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it has a RTX 3090 level GPU, how is Nvidia that bad? at 200watts less? that's insane... why does Apple not just produce discrete GPU with 200watts more power an

it has a RTX 3090 level GPU, how is Nvidia that bad? at 200watts less? that's insane... why does Apple not just produce discrete GPU with 200watts more power and just straight up destroy the GPU market?

bredren 5y ago
Unless the Max Pro is sunsetting or pausing the Max Pro, WWDC must produce the kind of GPU power to upend NVIDIA’s dominance.
Flankk 5y ago
They don't want to destroy the GPU market. They want to destroy the PC market. The gap is only going to widen now that they're on the new architecture. I'm sure AMD has more up their sleeve though. Who said Moore's law is dead?
vietvu 5y ago
I think the sweet point in Apple SoC is now they control both CPU, GPU and memory so they can optimize the price. If they make a discrete GPU, the margin will not be that high and will be less attractive.
neogodless 5y ago
They would have to dedicate a software team to writing drivers so you could run games on it. They don't value gaming though.
- stonith 5y ago
  And that's assuming their "GPU" is actually performant in those scenarios. All the examples they post are for GPGPU, but how does something like Unreal perform?
kondro 5y ago
Some of the fastest memory available for the entire system with zero-copy to the GPU. A lot of what a discrete GPU needs to do is move bits backwards and forwards with the main CPU/RAM.
GeekyBear 5y ago
The GPU is nice, but software needs to support Metal and be ARM native before it will run at full speed.
Teknoman117 5y ago
I'd take the RTX 3090 comparisons with a huge grain of salt for the moment. First of all, Apple's performance comparisons are against the mobile Nvidia cards, not the desktop ones. For example, the M1 Max comparisons with the "RTX 3080" were against the 100W mobile part, not the 320W desktop part. The mobile version is about 40% slower than the desktop one (something that I do find irritating about Nvidia's marketing). The desktop gaming cards are typically trading power consumption for performance. They're clocked well beyond the optimal efficiency point to squeeze everything possible out of them. Cutting the power target in half may only cost you 20% of your performance. Another thing to note is that Nvidia pretty much holds all the high-efficiency binned dies for the enterprise cards. In terms of GPGPU, the data center cards are nearly twice the performance per watt of the consumer cards by going wider and dropping the clock rate. Small edit: The best benchmarks I could find suggested that the M1 Max was drawing ~105 watts with the GPU under under a large synthetic load and doing about 10 TFLOP/s of FP32. Let's assume the M1 Ultra is exactly double this and can do 20 TFLOP/s at 200 watts. The Nvidia A100 GPUs are the same performance but at 250 watts. The RTX 3090 is upwards of 36 TFLOP/s but approaching 400W of power draw.
- AlphaSite 5y ago
  Aren’t the datacenter GPUs a totally different arch these days?
  - Teknoman117 5y ago
    Not really. They just fuse parts of the chip off.
- jointpdf 5y ago
  By comparison, the fastest supercomputer in the year 2000 was ASCI White, which did 4.9 TFLOP/s. It cost $168M in 2020 dollars, took up 12,000 sqft, weighed 106 tons, and used 3 megawatts (+ another 3MW for cooling... = 6,000,000 watts). Granted, it had 6TB of memory and 160TB storage...but with 7,000 disk drives. (https://www.top500.org/resources/top-systems/asci-white-lawrence-livermore-national-laboratory/ https://www.top500.org/resources/top-systems/asci-white-lawr...) The M1 Max itself is a the size of a postage stamp, 10 TFLOP/s, costs ~$200 to make, and uses ~100 watts (= a single incandescent lightbulb). Completely bananas.
viktorcode 5y ago
Short answer: immediate mode architecture versus tile-based deferred rendering architecture. The latter is designed for power saving. It's not apples to apples comparison; to get the most out of each of those two you'll have to write two different rendering paths in code.

bredren 5y ago

Unless the Max Pro is sunsetting or pausing the Max Pro, WWDC must produce the kind of GPU power to upend NVIDIA’s dominance.

Flankk 5y ago

They don't want to destroy the GPU market. They want to destroy the PC market. The gap is only going to widen now that they're on the new architecture. I'm sure AMD has more up their sleeve though. Who said Moore's law is dead?

vietvu 5y ago

I think the sweet point in Apple SoC is now they control both CPU, GPU and memory so they can optimize the price. If they make a discrete GPU, the margin will not be that high and will be less attractive.

neogodless 5y ago

They would have to dedicate a software team to writing drivers so you could run games on it. They don't value gaming though.

stonith 5y ago
And that's assuming their "GPU" is actually performant in those scenarios. All the examples they post are for GPGPU, but how does something like Unreal perform?

kondro 5y ago

Some of the fastest memory available for the entire system with zero-copy to the GPU. A lot of what a discrete GPU needs to do is move bits backwards and forwards with the main CPU/RAM.

GeekyBear 5y ago

The GPU is nice, but software needs to support Metal and be ARM native before it will run at full speed.

Teknoman117 5y ago

I'd take the RTX 3090 comparisons with a huge grain of salt for the moment. First of all, Apple's performance comparisons are against the mobile Nvidia cards, not the desktop ones. For example, the M1 Max comparisons with the "RTX 3080" were against the 100W mobile part, not the 320W desktop part. The mobile version is about 40% slower than the desktop one (something that I do find irritating about Nvidia's marketing). The desktop gaming cards are typically trading power consumption for performance. They're clocked well beyond the optimal efficiency point to squeeze everything possible out of them. Cutting the power target in half may only cost you 20% of your performance. Another thing to note is that Nvidia pretty much holds all the high-efficiency binned dies for the enterprise cards. In terms of GPGPU, the data center cards are nearly twice the performance per watt of the consumer cards by going wider and dropping the clock rate. Small edit: The best benchmarks I could find suggested that the M1 Max was drawing ~105 watts with the GPU under under a large synthetic load and doing about 10 TFLOP/s of FP32. Let's assume the M1 Ultra is exactly double this and can do 20 TFLOP/s at 200 watts. The Nvidia A100 GPUs are the same performance but at 250 watts. The RTX 3090 is upwards of 36 TFLOP/s but approaching 400W of power draw.

AlphaSite 5y ago
Aren’t the datacenter GPUs a totally different arch these days?
- Teknoman117 5y ago
  Not really. They just fuse parts of the chip off.
jointpdf 5y ago
By comparison, the fastest supercomputer in the year 2000 was ASCI White, which did 4.9 TFLOP/s. It cost $168M in 2020 dollars, took up 12,000 sqft, weighed 106 tons, and used 3 megawatts (+ another 3MW for cooling... = 6,000,000 watts). Granted, it had 6TB of memory and 160TB storage...but with 7,000 disk drives. (https://www.top500.org/resources/top-systems/asci-white-lawrence-livermore-national-laboratory/ https://www.top500.org/resources/top-systems/asci-white-lawr...) The M1 Max itself is a the size of a postage stamp, 10 TFLOP/s, costs ~$200 to make, and uses ~100 watts (= a single incandescent lightbulb). Completely bananas.

viktorcode 5y ago

Short answer: immediate mode architecture versus tile-based deferred rendering architecture. The latter is designed for power saving. It's not apples to apples comparison; to get the most out of each of those two you'll have to write two different rendering paths in code.