursory look right now shows latest blocks having 2.52 Ether in them, which is 26% greater yield. Block 14348267 a few minutes ago had 4.83 Ether, 140% greater yield There have been prolonged periods of time, weeks and months, where block rewards were 6-9 Ether. Miners were raking it all in while the calculators said “2 Ether” All this to say it could probably make $20-30 a month.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- didip 5y agoThe power leveling in this chip's naming scheme can rival Dragon Ball Z.
- ccwilson10 5y agoI wish HN was like this more often
- 0xbadcafebee 5y agoBe the comments you want to see in the HN
- et-al 5y agoI don't. There's already Reddit if you want to crack puns and farm karma. Let's try to keep the signal:noise ratio higher here.
- rpmisms 5y agoI appreciate that it's infrequent. Sure, it's fun to blow off some steam and have a laugh, but that's fundamentally not what this place is about. Confining it to Apple release threads makes it more of a purge scenario.
- technocratius 5y agoI really hope it won't. Let's cherish the high quality comments of HN. Once this comment section becomes a karma-fed race to the bottom driven by who can make the most memeable jokes, it will never recover. Case in point: Reddit.
- amne 5y agoHow many CUDA cores? It's over ninethousaaaaa .. oh wait nevermind!
- stjohnswarts 5y agothe M1-O9000
- Jetrel 5y ago
- t_mann 5y agoWould be interesting to get more info on the neural engine. On one hand, I find it fascinating that major manufacturers are now putting neural architectures into mainstream hardware. On the other hand I wonder what exactly it can do. To what degree are you tied into a specific neural architecture (eg recurrent vs convolutional), what APIs are available for training it, if it's even meant to be used that way (not just by Apple-provided featues lke FaceID)?
- slimsag 5y agoThey're doing quite a lot of work here: https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/ https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/ https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/create-ml/ https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/create-ml/ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/createml https://developer.apple.com/documentation/createml
- zozbot234 5y agoTypical "neural engines" are intended for real-time network inference, not training. Training is highly parallel and benefits more from GPU-like vector processing.
- mlajtos 5y agoApple is pushing for training & fine-tuning on the devices too. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreml/model_customization/personalizing_a_model_with_on-device_updates https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreml/model_custo...
- zitterbewegung 5y agoIt's a general purpose accelerator. You have coremltools[1] to convert your trained model into a format or you can make your own using CreateML[2]. [1] https://coremltools.readme.io/docs https://coremltools.readme.io/docs [2] https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/create-ml/ https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/create-ml/
- msoad 5y agoAt what point Apple will put those chips in their servers or sell server chips? It only makes sense for them to take this architecture to the cloud deployments
- arcticbull 5y agoThey likely won't re-visit the Xserve, IMO. No reason to. They can't sell them at a premium compared to peers and its outside their area of expertise.
- em500 5y ago> They can't sell them at a premium compared to peers Intel is believed to have pretty good margins on their server CPUs > and its outside their area of expertise. That's what people used to say about Apple doing CPUs in-house.
- npunt 5y agoFWIW, Apple's been helping define CPU specs in-house since the 90s. They were part of an alliance with Motorola and IBM to make PowerPC, and bought a substantial part of ARM and did a joint venture to make Newton's CPU. And they've done a bunch of architecture jumps, from 6502 to 68k to PPC to Intel to A-series. Folks who said CPUs weren't their core expertise (I assume back in 2010 or before, prior to A4) missed out on just how involved they've historically been, what it takes to get involved, the role of fabs and off the shelf IP to gradually build expertise, and what benefits were possible when building silicon and software toward common purpose.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoI don't know, the performance per watt has a big effect on data-centers, both in power budget and HVAC for cooling.
- nicoburns 5y agoI doubt they'll go after the web server market. But I wonder if they might go after the sort of rendering farms that animation studios like Pixar use. Those guys are willing to pay silly money for hardware, and are market Apple has a long history with.
- gigatexal 5y agoI used to be one of the biggest Apple fanboys/apologists but I’ve since put Linux on my MacBook Pro from 2013 and built a Linux workstation and rarely use my 2020 MacBook Pro anymore, I say this because I yawned at the over-the-top Apple marketing. The products are interesting, sure, but I wasn’t blown away. It’s mostly the prices. The hardware is just far above what I can afford these days — even though my MacBook Pro from 2013 is so well made it still works now, and buying a 2 or 3 thousand dollar MacBook now I am sure it’d last just as long but it’s just too much. Though I am saving for one for multimedia work, probably a used M1 MacBook Air.
- willcipriano 5y agoIs it actually more powerful than a top of the line threadripper[0] or is that not a "personal computer" CPU by this definition? I feel like 64 cores would beat 20 on some workloads even if the 20 were way faster in single core performance. [0]https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3990x https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3...
- dljsjr 5y agoApple's ARM chips can process a metric ton of ops per cycle due to the architecture of the chip: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25257932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25257932
- zamadatix 5y agoBut the answer to the question is still "no".
- gjsman-1000 5y agoDoesn't have to though. A Threadripper 3990X uses barrels of electricity, generates plenty of heat, comes with no GPU, has worse single-threaded performance, and still costs $4000 by itself without any of the parts needed to make it actually work.
- Nition 5y agoThe question is in relation to Apple's claim that it's "the world’s most powerful and capable chip for a personal computer".
- gjsman-1000 5y agoDepends on what you define "capable" as. Remember, they specify that it is the most powerful and capable chip, not necessarily complete system. There's no other chip that has the power of an RTX 3090 and more power than an i9-12900K in it - after all, Threadripper doesn't have a lick of graphics power at all. This chip can do 18 8K video streams at once, which Threadripper would get demolished at. I'm content with giving them the chip crown. Full system? Debatable.
- Synaesthesia 5y agoApple have some serious chip design abilities. Imagine if they entered the server market, with this architecture it could be very successful.
- throwawayboise 5y agoThey tried that before and flopped. The server market is different. Companies buy servers from the low bidder. Apple has never really played in that market.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoThis is pretty true. While people who buy racks consider vertical improvements they tend to think laterally and how easy is it to expand (aka how cheap is the +1 server)
- flatiron 5y agoPeople care about performance per watt now. So they could compete. The real question is if they would support Linux. In our containerized world I can’t see their servers getting super big running macOS
- greenknight 5y agoThe reason they dominate at PPW, is because they are on TSMCs 5nm process. No one else has made a cpu chip on this process yet. AMD are scheduled for later this year (they are currently using 7nm). It will be interesting to see the difference in performance and performance per watt, when both companies are on the same node.
- flatiron 5y agoArm I believe helps a bit as well.
- Sporktacular 5y agoNo, it's hetrogeneity, system integration, pipeline width and instruction set as well.
- tediousdemise 5y agoHow does Apple manage to blow every other computing OEM out of the water? What's in the secret sauce of their company? Is it great leadership? Top tier engineering talent? Lots of money? I simply don't understand.
- KaiserPro 5y agomarketing and a forgiving audience. You have to remember that since the 2014 retina, Apple's offerings have been a bit crap. This is a return to form ( and a good one at that) but its not worthy of hero worship. They've done a good job turning things around, which is very hard.
- yurishimo 5y agoI think it's mostly engineering and the cash to make things happen. You heard it today in the presentation that since they launched M1, sales have skyrocketed for Apple computers. Hopefully leadership is really looking hard at this trend and adjusting future offerings accordingly. Consumers WANT machines with high performance and great I/O and they're willing to pay for them. With Apple, Intel, and AMD really stepping up the last couple of years, I think the next decade of personal computing is going to be really exciting!
- stalfosknight 5y agoPut simply, it is vertical integration paired with management that is adept at playing the long game.
- amilios 5y agoD) all of the above?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ThrowawayR2 5y agoIf I had to guess, their secret sauce is that 1) they're paying lots of money to be on a chip fabrication node ahead of both AMD and Intel, 2) since their chip design is in-house, they don't have to pay the fat profit margin Intel and AMD want for their high-end processors and can therefore include what is effectively a more expensive processor in their systems for the same price, and 3) their engineering team is as good as AMD/Intel. Note that the first two have more to do with economics rather than engineering.
- mwcampbell 5y agoI wonder how long it will be until a CPU as capable as this one will be the required baseline for ordinary apps. Is there any hope that the upgrade treadmill will stop any time soon?
- FredPret 5y agoOne day we’ll be up to our eyeballs in computronium, and it will never be enough. Thinking is a superpower even better than being the first species to develop sight. See also “The Last Question” by Asimov.
- bufferoverflow 5y agoThere will always be apps that use all the power you throw at them. Raytracing scales pretty much linearly with the core count. Compression does too. But your everyday apps like your browser have been fast for at least a decade.
- ip26 5y agoYes, but your current browser is probably not very fast on a Nehalem. That is what they are lamenting. Will a M1 Ultra one day be too slow to run Calculator? Answer: Just wait for some genius to figure out how to run Electron inside Electron, and port Calculator to it.
- Epiphany21 5y ago>Is there any hope that the upgrade treadmill will stop any time soon? The bottleneck for most slow/old PCs is not actually the CPU. Dried thermal paste, mismatched low speed RAM sticks, operating systems installed to mechanical disks and weak iGPUs are often to blame. You can fix most of these easily at home for very little money and keep using old systems. Most people are sadly too tech-illiterate to really understand what an SSD is, so I still sometimes do SSD upgrades on almost brand new laptops and pre-built desktops for friends and family. OEMs like to add insult to injury by bloating up the default Windows install with janky driver control panels and adware. A new SSD, a clean OS install with generic drivers, new thermal paste and some compressed air in the fans will make those PCs work better than they did on day one. I have a few of those kind of machines around the house...
- pphysch 5y ago> This enables M1 Ultra to behave and be recognized by software as one chip, so developers don’t need to rewrite code to take advantage of its performance. There’s never been anything like it. Since when did the average developer care about how many sockets a mobo has...? Surely you still have to carefully pin processes and reason about memory access patterns if you want maximum performance.
- KaiserPro 5y agoI think its more the case that OSX hasn't really had SMP/numa for a long time. My understanding was the the dustbin was designed with one big processor because SMP/numa was a massive pain in the arse for the kernel devs at the time so it was easier to just drop it and not worry.
- yuuko11 5y agoNot sure what is required of a dev, but as an example, Adobe Premiere pro doesn't take any advantage of >1 CPU, at least on Windows. https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Should-you-use-a-Dual-Xeon-for-Premiere-Pro-CC-2017-932/ https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Should-you-use-a-...
- AdrianB1 5y agoCPU as in core or socket? These days most CPUs are "many-CPU-cores-in-1-socket" and having X CPU cores over 1 or 2 sockets make a small difference, but software does not care about sockets.
- vmception 5y ago> M1 Ultra can be configured with up to 128GB of high-bandwidth, low-latency unified memory Nice! Good enough to run a Solana node! I was slightly annoyed that the M1 Max’s 64gb RAM puts it just under the system requirements, at that premium price But I don't have any other theoretical use case for that much resources
- mrcwinn 5y agoPro, Max, Ultra. The board has been set. M1 Endgame is nearly ready.
- fulafel 5y ago"Apple’s innovative packaging architecture that interconnects the die of two M1 Max chips to create a system on a chip (SoC)" Did they get their terminology confused? Later it says "By connecting two M1 Max die with our UltraFusion packaging architecture [...]" which also sounds like it's a MCM and not a SoC.
- wdurden 5y agoAhhh, reminiscent of the G4 Desktop Supercomputer .. https://www.deseret.com/1999/9/1/19463524/apple-unveils-g4-desktop-supercomputer https://www.deseret.com/1999/9/1/19463524/apple-unveils-g4-d... I kinda believe em this time, but time will tell.
- iskander 5y agoSo little memory? The now outdated Mac Pro goes up to 1.5TB, only 128GB available here.
- masklinn 5y agoTheir design is basically gated by the number of memory controllers: 1MC tops out at 16GB (M1), 2MCs for 32 (Pro), 4 MCs for 64 (Max), and I guess 8 MCs for 128 (Ultra which is apparently two Maxes stapled together). Hopefully the next gen will provide more capable and flexible memory controllers, both so they can scale the top end for a full Pro-scale offering, and so there is more memory flexibility at the lower end e.g. the ability to get an M1 with 32+GB RAM, or a Pro with 64+.
- bengale 5y agoThey mentioned the Mac Pro replacement is still to come.
- crazypython 5y agoIntel 12th gen i9 is 11% better at single core and 42% slower at multicore. https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_core_i9_12900k-vs-apple_m1_ultra_48_gpu https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_core_i9_1290... For most non-parallel tasks, my guess is the Intel 12900K will beat at performance. Intel's next generation will have 50% more cores and beat this chip at multithreading.
- moralestapia 5y agoRIP Intel
- MangoCoffee 5y agonot yet. Intel Alder lake have mostly positive reviews.
- 1980phipsi 5y agoCan we trust the performance measurements that are listed?
- Lramseyer 5y agoYes, but assume that they're cherry picked. Don't get me wrong, these numbers are impressive, but it claims that it's GPU is faster than the highest end discrete GPU (RTX 3090) but it's unclear on what benchmark it used. It's important to keep in mind that their GPUs are not architected with gaming in mind, whereas the 3090 definitely is. So it's not unreasonable to find some metrics where their GPU performs better.
- zwaps 5y agoSo then, when will common ML frameworks work on Apple? I guess compiled Tensorflow works with some plugins or whatever, where afaik performance is still subpar. Apple emphasizes that they have this many Tensorcores... but unfortunately to use them one has to roll one's own framework on what Swift or something. I am sure it gets better soon.
- xyst 5y ago"M1 Ultra Pro Max", wen? Naming scheme aside, this is great!
- jcadam 5y agoWell, more reasonable than a mac pro, price wise. Might have to consider this when the time comes to replace my Ryzen9 rig.
- polyrand 5y agoI think the GPU claims are interesting. According to the graph's footer, the M1 Ultra was compared to an RTX 3090. If the performance/wattage claims are correct, I'm wondering if the Mac Studio could become an "affordable" personal machine learning workstation (which also won't make the electricity bill skyrocket). If Pytorch becomes stable and easy to use on Apple Silicon [0][1], it could be an appealing choice. [0]: https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/47702#issuecomment-965625139 https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/47702#issuecomment... [1]: https://nod.ai/pytorch-m1-max-gpu/ https://nod.ai/pytorch-m1-max-gpu/
- Koshkin 5y agoFor some definitions of "affordable."
- savant_penguin 5y agoAnd hopefully not make you deaf with their buzzing fans
- LegitShady 5y agoI always take such claims with a grain of salt anyways. It usualy on one specific benchmark. I wait for better benchmarks always instead of trusting the marketing
- pathartl 5y agoEven if their claims are accurate, it usually has the asterisk of *Only with Apple Metal 2. I honestly cannot understand why Apple decided they needed to write their own graphics API when the rest of the world is working hard to get away from the biggest proprietary graphics API.
- jpetso 5y agoI'd like to note that Microsoft is doing no better with DirectX. If it weren't for the drivers on Windows being distributed and supported by the GPU manufacturers themselves, Vulkan would only be a thing for Linux (incl. Android) and custom niche devices now.
- jjuuaann 5y ago
- ChuckMcM 5y agoIn some ways I wish this processor was available from a CPU chip seller. As a compute engine it gets a lot "right" (in my opinion) and would be fun to hack on. That said, the idea that USB C/Thunderbolt is the new PCIe bus has some merit. I have yet to find someone who makes a peripheral card cage that is fed by USBC/TB but there are of course standalone GPUs.
- jamesfmilne 5y agohttps://www.sonnettech.com/product/thunderbolt/pcie-card-expansion-systems.html https://www.sonnettech.com/product/thunderbolt/pcie-card-exp...
- ChuckMcM 5y agoThanks! Of course they are bit GPU centric but the idea is there. Very interesting stuff. I wonder both if the Zynq Ultrascale RFSOC PCIe card would work in that chassis and if I could get register level access out of MacOS.
- jamesfmilne 5y agoYes, you can interface with PCIe devices using DriverKit, Apple's new user-space device driver platform. No need to run inside the kernel for these things any more. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/driverkit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/driverkit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/pcidriverkit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/pcidriverkit
- dheera 5y ago> USB C/Thunderbolt is the new PCIe bus Oh please hell no. I have to unplug and plug my USB-C camera at least once a day because it gets de-enumerated very randomly. Using the best cables I can get my hands on. File transfers to/from USB-C hard drives suddenly stop mid-transfer and corrupt the file system. Don't ask me why, I'm just reporting my experiences, this is the reality of my life that UX researchers don't see because they haven't sent me an e-mail and surveyed me. Never had such problems with PCIe.
- gtvwill 5y ago
- Mikeb85 5y agoUgh really wish that a non-Apple vendor could make an ARM chip of this calibre. Jealous but cat bring myself to use a proprietary OS and get locked into Apple.
- pantalaimon 5y agoThere is always Asahi Linux
- Mikeb85 5y agoLast I heard not all of the chipset's features are working in Linux yet...
- swyx 5y agowas surprised to learn that the CPUs and GPUs on the M1x chips are essentially a single unit, and for the M1 Ultra they basically slapped two M1’s together. in traditional PC building, the CPU is quite distinct from the GPU. can anyone ELI5 what the benefits are to having the CPU closely integrated with GPU like the M1 has? seems a bit unwieldy but i dont know anything about computer architecture
- Koshkin 5y agoI remember how AMD 3DNow! and Intel MMX were meant to render GPUs obsolete.
- MBCook 5y agoHaving everything in one unit sharing the same pool of memory is quite common. PCs (and older) Macs didn’t do it because the CPU and GPU evolved as physically separate parts and sharing memory was too slow. I believe some Intel/AMD low power chips (non-performance laptops) have use this unified memory model as well. But it became extremely common on phones where there was no historical baggage and it was thought out from day one. I believe all the consoles use a unified memory layout now, but I’m not 100% sure. The usual limitation is you’re stuck with the on-die GPU, which can pale in comparison to a top of the line AMD or nVidia board.
- pram 5y agoEvery single consumer Intel processor has had a GPU on it for a decade.
- slmjkdbtl 5y agoCurious about the naming here, terms like "pro" "pro max" "max", "ultra" (hopefully there's no "pro ultra" and "ultra max" in the future) is very confusing and hard to know which one is more powerful than which, or if it's a power-level relationship. Is this on purpose or it's just bad naming? Is there example of good naming for this kind of situation?
- teaearlgraycold 5y agoI think the naming is based entirely around how the announcement sentence lands in the keynote. So they've optimized for "We're adding one last chip to the M1 family, and it's gonna blow your mind... (M1 Ultra appears on screen)".
- ip26 5y agoIt probably is on purpose. They all sound positive, full of goodness and speeds and synergies for today’s hip intelligentsia (which could be you!). You didn't settle for a MacBook with a harvested midrange chip, no, that’s a pro under your fingertips. What does that mean? Doesn’t matter, it makes you feel good. It works for them because most of their products have only one or maybe two choices. It would never fly for white box sales, but Apple is not in that market.
- thfuran 5y agoAs long as Asahi Linux is in good working order by the time the M3 Plus Ultra: Max Quantum Pro releases, I'll get one despite the name.
- ur-whale 5y agoWhere be the Linux distro that can run on an M1 (ultra or otherwise)? Without having to be a kernel hacker, that is.
- neogodless 5y agoThis is the one that has that as a core goal: https://asahilinux.org/ https://asahilinux.org/
- xedrac 5y agoWhile I'm not on the Apple train, I love how they are pushing AMD, Intel and NVidia out of complacency. No more of these little tiny incremental improvements to milk the industry. Bring your BEST to the table or get left behind!
- olliej 5y agoI’m find the slow drip of M1 extensions to be kind of ehn - like the tick part of the old intel cycle, only in this case it’s literally just gluing more of the same cores together (obviously work is involved, but not at the level of an architecture rev) (edit: calm down people, I recognize it's impressive, but it's just not as fun an announcement as an architecture rev, which I was hoping for after a year :D )
- teilo 5y agoIt's literally not.
- outworlder 5y agoIf 'gluing cores together' were this simple, every random desktop CPU would have 20 cores. That's not the case.
- Dylan16807 5y agoYou're forgetting price. If simplicity was the main concern, every random desktop CPU would have 16+ cores right now.
- jjtheblunt 5y agowhat? the unified memory growth IS an architecture rev
- jonplackett 5y agoMakes you wonder how many they can glue together. Looking at you Mac Pro
- Geee 5y agoThis is insane. They claim that its GPU performance tops the RTX 3090, while using 200W less power. I happen to have this GPU on my PC and not only it costs over $3000, but its also very power-hungry and loud. Currently, you need this kind of GPU performance for high resolution VR gaming at 90 fps, but its just barely enough. This means that the GPU will run very loudly and heat up the room, and running games like HL Alyx on max settings is still not possible. It seems that Apple might be the only company who can deliver a proper VR experience. I can't wait to see what they've been cooking up.
- 5etho 5y agoif it isn't marketing straight from the Apple HQ I will be wrong
- outworlder 5y agoToo bad that historically Apple has not given any attention to Mac gaming.
- bobbylarrybobby 5y agoPart of Apple's historic MO has been to not invest in areas they don't see themselves having a competitive advantage in. Now that they can make gaming happen with a very low wattage budget they may well try to enter that space in earnest.
- kllrnohj 5y agoThe gaming performance of the existing M1 GPUs is, well, crap (like far behind the other laptop competition, to say nothing of desktop GPUs). The Ultra probably isn't changing that, since it's very unlikely to be a hardware problem and instead a software ecosystem & incentives problem.
- kitsunesoba 5y agoI don’t think the performance is that bad. On a whim I tried running WoW on a 16” M1 Pro MBP and it consistently got FPS higher than the refresh rate (120hz) with the game rendering at 1x scale and most effects maxed out. Granted, that’s not as good as what you’d get with a mobile RTX 3080 or something, but it’s nothing to sneeze at for a laptop that doesn’t get scorching hot and doesn’t sound like a leaf blower when being pushed. I could definitely see the Max and Ultra with a beefier cooling system (like the Studio’s) having pretty respectable performance.
- randyrand 5y agoThese CPU names are terrible. When did Apple get bad at naming things?
- kristianp 5y agoI wonder what clock rate the studio runs these chips at with the extra cooling. Frustrating that the marketing materials don't mention that.
- top_sigrid 5y agoThis is a very little discussed question but one of the most interesting unknowns I think. The pro and max come only in laptops, so the cooling difference should be quite significant, but also there is more chip and an interconnect to cool. Really looking forward to the in depth analysis of this.
- j_d_b 5y agoM1 has the most powerful chip ever yet it still can't handle two monitors.
- neogodless 5y agoThis is not relevant to the Apple M1 Ultra. From the Mac Studio technical specifications > Simultaneously supports up to five displays: > Support for up to four Pro Display XDRs (6K resolution at 60Hz and over a billion colors) over USB-C and one 4K display (4K resolution at 60Hz and over a billion colors) over HDMI
- lazyeye 5y agoI'm surprised Apple found time outside of focusing on growing the Chinese economy to work on this. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/07/apple-china-deal-tim-cook https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/07/apple-chi...
- yoloyoloyoloa 5y agoMKUltra was a better chip
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jedberg 5y agoGiven how low the power consumption is for the power you get, I wonder if we'll see a new push for Mac servers. In an age where reducing power consumption in the datacenter is an advantage, it seems like it would make a lot of sense.
- MaxLeiter 5y agoI don’t think this will be the case until they’re more right to repair friendly
- Flankk 5y agoMost people don't want to repair, they want to replace. What people really want is a modular computer, the way things used to be. Right to repair is going to force legislation for schematics, at best. Even then I don't think it's going to happen. Like it or not, Apple builds integrated products now. You are the old man grumbling about the iMac not including a floppy drive.
- MaxLeiter 5y agoI'm not complaining; I generally agree with you. But (I believe) for people to invest in Macs for servers they need to be able to fix and replace them faster than dealing with Apple would allow.
- MBCook 5y agoHonestly CPUs and memory fail very rarely. If the storage was on standard m.2 sticks and maybe the I/O was on a replaceable module in case Ethernet fails… would that be enough to assuage most server concerns? I don’t see Apple getting back into that business. But I think they have the ability to make a good option if they want.
- mst 5y agoGiven the hyperscalers' tendency to just leave failed machines in place in the rack because it's not worth the money to even swap it out, for specifically cloud type stuff the price point and density may be more relevant than the repairability.
- excerionsforte 5y agoThey say this is the M1 Ultra Benchmark https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/13330272 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/13330272 Wow.
- neycoda 5y agoI really wish popular companies would focus more on software optimization than hardware renovations. It's really sad to see how fast products die due to increasingly bloated and overly-complex software.
- pkaye 5y agoI wonder if the project codename was MK Ultra?
- Indioli 5y ago
- sairahul82 5y agoI agree that M1 is great but the entire press release is full of adjectives. I never read any press release like it.
- jdlyga 5y agoThe Apple M1 Megazord, supporting 16 external monitors and 5 power rangers.
- bhewes 5y agoSweet chip! The copy, my eyes just glazed over.
- hobobaggins 5y agoWhat are people doing with these CPUs on a desktop? I'm just watching videos, surfing, and doing some programming -- on a 5 year old Ryzen with 32GB and it seems perfectly fine. For my productivity needs, performance is mostly about I/O speed and so switching to SSD and then NVME was the biggest boost for me (Linux at work). When I get home, it's all about the GPU on my gaming PC (Windows). It's just that CPU just doesn't seem to be a huge bottleneck for me on the desktop anymore. Are Mac's different somehow where they need more CPU?
- Gigachad 5y agoThe Mac studio seems targeted at pro users doing things like video editing and CAD. The M1 regular is good but its insufficient in a lot of ways. It can only power one video output, it's capped at 16GB memory, and if you try to do anything sufficiently demanding like gaming, it really shows its limits. If you are doing CAD, things like fluid/particle physics simulations can really slam the CPU. The M1 Ultra isn't marketed to the normal user just doing some web browsing. Its the top tier chip for people who find the M1 insufficient.
- Kelteseth 5y agoFor compiling c++ code, this really matters. At home, I have a 16 core 5950x and at the office an 8 core 2700x, and it is a night and day difference. Even if it's just a few minutes of compile time, it creates a different mindset. At home: Yeah, let's just recompile and see the changes. At the office: Oh no I have to recompile, let's go to the kitchen and grab a coffee or so, I have the time.
- nano9 5y agoMy concern is cooling. Any reason to believe that this new chip will run cool and not be drowned in thermal paste when installed? My Intel i7 Macbook Pro loves to idle at 65 C, and some light browsing will kick that up to 80 C, which worries me.
- raverbashing 5y agoI'm reading the Ultrafusion description and besides all the talk what I can think of is: NUMA?
- Razengan 5y agoIt’s funny how during all the years that PC elitists turned their pince-nez’ed noses up at Macs and pooh-poohed Apple, the biggest factor holding Macs down turned out to be the commodity PC chips. :)
- Transisto 5y agoInteresting how so many of their benchmarks are based on the number of 8k stream they can playback or edit at once but OSX doesn't support outputting to 8K resolution. Most likely crippled until Apple come up with their own 8K monitors.
- mst 5y agoThe new Studio Display appears to be 5K so it wouldn't surprise me if the second generation of that will be 8K,
- theodric 5y agoThe price alone is turning me back into a Linux user after 20 years. I simply cannot justify 6800 Swiss Francs (neighborhood of 7000 Euros or USD) for the max CPU/RAM and a 2TB SSD, and I cannot justify getting any less because it's soldered-down and not in any way upgradeable or repairable. Not to mention, even with AppleCare+ it's only guaranteed to work for 3 years (in Europe, I know you Americans can get long-term AppleCare subscriptions, but we don't have that option here). This is a tragedy for the future of computing. It might as well be encased in resin. Great performance, but I won't spend car money on something I can't upgrade or repair.
- danielktdoranie 5y agoPretty God damn impressive. I have a MacBook Air w/ the M1 and 16GB and it's more computer than I need for my work flows. Work gave me a MacBook Pro 16" M1 Max w/ a 10-Core CPU, 32-Core GPU, 64GB Unified Memory... it is a monster. Intel's got a lot of work to do to catch up. I think the only way Intel will catch up is to completely embrace RISC-V
- tough 5y agoI'm waiting for the MK Ultra
- spacexsucks 5y ago
- birthday 5y agoOK Microsoft, it's time to get started with Visual Studio ARM support. We need to be able to run it properly in a Windows ARM VM on the M1 chips!
- visionscaper 5y agoI’m wondering what this all means for the upcoming Mac Pro. Apple mentioned that the M1 Ultra is the last member of the M1 family. So how is the Mac Pro going to scale? Will Apple enable “traditional” scaling by allowing multiple M1 Ultra chips to be combined in one system? Or what? Further, how will an Apple Silicon based Mac Pro be made expandable; something that has been a corner stone feature of Mac Pros in the past?
- ece 5y agoCredit to Apple for making a big APU, literally the biggest possible (AFAICT) on the most advanced node with the M1 Max, and now M1 Ultra. Maybe UltraFusion can be scaled up further, TBD, I think. Hopefully Intel/AMD/Nvidia can step up their game here as well.