16 ms·

Apple M1 Ultra Meanings and Consequences

199 points by carlycue 5y ago

sebastianconcpt 5y ago
Crayne’s Law: All computers wait at the same speed
pcurve 5y ago
The author Jean-Louis Gassée was the head of BeOS, a modern multi threaded OS that Apple almost chose over Nextstep
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Pardon me but even as a person who developed a few toy applications for BeOS back in the 90s, what about it could have been described as "modern", then or now? Certainly today, 25 years after the fact, it doesn't feel like an OS written partially in C++, that had a few SMP tricks but barely any working networking, is modern. Even at the time, its modernity was in question compared to even Windows NT.
  - ianai 5y ago
    I liked the GUI. It also booted incredibly fast compared to windows at the time. I remember the GUI being responsive and laid out in a way I wished Windows was at the time. I remember reading about the prospects for BeOS 5 menus later. They were going to have a ribbon of color follow your menu selections through drop downs. I forget the look since it’s been so long, but it was a cool idea. Would have made drill downs easier to follow. Notably, modern OSes can be pretty finicky about menu drill downs and outright user hostile. It’s pretty easy to lose an entire drill down by moving the mouse a couple pixels one or another way too far, for instance. Mobile UI of course is amongst the most limited interfaces. We’ve gone backwards a lot in ways on mobile. It also seems mobile may be steering people away from certain careers by simply being good enough to ignore learning things like touch typing, Linux/foss, or hobbies that lead to tech careers. (Not sure how much sense this last point makes-just spreading to general trends I’ve heard or seen.) Edit-maybe I’d say BeOS had a certain polish that seems lacking even in todays FOSS GUIs/OSes but especially back then.
    - User23 5y ago
      Being able to play 8 quicktime movies smoothly at once on a PPC 603 while the UI remained responsive was pretty impressive back in 1997.
    - KerrAvon 5y ago
      > Notably, modern OSes can be pretty finicky about menu drill downs and outright user hostile. It’s pretty easy to lose an entire drill down by moving the mouse a couple pixels one or another way too far, for instance. The Mac basically solved this problem in 1986 when Apple first introduced hierarchical menus. To make it work, the UI layer has to be able to avoid strict hit testing of the mouse cursor during menu tracking, which I would conjecture is probably difficult in some environments.
  - Synaesthesia 5y ago
    The indexed and searchable file system was pretty cool
  - rayiner 5y ago
    It still holds up pretty well. I’ll take a multi-threaded C++ GUI toolkit over Electron any day.
    - Guillaume86 5y ago
      Electron has become the Godwin point of software performance discussions.
      - xyzzyz 5y ago
        Considering how everyone called everyone a Nazi over past 5 years, I think it's to safe to say that the Godwin's Law belongs to an era of internet that has expired.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - KerrAvon 5y ago
    You’ve got to be kidding. The state of the art for the vast majority of desktop computer users was classic Mac OS and Windows 9x. Did you never see the BeOS demos where they yanked the plug out of the wall while doing heavy filesystem operations and booted straight back up without significant data loss? I don’t remember if NTFS existed back then, but most people wouldn’t use NT and successors until the turn of the century. There were gaping holes in functionality, but BeOS was a revelation at the time.
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      NTFS came out years before BeFS and had journaling from day 1. At the time that people were experimenting with BeOS there were already millions of users of Windows NT. Even Windows NT 3.1 for workstations sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Be's all time cumulative net revenues were less than $5 million.
  - wmf 5y ago
    At the time there was an idea that normal PCs could never afford to run "professional" OSes like NT, Unix, or NeXTSTEP and thus BeOS was only competing with "PC" OSes like classic MacOS, Windows 95, or OS/2. In retrospect this was wrong, although it did take until 2001-2003 for real OSes to make their way to the mainstream.
    - elzbardico 5y ago
      Exactly, around 98 I ran Windows NT 4.0 at work, in a very expensive Pentium II with plenty of memory (I guess 64MB at the time). At home in my personal machine with an older AMD K-5 and only 16MB (another guess) Windows NT was not very usable, although it was way more stable than windows 95. And nevermind the price difference.
- JeanMeche 5y ago
  He also was the head of Apple France.
- Hayvok 5y ago
  JLG also worked at Apple through the 80s. Ran the Mac team and a few other groups.
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 5y ago
>A slightly orthogonal thought: because every word, every image of Apple Events is carefully vetted, one had to notice all six developers brought up to discuss the Mac Studio and Mac Ultra benefits inter work were women. Well yes, the event was on March 8, International Women's Day.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  That was a truly bizarre segue. I wonder what emotions or thoughts he was hoping to inspire with that sentence.
  - katbyte 5y ago
    - flumpcakes 5y ago
      That's an extremely unfriendly thing to jump to. There was nothing in the text to suggest that. I also noticed that every developer was from one gender and even commented to my partner at the time, at which point I remembered it was international women's day and perhaps this was Apple showing their support in an unvoiced/non-bombastic way. Does this make me a misogynist? For noticing something?
      - dymk 5y ago
        At minimum, it gives you a taste of what it feels like to be a woman in tech, and everybody around you is male.
        flumpcakes 5y ago
        I don't need a "taste". I have basic empathy for other human beings, regardless of gender.
        5y ago
bklyn11201 5y ago
> "which points to the problem I’d have if I wanted to update my own five-year old iMac, I’d need to jettison a perfectly good display in order to move to an Apple Silicon CPU." Is it impossible to use the 27" iMac as a display monitor for the new Mac Studio?
- auggierose 5y ago
  It's impossible to use it as a display for anything than itself.
- newsclues 5y ago
  Target display mode exists but it’s compatibility support could be improved.
- tl 5y ago
  Target Display Mode which turns iMacs into monitors is not supported on newer iMacs (anything post 2015): https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204592 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204592
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    This sounds terrible for the consumers and for the environment as once the computer inside dies or is obsolete, you have to throw away a perfectly good display that could have a second life as an external monitor plugged into a more modern system since display technology doesn't go outdated as fast as computing.
    - Forgeties79 5y ago
      As someone who finally bit the bullet and scrapped/curbed 2 old iMacs, yeah. It hurt a lot. Perfectly good, well-calibrated 21.5” and 27” monitors just reduced to paper weights. Plucked the ram/HDD’s and sent them on their way. I looked into every possible option for them. Such a waste.
      - 5y ago
formerly_proven 5y ago
> Second, the recourse to two M1 Max chips fused into a M1 Ultra means TSMC’s 5 nm process has reached its upper limit. M1 Max is ~20x22 mm (~430 mm²), double this, even without some of the interconnect die space, doesn't fit into the reticle anyway.
- MikusR 5y ago
  Cerebras is 46225 mm²
  - _ph_ 5y ago
    That is made in a multi-step process, as far as I understand its design, they made the point of designing it from a completely repetitive structure which is the size of one step.
  - jecel 5y ago
    Among the issues that Cerebras had to overcome was how to connect tiles on a wafer where each tile has to be smaller than a reticle. In normal chips you have a gap on all sides where the diamond saw will cut the wafer into individual dies. Having wires cross that gap requires non standard processing. And the tiles themselves would still be limited to a single reticle (under 35mm on a side), so a multi-reticle M1 would not be easy to design.
allie1 5y ago
Means MacabookPro m1max orders will get even more delayed
- meepmorp 5y ago
  Or replaced with orders for Studios. I'm not in the market for a laptop, but if I were getting a computer before last week, I probably would've gotten an m1max MBP because I always want more memory. Now, I've got a desktop option.
- kaladin_1 5y ago
  The delays are bad enough at the moment, it should not get worse pls. Some are yet to receive orders placed since January for the 2021 MBP. Especially for anything beyond the base model. I wonder if they have the capacity to serve the current one going on Sales this week.
nicoburns 5y ago
> It also means TSMC’s 3 nm process isn’t ready, probably not shipping until late 2022. Apple, by virtue of their tight partnership with TSMC has known about and taken precautions against the 3 nm schedule, hence the initially undisclosed M1 Max UltraFusion design wrinkle, likely an early 2021 decision. I find it hard to believe that this was a last-minute decision. Rather, I think this pattern of a new core design (using a new process if there is one) releases first for the smallest devices (iPhones), and the gradually moves its way up the lineup all the way up the Ultra before the cycle repeats with a new generation is likely Apple's new strategy going forwards. My understanding is that this is pretty much what Intel and AMD do too (releasing their smaller dies on new processes first) and that this is a general strategy for dealing with poorer yield number on new process nodes. The idea that Apple would ever have considered releasing their biggest chip as the first chip on a new node seems far-fetched to me.
- dom96 5y ago
  Side question but I'm curious if anyone knows, where are we heading with this constant decrease in nm for chip manufacturing processes? When will we hit a wall and where will gains in performance come from then?
  - monocasa 5y ago
    Like most curves that looked like exponentials initially, Moore's law turned out to be an s curve. We're already on the top half of that curve where gains are increasingly more difficult and increasingly spread out over time. There's still a more or less direct road map for another five or so full nodes, and we'll probably come up with some cute way to increase density in other ways.
  - barbacoa 5y ago
    >When will we hit a wall and where will gains in performance come from then? nm notation used to mean the width of the smallest feature that could be made. Even today there are processes such as atomic layer deposition (ALD) that allows singular atom thick features. The difference between nodes now are in shrinking macro features, you don't necessarily make them smaller, more important is density. This is currently done with 3d transistors (finfet) and perhaps in the future going full vertical. When all other optimization have been exhausted it's likely to see multiple layers of stacked transistors simulator to what they are doing with NAND memory chips. Eventually even that will hit a wall due to thermal limitations. Beyond that people have proposed using carbonnano tube transistors. That tech is very early but has been proved to function in labs. If we ever figure out how to manufacture carbon nanotubes chips, it will be truly revolutionary; you could expect at least another 50 years of semiconductor innovation.
AltruisticGapHN 5y ago
I wonder how usable those new Apple displays will be with PCs or Linux - as they add more and more builtin chips and software. I have an old 27" LED Cinema which I used with a PC for many many years, and then with Ubuntu native... and now back to the mac on a Mac Mini. I'm ithcing to replace it eventually with its "double pixel density" big brother, which is essentially what this new Studio Display is (exactly double of 2560x1440). Personally I love the glass pane, and I really dislike those "anti glare" bubbly/grainy coatings I've seen on PC displays.
- fuzzy2 5y ago
  There’s an article[1] on The Verge where an Apple spokesperson talks about this. Apparently, you can use the camera (without Center Stage) and the display. That's it. No 3D audio, no True Tone, no updates. Of course, the PC would need an appropriate USB-C connector with support for 5K resolution. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/9/22969789/apple-studio-display-windows-pc-compatibility-camera-5k-thunderbolt https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/9/22969789/apple-studio-disp...
  - monitron 5y ago
    Nice, that's good enough for me. Now if only I could find a box with a button on it to switch the monitor between two or three computers, at full resolution, retaining Power Delivery and attached USB devices. I'd buy one right now.
    - kllrnohj 5y ago
      Why not just pick up the LG 5k or any number of 4k displays that are cheaper (and better) then the apple 27" in the case though? This new Studio 27" isn't really a good display on its own. It's an 8 year old panel and is missing a host of modern display upgrades like higher refresh rates, variable refresh rates, HDR, or local dimming
      - holmium 5y ago
        There is only one other monitor on the market with the pixel density and screen size equal to or greater than the Studio 27", eight year old panel or not.[0] If you want high PPI, right now, you get this, or you buy the 16:9, 60Hz 8K 32" Dell monitor and pray you can get the dual DP cables to work with your setup. Unfortunately, Apple no longer sells the LG Ultrafine 5K [1], and no one knows if LG is even going to restock them.[2] So, you'll have to find one used, and you'll have to hope that LG continues to service this incredibly flaky series of monitors when you inevitably run into an issue. On the flip side, if you don't care about the pixel density, you could have bought any of the low res gaming monitors, or 4k 28" monitors, or whatever other ultrawide, low PPI monstrosity the market has coughed up in the past eight years. They've been waiting this long for a reason. You are stuck choosing between those modern features you listed and a >200ppi display. That is the state of the market right now. Until Apple solves this issue and charges you like $3,000 for the privilege later this year.[3] ---------- [0] https://pixensity.com/list/desktop/ https://pixensity.com/list/desktop/ [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2022/03/12/apple-lg-ultrafine-5k-display/ https://www.macrumors.com/2022/03/12/apple-lg-ultrafine-5k-d... [2] https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-27md5kl-b-5k-uhd-led-monitor https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-27md5kl-b-5k-uhd-led-monit... [3] https://www.macrumors.com/2022/03/10/studio-display-pro-launch-in-june/ https://www.macrumors.com/2022/03/10/studio-display-pro-laun...
shantara 5y ago
>Here 5 nm and 3 nm refer to the size in nanometers, billionths of meter, of circuit elements used to build chips Not this again. They don't mean anything except for being purely marketing designations
- monocasa 5y ago
  Sort of. Foundaries can normally point to some real world metric for their Nnm node name. But because they pick different metrics it's not useful for comparing between nodes/foundaries hence why people say it doesn't mean anything practical.
- zamalek 5y ago
  Within the same foundry, they are comparable. It's just a decrementing version number, though.
- sliken 5y ago
  Sort of, yes you can't compare across fabs. But TSMC 3nm allows more transistors per square mm than TSMC 5nm.
chrisoverzero 5y ago
>In passing, we’ll note there is Mac Studio version sporting a single M1 Max chip that happens to weigh 2 pounds less, most likely the result of a smaller power supply. This article was published on 13 March. It's been known for 5 days (as of the time of this comment) that the difference in weight is due to the Ultra variant's using a copper heat sink, as opposed to an aluminum one. The whole article has this kind of feeling of off-the-cuff, underinformed pontification, and I don't think it's a very good one.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  - dang 5y ago
    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? We ban accounts that do that repeatedly. You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly, and I don't want to ban you again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - datavirtue 5y ago
      How long is the ban for?
      - dang 5y ago
        Which ban are you asking about?
- yborg 5y ago
  I kind of had a similar impression, but Jean-Louis is kind of an elder statesman in the industry from his time at Apple. I actually find it heartening that a guy in his mid-70s and long out of the industry still follows it from a technical standpoint even at this level.
  - 5y ago
rwmj 5y ago
How do you connect 10,000 signals between two microscopically tiny dies reliably?
- Synaesthesia 5y ago
  With a custom chip interconnect which has its wires made with lithography
- cjensen 5y ago
  The two dies and interconnect are all part of the same silicon. In the chiplets used by AMD and many others, they use separate CPU dies with literal wires between them. This replaced the wires with hard silicon. Disadvantage of this technique is yields will be worse because the individual component is bigger, and this is limited to combining exactly two chips because it's not a ring-bus design.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    This is false. Apple’s M1 Ultra uses an interposer to connect two chips.
  - u320 5y ago
    No, this is a multichip design, Apple was clear about that. And you don't make wires out of silicon.
- colejohnson66 5y ago
  Assuming they're on different dies, it would be the same way they connect the thousand or so pins (of an FPGA or CPU) from the die to the BGA/PGA/LGA package: interposers with wires whose widths are in the nanometer range
- hajile 5y ago
  Same way AMD did it with their HBM GPUs. There's was 4K wires, but once you've moved to etching the wires with lithography, even millions of wires wouldn't be impossible.
genmon 5y ago
I don't get this: > Second, the recourse to two M1 Max chips fused into a M1 Ultra means TSMC’s 5 nm process has reached its upper limit. It also means TSMC’s 3 nm process isn’t ready, probably not shipping until late 2022. Apple, by virtue of their tight partnership with TSMC has known about and taken precautions against the 3 nm schedule, hence the initially undisclosed M1 Max UltraFusion design wrinkle, likely an early 2021 decision. "recourse"... "design wrinkle"... wouldn't something like UltraFusion be an architectural goal at the outset, rather than something grafted on later? Feels pretty fundamental. I have a vague memory that AMD has/had something similar -- the idea what their entire range would be the same basic core, fused together into larger and larger configurations. Seems like a smart move to concentrate engineering effort. But chip design not even slightly my area.
- rayiner 5y ago
  Depends on what the UltraFusion interconnect is. Ganging up chips as am unplanned stop-gap isn’t unheard of (e.g. the ATI Rage Fury Max). But it’s much harder to do when you’re talking about grafting on a cache coherent interconnect. If they’re using something off the shelf like CXL maybe it wasn’t planned from the outset.
  - monocasa 5y ago
    It wasn't unplanned. The work by marcan on asahi Linux revealed support for multi die configurations baked into the M1 Max. > While working on AIC2 we discovered an interesting feature… while macOS only uses one set of IRQ control registers, there was indeed a full second set, unused and apparently unconnected to any hardware. Poking around, we found that it was indeed a fully working second half of the interrupt controller, and that interrupts delivered from it popped up with a magic “1” in a field of the event number, which had always been “0” previously. Yes, this is the much-rumored multi-die support. The M1 Max SoC has, by all appearances, been designed to support products with two of them in a multi-die module. While no such products exist yet, we’re introducing multi-die support to our AIC2 driver ahead of time. If we get lucky and there are no critical bugs, that should mean that Linux just works on those new 2-die machines, once they are released! https://asahilinux.org/2021/12/progress-report-oct-nov-2021/ https://asahilinux.org/2021/12/progress-report-oct-nov-2021/
codeflo 5y ago
Multiple dies integrated with an interconnect on a single chip is how you build big processors these days. AMD has been doing the same thing for years, and I’m sure the largest M2 will as well. What I find interesting is that there’s no desktop Mac with an M1 Pro, leaving a gap between the entry-level M1 in the Mac mini, and the Mac Studio with its M1 Max. For those who might not remember the full lineup: the M1 Pro and M1 Max have the same CPU part, the main difference is the number of GPU cores. For many CPU-bound applications, the Pro is all you need. I wonder if this is an intentional strategy to sell the more expensive product or if it’s supply related.
- NhanH 5y ago
  There is probably an updated mac mini with m1 pro and m1 max soon alongside the mac pro.
  - microtonal 5y ago
    Why would anyone buy the baseline Mac Studio if there was a Mac Mini with the M1 Max (or even M1 Pro)?
    - klausa 5y ago
      I don't think there'll be a Mini with a Max, for exactly the reason you mentioned, but going from Pro to Max gets you more RAM, more I/O, more GPU, and more displays controller, if any of those are things you care about.
- hajile 5y ago
  I'd guess that there's a market for an iMac with an M1/M2 Pro chip.
ramesh31 5y ago
I'm not sure how Intel can ever compete in the consumer laptop market again. Apple could easily produce a knocked down M1 Macbook base model for ~$599, at which point all but the low end Chromebook market goes to them.
- kaladin_1 5y ago
  Well, with the pocket size of Intel, I would assume that some sort of serious research would be going on at the moment to maintain their dominance in that market. They would fight Apple in this. They also have AMD to fight for the non-M1 chip market... For a company used to enjoying dominance they have a lot of work to do to remain at the top.
  - faeriechangling 5y ago
    Intel at this point is famous for blowing tons of R&D budget with little to show for it. I think the better question is if Intel can successfully eject its incompetent managers from the company.
- kayoone 5y ago
  i don't think Apple is particularly interested in the low end Chromebook market. It has also been largely replaced by tablets and phablets and is pretty niche nowadays.
  - ramesh31 5y ago
    >i don't think Apple is particularly interested in the low end Chromebook market. It has also been largely replaced by tablets and phablets and is pretty niche nowadays. Kind of my point though; the low end isn't even worth it for PC manufacturers anymore. And by the time you get to a ~$600 laptop, you can have a cheap M1 device with 10x the performance/watt. The new M1 iPad Air starts at $700, and absolutely blows any existing Intel laptop out of the water, short of a desktop replacement gaming rig with discrete GPU.
- simonh 5y ago
  It'll never happen, far too many people that would otherwise buy a $1000 laptop would buy a $600 one instead. Why give up that $400?
nickcw 5y ago
Amdahal's Law says hello. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law If we keep scaling up number of processors rather than clock speed, what is going to be the maximum number useful cores in a laptop or desktop? 20? 100? 1000? At some point adding more cores is going to make no difference to the user experience, but the way we are going we'll be at 1000 cores in about a decade so we better start thinking about it now. Or to put it another way, what normal workloads will load up all the cores in the new M1 chip? Being a software developer, compiling things is the obvious choice, except when you come to that rather serial linking phase at the end of the compile job. Already my incremental Go compiles are completely dominated by the linking phase. There are a few easy to parallelise tasks, mostly to do with media (as it says in the article). However a lot of stuff isn't like that. Will 20 cores speed up my web browser? How about Excel? Your average user is going to prefer double the clock rate of your processors to doubling the number of processors. Anyway, I don't want to rain on Apple's parade with these musings - the M1 Ultra is an amazing achievement and it certainly isn't for your average user. I wish I had one in a computer of my choice running Linux!
- zitterbewegung 5y ago
  If I were to make a best case scenario on where multiprocessing , GPU acceleration and the neural engine I would say a iOS App development using a simulator , a container that contains your backend services and the iOS app using ML inference. Training on the M1 Ultra isn’t really worth it.
- kayoone 5y ago
  Well, chrome could certainly use more threads for all your tabs which might make it even more of a resource hog but probably also run faster. Software Engineering will evolve too, like we have seen in game development over the last decade. While 10 years ago most game engines were hardly using let alone optimized for multicore systems, nowadays the modern engines very much benefit from more cores and I guess the modern OSes also benefit from having more threads to put processes on.
- simonh 5y ago
  These pro machines are squarely aimed at creative professionals doing video work and image processing. Of course there are used for a lot of other stuff too, but that's the biggest single use case by long way. The studio name for the new systems was well advised.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
planb 5y ago
> Surprise, Apple announced not an M2 device but a new member of the M1 family, the M1 Ultra. Really this dod not come as a surprise to anyone interested in Apple's chips, it was rumored as "Jade-2C" for a long time. And they were not expected to release a "pro" version of M2 before the standard version for the new MacBook Air neither.
sanguy 5y ago
They have an 8 tile version in internal testing for the next generation Mac Pro workstations. It won't launch until 3nm is ramped up. But that is when it is completely over with Intel, AMD, Nvidia completely.
- neogodless 5y ago
  When you say 8 tile, you mean 8 M1 Max CPUs glued together? So presumably $16,000 (or greater) systems? In what way does this eliminate competitors from the market? Also is Apple doing something that is literally impossible for anyone else to do? And will the use cases that Apple currently does not cover cease to exist?
- faeriechangling 5y ago
  Having impressive or even superior hardware does not mean that the ecosystems built up around Intel/AMD/Nvidia disappear over night. Wake me up when Metal has the same libraries that Cuda does, etc. etc.
- kllrnohj 5y ago
  > But that is when it is completely over with Intel, AMD, Nvidia completely. AMD is already shipping on 9 tile SoCs, and Intel is doing tile stuff, too. Unless Apple gets back into the server game, and gets a lot more serious about MacOS, pretty much nothing Apple does makes it "game over" for Intel, AMD, or Nvidia. Especially not Nvidia who is still walking all over every GPU coming out of Apple so far, and is so ridiculously far ahead in the HPC & AI compute games it's not even funny.
- CamelRocketFish 5y ago
  Source?
starwind 5y ago
Am I the only one bothered that the M1 "Max" was apparently not the best Apple could do? In what would is the "Ultra" version of something better than the "Max" version? MAXIMUM MEANS AS GREAT AS POSSIBLE!!! Anyone? Just me? ...ok
- jmull 5y ago
  You're never going to make it in marketing, my friend.
- wmf 5y ago
  Then you won't want to know that USB "full speed" is slower than "superspeed".
  - layer8 5y ago
    Also, Full HD is lesser than Ultra HD. They should have called it Overflowing HD.
    - jayd16 5y ago
      I think Full HD was really just to separate from 720p. So if you consider "HD" to mean 1080p and UltraHD to mean 4k, its like saying a "Full v6" and a "v8" or something. For whatever reason it made just enough sense to never bothered me too much.
- layer8 5y ago
  > MAXIMUM MEANS AS GREAT AS POSSIBLE!!! And “ultra” means “beyond” [great]. It enters the next realm. :)
- r00fus 5y ago
  I take it you never played Steet Fighter in the 90s.
- jayd16 5y ago
  fine print was local* maximum, I guess.
sharikous 5y ago
> the M1 Ultra isn’t faster than an entry-level M1 chip [...] the clock speed associated with the 5nm process common to all M1 chip hasn’t changed for the M1 Ultra It's telling that almost the only "bad" thing that you can say about the M1 Ultra is that its single threaded performance is on par with the M1, whose performance is great anyway. Apple pumped up the integration, cache size, pipeline length, branch prediction, power efficiency and what not. I think that in terms of clock frequency increase that road is closed, and has been for 15 years already. Realistically the only disadvantage I heard about Apple Silicon is that the GPU performance is not quite as earth-shattering as they claim.
- kllrnohj 5y ago
  > I think that in terms of clock frequency increase that road is closed, and has been for 15 years already. Possibly, except M1 runs at relatively low clock speeds of around 3.2ghz. This is in no small part how it achieves good power efficiency. It's a bit surprising that a wall powered unit is still capped at this clock speed, although whether that's intentional or just something Apple hasn't gotten around to fixing is TBD. That is, the M1 largely lacks the load-based turbo'ing that modern Intel & AMD CPUs have. So it's "stuck" at whatever it can do on all-cores & max load. This could be intentional, that is Apple may just not ever want to venture into the significantly reduced perf/watt territory of higher clock speeds & turbo complications. Or it could just be an artifact of the mobile heritage, and might be something Apple addresses with the M2, M3, etc...
  - ls612 5y ago
    But for a desktop chip like the M1 Ultra which will always be on wall power I don't see why Apple would be uncomfortable pushing the thermal envelope of the M1 architecture.
  - r00fus 5y ago
    > It's a bit surprising that a wall powered unit is still capped at this clock speed The Intel/x86 mantra that desktops should be allowed to be massively inefficient just to pump up the clock speed fractionally is what's changing. I for one, agree with Apple - 450W beasts aren't really needed. Most workflows can be (or already are) parallelized so multiple cores can demolish what a fast single-thread can tackle.
Maursault 5y ago
So, surprise, the M1 Ultra is 2x M1 Max chips. They've been secretly planning since inception to attach 2 chips together. Why am I so unimpressed? Because connecting 2 chips together is so dang obvious. Because I would have expected Apple to connect 10 of them together in a semi-circle and not only own the desktop and mobile market, but in a truly shocking surprise, release a new Apple server that has 10x the processing power of the next most powerful server running at 1/10th the Wattage, and a new macOS server version with a footprint smaller than iOS that is binary compatible with the whole of linux development.
- kllrnohj 5y ago
  > release a new Apple server that has 10x the processing power of the next most powerful server running at 1/10th the Wattage The power efficiency of M1 is vastly overstated. Reminder here that the M1 Ultra is almost certainly a 200W TDP SoC (since the M1 Max was ~100W, and this is 2x of those...) So 10x M1 Max's would be ~1000W. That's possibly to put in a server chassis, but it's of course also not remotely 1/10th the wattage of existing server CPUs, either, which tend to be in the 250-350w range. And interconnects aren't free, either (or necessarily even cheap). The infinity fabric connecting the dies together on Epyc is like 70w by itself, give or take.
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    >The power efficiency of M1 is vastly overstated. Reminder here that the M1 Ultra is almost certainly a 200W TDP SoC 114 Billion transistors are going to draw some power. An RTX 3090 is 28.3 Billion transistors drawing 350W or so for just the GPU portion of the system.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    The M1 Pro is slightly faster than other CPUs at that ~35W design point, but it doesn't scale up beyond that, or Apple just doesn't care if users can experience its latent scaling abilities, if they exist. I like this chart from "Hardware Unboxed" that puts current Apple, AMD, and Intel CPUs in context: https://imgur.com/PKHelVY https://imgur.com/PKHelVY
GeekyBear 5y ago
The most interesting new thing going on in the M1 Ultra: >combining multiple GPUs in a transparent fashion [is] something of a holy grail of multi-GPU design. It’s a problem that multiple companies have been working on for over a decade, and it would seem that Apple is charting new ground by being the first company to pull it off. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17306/apple-announces-m1-ultra-combining-two-m1-maxes-for-even-more-performance https://www.anandtech.com/show/17306/apple-announces-m1-ultr...
- jayd16 5y ago
  Not that it isn't good for the M1 but is such a setup really something other companies are attempting to pull off? It seems like GPU makers just put more cores on a single die. Does this tech apply to discrete graphics? You can't really connect separate cards with this, right? Are you saying this is a blow to Intel's graphics? Or maybe you're implying it's a way for integrated graphics to become dominant?
ossusermivami 5y ago
> A slightly orthogonal thought: because every word, every image of Apple Events is carefully vetted, one had to notice all six developers brought up to discuss the Mac Studio and Mac Ultra benefits inter work were women. it was international women day on that day, i think it was a nice touch from apple
MichaelRazum 5y ago
Would love if you could run linux on it. That would be really amazing.
- WhyNotHugo 5y ago
  Progress on this front has been going pretty well. It's still not ready for everyday usage (though the people working on porting it might already be using it), but it's way moving a lot faster than one would guess. I'm considering a Mac Mini build machine sometime during 2022, it might be feasible for that. See https://asahilinux.org/2021/12/progress-report-oct-nov-2021/ https://asahilinux.org/2021/12/progress-report-oct-nov-2021/ or follow https://twitter.com/marcan42 https://twitter.com/marcan42

199 points by carlycue 5y ago

sebastianconcpt 5y ago

Crayne’s Law: All computers wait at the same speed

pcurve 5y ago

The author Jean-Louis Gassée was the head of BeOS, a modern multi threaded OS that Apple almost chose over Nextstep

jeffbee 5y ago
Pardon me but even as a person who developed a few toy applications for BeOS back in the 90s, what about it could have been described as "modern", then or now? Certainly today, 25 years after the fact, it doesn't feel like an OS written partially in C++, that had a few SMP tricks but barely any working networking, is modern. Even at the time, its modernity was in question compared to even Windows NT.
- ianai 5y ago
  I liked the GUI. It also booted incredibly fast compared to windows at the time. I remember the GUI being responsive and laid out in a way I wished Windows was at the time. I remember reading about the prospects for BeOS 5 menus later. They were going to have a ribbon of color follow your menu selections through drop downs. I forget the look since it’s been so long, but it was a cool idea. Would have made drill downs easier to follow. Notably, modern OSes can be pretty finicky about menu drill downs and outright user hostile. It’s pretty easy to lose an entire drill down by moving the mouse a couple pixels one or another way too far, for instance. Mobile UI of course is amongst the most limited interfaces. We’ve gone backwards a lot in ways on mobile. It also seems mobile may be steering people away from certain careers by simply being good enough to ignore learning things like touch typing, Linux/foss, or hobbies that lead to tech careers. (Not sure how much sense this last point makes-just spreading to general trends I’ve heard or seen.) Edit-maybe I’d say BeOS had a certain polish that seems lacking even in todays FOSS GUIs/OSes but especially back then.
  - User23 5y ago
    Being able to play 8 quicktime movies smoothly at once on a PPC 603 while the UI remained responsive was pretty impressive back in 1997.
  - KerrAvon 5y ago
    > Notably, modern OSes can be pretty finicky about menu drill downs and outright user hostile. It’s pretty easy to lose an entire drill down by moving the mouse a couple pixels one or another way too far, for instance. The Mac basically solved this problem in 1986 when Apple first introduced hierarchical menus. To make it work, the UI layer has to be able to avoid strict hit testing of the mouse cursor during menu tracking, which I would conjecture is probably difficult in some environments.
- Synaesthesia 5y ago
  The indexed and searchable file system was pretty cool
- rayiner 5y ago
  It still holds up pretty well. I’ll take a multi-threaded C++ GUI toolkit over Electron any day.
  - Guillaume86 5y ago
    Electron has become the Godwin point of software performance discussions.
    - xyzzyz 5y ago
      Considering how everyone called everyone a Nazi over past 5 years, I think it's to safe to say that the Godwin's Law belongs to an era of internet that has expired.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- KerrAvon 5y ago
  You’ve got to be kidding. The state of the art for the vast majority of desktop computer users was classic Mac OS and Windows 9x. Did you never see the BeOS demos where they yanked the plug out of the wall while doing heavy filesystem operations and booted straight back up without significant data loss? I don’t remember if NTFS existed back then, but most people wouldn’t use NT and successors until the turn of the century. There were gaping holes in functionality, but BeOS was a revelation at the time.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    NTFS came out years before BeFS and had journaling from day 1. At the time that people were experimenting with BeOS there were already millions of users of Windows NT. Even Windows NT 3.1 for workstations sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Be's all time cumulative net revenues were less than $5 million.
- wmf 5y ago
  At the time there was an idea that normal PCs could never afford to run "professional" OSes like NT, Unix, or NeXTSTEP and thus BeOS was only competing with "PC" OSes like classic MacOS, Windows 95, or OS/2. In retrospect this was wrong, although it did take until 2001-2003 for real OSes to make their way to the mainstream.
  - elzbardico 5y ago
    Exactly, around 98 I ran Windows NT 4.0 at work, in a very expensive Pentium II with plenty of memory (I guess 64MB at the time). At home in my personal machine with an older AMD K-5 and only 16MB (another guess) Windows NT was not very usable, although it was way more stable than windows 95. And nevermind the price difference.
JeanMeche 5y ago
He also was the head of Apple France.
Hayvok 5y ago
JLG also worked at Apple through the 80s. Ran the Mac team and a few other groups.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 5y ago

>A slightly orthogonal thought: because every word, every image of Apple Events is carefully vetted, one had to notice all six developers brought up to discuss the Mac Studio and Mac Ultra benefits inter work were women. Well yes, the event was on March 8, International Women's Day.

notreallyserio 5y ago
That was a truly bizarre segue. I wonder what emotions or thoughts he was hoping to inspire with that sentence.
- katbyte 5y ago
  - flumpcakes 5y ago
    That's an extremely unfriendly thing to jump to. There was nothing in the text to suggest that. I also noticed that every developer was from one gender and even commented to my partner at the time, at which point I remembered it was international women's day and perhaps this was Apple showing their support in an unvoiced/non-bombastic way. Does this make me a misogynist? For noticing something?
    - dymk 5y ago
      At minimum, it gives you a taste of what it feels like to be a woman in tech, and everybody around you is male.
      - flumpcakes 5y ago
        I don't need a "taste". I have basic empathy for other human beings, regardless of gender.
        5y ago

bklyn11201 5y ago

> "which points to the problem I’d have if I wanted to update my own five-year old iMac, I’d need to jettison a perfectly good display in order to move to an Apple Silicon CPU." Is it impossible to use the 27" iMac as a display monitor for the new Mac Studio?

auggierose 5y ago
It's impossible to use it as a display for anything than itself.
newsclues 5y ago
Target display mode exists but it’s compatibility support could be improved.
tl 5y ago
Target Display Mode which turns iMacs into monitors is not supported on newer iMacs (anything post 2015): https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204592 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204592
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  This sounds terrible for the consumers and for the environment as once the computer inside dies or is obsolete, you have to throw away a perfectly good display that could have a second life as an external monitor plugged into a more modern system since display technology doesn't go outdated as fast as computing.
  - Forgeties79 5y ago
    As someone who finally bit the bullet and scrapped/curbed 2 old iMacs, yeah. It hurt a lot. Perfectly good, well-calibrated 21.5” and 27” monitors just reduced to paper weights. Plucked the ram/HDD’s and sent them on their way. I looked into every possible option for them. Such a waste.
    - 5y ago

formerly_proven 5y ago

> Second, the recourse to two M1 Max chips fused into a M1 Ultra means TSMC’s 5 nm process has reached its upper limit. M1 Max is ~20x22 mm (~430 mm²), double this, even without some of the interconnect die space, doesn't fit into the reticle anyway.

MikusR 5y ago
Cerebras is 46225 mm²
- _ph_ 5y ago
  That is made in a multi-step process, as far as I understand its design, they made the point of designing it from a completely repetitive structure which is the size of one step.
- jecel 5y ago
  Among the issues that Cerebras had to overcome was how to connect tiles on a wafer where each tile has to be smaller than a reticle. In normal chips you have a gap on all sides where the diamond saw will cut the wafer into individual dies. Having wires cross that gap requires non standard processing. And the tiles themselves would still be limited to a single reticle (under 35mm on a side), so a multi-reticle M1 would not be easy to design.

allie1 5y ago

Means MacabookPro m1max orders will get even more delayed

meepmorp 5y ago
Or replaced with orders for Studios. I'm not in the market for a laptop, but if I were getting a computer before last week, I probably would've gotten an m1max MBP because I always want more memory. Now, I've got a desktop option.
kaladin_1 5y ago
The delays are bad enough at the moment, it should not get worse pls. Some are yet to receive orders placed since January for the 2021 MBP. Especially for anything beyond the base model. I wonder if they have the capacity to serve the current one going on Sales this week.

nicoburns 5y ago

> It also means TSMC’s 3 nm process isn’t ready, probably not shipping until late 2022. Apple, by virtue of their tight partnership with TSMC has known about and taken precautions against the 3 nm schedule, hence the initially undisclosed M1 Max UltraFusion design wrinkle, likely an early 2021 decision. I find it hard to believe that this was a last-minute decision. Rather, I think this pattern of a new core design (using a new process if there is one) releases first for the smallest devices (iPhones), and the gradually moves its way up the lineup all the way up the Ultra before the cycle repeats with a new generation is likely Apple's new strategy going forwards. My understanding is that this is pretty much what Intel and AMD do too (releasing their smaller dies on new processes first) and that this is a general strategy for dealing with poorer yield number on new process nodes. The idea that Apple would ever have considered releasing their biggest chip as the first chip on a new node seems far-fetched to me.

dom96 5y ago
Side question but I'm curious if anyone knows, where are we heading with this constant decrease in nm for chip manufacturing processes? When will we hit a wall and where will gains in performance come from then?
- monocasa 5y ago
  Like most curves that looked like exponentials initially, Moore's law turned out to be an s curve. We're already on the top half of that curve where gains are increasingly more difficult and increasingly spread out over time. There's still a more or less direct road map for another five or so full nodes, and we'll probably come up with some cute way to increase density in other ways.
- barbacoa 5y ago
  >When will we hit a wall and where will gains in performance come from then? nm notation used to mean the width of the smallest feature that could be made. Even today there are processes such as atomic layer deposition (ALD) that allows singular atom thick features. The difference between nodes now are in shrinking macro features, you don't necessarily make them smaller, more important is density. This is currently done with 3d transistors (finfet) and perhaps in the future going full vertical. When all other optimization have been exhausted it's likely to see multiple layers of stacked transistors simulator to what they are doing with NAND memory chips. Eventually even that will hit a wall due to thermal limitations. Beyond that people have proposed using carbonnano tube transistors. That tech is very early but has been proved to function in labs. If we ever figure out how to manufacture carbon nanotubes chips, it will be truly revolutionary; you could expect at least another 50 years of semiconductor innovation.

AltruisticGapHN 5y ago

I wonder how usable those new Apple displays will be with PCs or Linux - as they add more and more builtin chips and software. I have an old 27" LED Cinema which I used with a PC for many many years, and then with Ubuntu native... and now back to the mac on a Mac Mini. I'm ithcing to replace it eventually with its "double pixel density" big brother, which is essentially what this new Studio Display is (exactly double of 2560x1440). Personally I love the glass pane, and I really dislike those "anti glare" bubbly/grainy coatings I've seen on PC displays.

fuzzy2 5y ago
There’s an article[1] on The Verge where an Apple spokesperson talks about this. Apparently, you can use the camera (without Center Stage) and the display. That's it. No 3D audio, no True Tone, no updates. Of course, the PC would need an appropriate USB-C connector with support for 5K resolution. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/9/22969789/apple-studio-display-windows-pc-compatibility-camera-5k-thunderbolt https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/9/22969789/apple-studio-disp...
- monitron 5y ago
  Nice, that's good enough for me. Now if only I could find a box with a button on it to switch the monitor between two or three computers, at full resolution, retaining Power Delivery and attached USB devices. I'd buy one right now.
  - kllrnohj 5y ago
    Why not just pick up the LG 5k or any number of 4k displays that are cheaper (and better) then the apple 27" in the case though? This new Studio 27" isn't really a good display on its own. It's an 8 year old panel and is missing a host of modern display upgrades like higher refresh rates, variable refresh rates, HDR, or local dimming
    - holmium 5y ago
      There is only one other monitor on the market with the pixel density and screen size equal to or greater than the Studio 27", eight year old panel or not.[0] If you want high PPI, right now, you get this, or you buy the 16:9, 60Hz 8K 32" Dell monitor and pray you can get the dual DP cables to work with your setup. Unfortunately, Apple no longer sells the LG Ultrafine 5K [1], and no one knows if LG is even going to restock them.[2] So, you'll have to find one used, and you'll have to hope that LG continues to service this incredibly flaky series of monitors when you inevitably run into an issue. On the flip side, if you don't care about the pixel density, you could have bought any of the low res gaming monitors, or 4k 28" monitors, or whatever other ultrawide, low PPI monstrosity the market has coughed up in the past eight years. They've been waiting this long for a reason. You are stuck choosing between those modern features you listed and a >200ppi display. That is the state of the market right now. Until Apple solves this issue and charges you like $3,000 for the privilege later this year.[3] ---------- [0] https://pixensity.com/list/desktop/ https://pixensity.com/list/desktop/ [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2022/03/12/apple-lg-ultrafine-5k-display/ https://www.macrumors.com/2022/03/12/apple-lg-ultrafine-5k-d... [2] https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-27md5kl-b-5k-uhd-led-monitor https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-27md5kl-b-5k-uhd-led-monit... [3] https://www.macrumors.com/2022/03/10/studio-display-pro-launch-in-june/ https://www.macrumors.com/2022/03/10/studio-display-pro-laun...

shantara 5y ago

>Here 5 nm and 3 nm refer to the size in nanometers, billionths of meter, of circuit elements used to build chips Not this again. They don't mean anything except for being purely marketing designations

monocasa 5y ago
Sort of. Foundaries can normally point to some real world metric for their Nnm node name. But because they pick different metrics it's not useful for comparing between nodes/foundaries hence why people say it doesn't mean anything practical.
zamalek 5y ago
Within the same foundry, they are comparable. It's just a decrementing version number, though.
sliken 5y ago
Sort of, yes you can't compare across fabs. But TSMC 3nm allows more transistors per square mm than TSMC 5nm.

chrisoverzero 5y ago

>In passing, we’ll note there is Mac Studio version sporting a single M1 Max chip that happens to weigh 2 pounds less, most likely the result of a smaller power supply. This article was published on 13 March. It's been known for 5 days (as of the time of this comment) that the difference in weight is due to the Ultra variant's using a copper heat sink, as opposed to an aluminum one. The whole article has this kind of feeling of off-the-cuff, underinformed pontification, and I don't think it's a very good one.

datavirtue 5y ago
- dang 5y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? We ban accounts that do that repeatedly. You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly, and I don't want to ban you again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    How long is the ban for?
    - dang 5y ago
      Which ban are you asking about?
yborg 5y ago
I kind of had a similar impression, but Jean-Louis is kind of an elder statesman in the industry from his time at Apple. I actually find it heartening that a guy in his mid-70s and long out of the industry still follows it from a technical standpoint even at this level.
- 5y ago

rwmj 5y ago

How do you connect 10,000 signals between two microscopically tiny dies reliably?

Synaesthesia 5y ago
With a custom chip interconnect which has its wires made with lithography
cjensen 5y ago
The two dies and interconnect are all part of the same silicon. In the chiplets used by AMD and many others, they use separate CPU dies with literal wires between them. This replaced the wires with hard silicon. Disadvantage of this technique is yields will be worse because the individual component is bigger, and this is limited to combining exactly two chips because it's not a ring-bus design.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  This is false. Apple’s M1 Ultra uses an interposer to connect two chips.
- u320 5y ago
  No, this is a multichip design, Apple was clear about that. And you don't make wires out of silicon.
colejohnson66 5y ago
Assuming they're on different dies, it would be the same way they connect the thousand or so pins (of an FPGA or CPU) from the die to the BGA/PGA/LGA package: interposers with wires whose widths are in the nanometer range
hajile 5y ago
Same way AMD did it with their HBM GPUs. There's was 4K wires, but once you've moved to etching the wires with lithography, even millions of wires wouldn't be impossible.

genmon 5y ago

I don't get this: > Second, the recourse to two M1 Max chips fused into a M1 Ultra means TSMC’s 5 nm process has reached its upper limit. It also means TSMC’s 3 nm process isn’t ready, probably not shipping until late 2022. Apple, by virtue of their tight partnership with TSMC has known about and taken precautions against the 3 nm schedule, hence the initially undisclosed M1 Max UltraFusion design wrinkle, likely an early 2021 decision. "recourse"... "design wrinkle"... wouldn't something like UltraFusion be an architectural goal at the outset, rather than something grafted on later? Feels pretty fundamental. I have a vague memory that AMD has/had something similar -- the idea what their entire range would be the same basic core, fused together into larger and larger configurations. Seems like a smart move to concentrate engineering effort. But chip design not even slightly my area.

rayiner 5y ago
Depends on what the UltraFusion interconnect is. Ganging up chips as am unplanned stop-gap isn’t unheard of (e.g. the ATI Rage Fury Max). But it’s much harder to do when you’re talking about grafting on a cache coherent interconnect. If they’re using something off the shelf like CXL maybe it wasn’t planned from the outset.
- monocasa 5y ago
  It wasn't unplanned. The work by marcan on asahi Linux revealed support for multi die configurations baked into the M1 Max. > While working on AIC2 we discovered an interesting feature… while macOS only uses one set of IRQ control registers, there was indeed a full second set, unused and apparently unconnected to any hardware. Poking around, we found that it was indeed a fully working second half of the interrupt controller, and that interrupts delivered from it popped up with a magic “1” in a field of the event number, which had always been “0” previously. Yes, this is the much-rumored multi-die support. The M1 Max SoC has, by all appearances, been designed to support products with two of them in a multi-die module. While no such products exist yet, we’re introducing multi-die support to our AIC2 driver ahead of time. If we get lucky and there are no critical bugs, that should mean that Linux just works on those new 2-die machines, once they are released! https://asahilinux.org/2021/12/progress-report-oct-nov-2021/ https://asahilinux.org/2021/12/progress-report-oct-nov-2021/

codeflo 5y ago

Multiple dies integrated with an interconnect on a single chip is how you build big processors these days. AMD has been doing the same thing for years, and I’m sure the largest M2 will as well. What I find interesting is that there’s no desktop Mac with an M1 Pro, leaving a gap between the entry-level M1 in the Mac mini, and the Mac Studio with its M1 Max. For those who might not remember the full lineup: the M1 Pro and M1 Max have the same CPU part, the main difference is the number of GPU cores. For many CPU-bound applications, the Pro is all you need. I wonder if this is an intentional strategy to sell the more expensive product or if it’s supply related.

NhanH 5y ago
There is probably an updated mac mini with m1 pro and m1 max soon alongside the mac pro.
- microtonal 5y ago
  Why would anyone buy the baseline Mac Studio if there was a Mac Mini with the M1 Max (or even M1 Pro)?
  - klausa 5y ago
    I don't think there'll be a Mini with a Max, for exactly the reason you mentioned, but going from Pro to Max gets you more RAM, more I/O, more GPU, and more displays controller, if any of those are things you care about.
hajile 5y ago
I'd guess that there's a market for an iMac with an M1/M2 Pro chip.

ramesh31 5y ago

I'm not sure how Intel can ever compete in the consumer laptop market again. Apple could easily produce a knocked down M1 Macbook base model for ~$599, at which point all but the low end Chromebook market goes to them.

kaladin_1 5y ago
Well, with the pocket size of Intel, I would assume that some sort of serious research would be going on at the moment to maintain their dominance in that market. They would fight Apple in this. They also have AMD to fight for the non-M1 chip market... For a company used to enjoying dominance they have a lot of work to do to remain at the top.
- faeriechangling 5y ago
  Intel at this point is famous for blowing tons of R&D budget with little to show for it. I think the better question is if Intel can successfully eject its incompetent managers from the company.
kayoone 5y ago
i don't think Apple is particularly interested in the low end Chromebook market. It has also been largely replaced by tablets and phablets and is pretty niche nowadays.
- ramesh31 5y ago
  >i don't think Apple is particularly interested in the low end Chromebook market. It has also been largely replaced by tablets and phablets and is pretty niche nowadays. Kind of my point though; the low end isn't even worth it for PC manufacturers anymore. And by the time you get to a ~$600 laptop, you can have a cheap M1 device with 10x the performance/watt. The new M1 iPad Air starts at $700, and absolutely blows any existing Intel laptop out of the water, short of a desktop replacement gaming rig with discrete GPU.
simonh 5y ago
It'll never happen, far too many people that would otherwise buy a $1000 laptop would buy a $600 one instead. Why give up that $400?

nickcw 5y ago

Amdahal's Law says hello. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law If we keep scaling up number of processors rather than clock speed, what is going to be the maximum number useful cores in a laptop or desktop? 20? 100? 1000? At some point adding more cores is going to make no difference to the user experience, but the way we are going we'll be at 1000 cores in about a decade so we better start thinking about it now. Or to put it another way, what normal workloads will load up all the cores in the new M1 chip? Being a software developer, compiling things is the obvious choice, except when you come to that rather serial linking phase at the end of the compile job. Already my incremental Go compiles are completely dominated by the linking phase. There are a few easy to parallelise tasks, mostly to do with media (as it says in the article). However a lot of stuff isn't like that. Will 20 cores speed up my web browser? How about Excel? Your average user is going to prefer double the clock rate of your processors to doubling the number of processors. Anyway, I don't want to rain on Apple's parade with these musings - the M1 Ultra is an amazing achievement and it certainly isn't for your average user. I wish I had one in a computer of my choice running Linux!

zitterbewegung 5y ago
If I were to make a best case scenario on where multiprocessing , GPU acceleration and the neural engine I would say a iOS App development using a simulator , a container that contains your backend services and the iOS app using ML inference. Training on the M1 Ultra isn’t really worth it.
kayoone 5y ago
Well, chrome could certainly use more threads for all your tabs which might make it even more of a resource hog but probably also run faster. Software Engineering will evolve too, like we have seen in game development over the last decade. While 10 years ago most game engines were hardly using let alone optimized for multicore systems, nowadays the modern engines very much benefit from more cores and I guess the modern OSes also benefit from having more threads to put processes on.
simonh 5y ago
These pro machines are squarely aimed at creative professionals doing video work and image processing. Of course there are used for a lot of other stuff too, but that's the biggest single use case by long way. The studio name for the new systems was well advised.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

planb 5y ago

> Surprise, Apple announced not an M2 device but a new member of the M1 family, the M1 Ultra. Really this dod not come as a surprise to anyone interested in Apple's chips, it was rumored as "Jade-2C" for a long time. And they were not expected to release a "pro" version of M2 before the standard version for the new MacBook Air neither.

sanguy 5y ago

They have an 8 tile version in internal testing for the next generation Mac Pro workstations. It won't launch until 3nm is ramped up. But that is when it is completely over with Intel, AMD, Nvidia completely.

neogodless 5y ago
When you say 8 tile, you mean 8 M1 Max CPUs glued together? So presumably $16,000 (or greater) systems? In what way does this eliminate competitors from the market? Also is Apple doing something that is literally impossible for anyone else to do? And will the use cases that Apple currently does not cover cease to exist?
faeriechangling 5y ago
Having impressive or even superior hardware does not mean that the ecosystems built up around Intel/AMD/Nvidia disappear over night. Wake me up when Metal has the same libraries that Cuda does, etc. etc.
kllrnohj 5y ago
> But that is when it is completely over with Intel, AMD, Nvidia completely. AMD is already shipping on 9 tile SoCs, and Intel is doing tile stuff, too. Unless Apple gets back into the server game, and gets a lot more serious about MacOS, pretty much nothing Apple does makes it "game over" for Intel, AMD, or Nvidia. Especially not Nvidia who is still walking all over every GPU coming out of Apple so far, and is so ridiculously far ahead in the HPC & AI compute games it's not even funny.
CamelRocketFish 5y ago
Source?

starwind 5y ago

Am I the only one bothered that the M1 "Max" was apparently not the best Apple could do? In what would is the "Ultra" version of something better than the "Max" version? MAXIMUM MEANS AS GREAT AS POSSIBLE!!! Anyone? Just me? ...ok

jmull 5y ago
You're never going to make it in marketing, my friend.
wmf 5y ago
Then you won't want to know that USB "full speed" is slower than "superspeed".
- layer8 5y ago
  Also, Full HD is lesser than Ultra HD. They should have called it Overflowing HD.
  - jayd16 5y ago
    I think Full HD was really just to separate from 720p. So if you consider "HD" to mean 1080p and UltraHD to mean 4k, its like saying a "Full v6" and a "v8" or something. For whatever reason it made just enough sense to never bothered me too much.
layer8 5y ago
> MAXIMUM MEANS AS GREAT AS POSSIBLE!!! And “ultra” means “beyond” [great]. It enters the next realm. :)
r00fus 5y ago
I take it you never played Steet Fighter in the 90s.
jayd16 5y ago
fine print was local* maximum, I guess.

sharikous 5y ago

> the M1 Ultra isn’t faster than an entry-level M1 chip [...] the clock speed associated with the 5nm process common to all M1 chip hasn’t changed for the M1 Ultra It's telling that almost the only "bad" thing that you can say about the M1 Ultra is that its single threaded performance is on par with the M1, whose performance is great anyway. Apple pumped up the integration, cache size, pipeline length, branch prediction, power efficiency and what not. I think that in terms of clock frequency increase that road is closed, and has been for 15 years already. Realistically the only disadvantage I heard about Apple Silicon is that the GPU performance is not quite as earth-shattering as they claim.

kllrnohj 5y ago
> I think that in terms of clock frequency increase that road is closed, and has been for 15 years already. Possibly, except M1 runs at relatively low clock speeds of around 3.2ghz. This is in no small part how it achieves good power efficiency. It's a bit surprising that a wall powered unit is still capped at this clock speed, although whether that's intentional or just something Apple hasn't gotten around to fixing is TBD. That is, the M1 largely lacks the load-based turbo'ing that modern Intel & AMD CPUs have. So it's "stuck" at whatever it can do on all-cores & max load. This could be intentional, that is Apple may just not ever want to venture into the significantly reduced perf/watt territory of higher clock speeds & turbo complications. Or it could just be an artifact of the mobile heritage, and might be something Apple addresses with the M2, M3, etc...
- ls612 5y ago
  But for a desktop chip like the M1 Ultra which will always be on wall power I don't see why Apple would be uncomfortable pushing the thermal envelope of the M1 architecture.
- r00fus 5y ago
  > It's a bit surprising that a wall powered unit is still capped at this clock speed The Intel/x86 mantra that desktops should be allowed to be massively inefficient just to pump up the clock speed fractionally is what's changing. I for one, agree with Apple - 450W beasts aren't really needed. Most workflows can be (or already are) parallelized so multiple cores can demolish what a fast single-thread can tackle.

Maursault 5y ago

So, surprise, the M1 Ultra is 2x M1 Max chips. They've been secretly planning since inception to attach 2 chips together. Why am I so unimpressed? Because connecting 2 chips together is so dang obvious. Because I would have expected Apple to connect 10 of them together in a semi-circle and not only own the desktop and mobile market, but in a truly shocking surprise, release a new Apple server that has 10x the processing power of the next most powerful server running at 1/10th the Wattage, and a new macOS server version with a footprint smaller than iOS that is binary compatible with the whole of linux development.

kllrnohj 5y ago
> release a new Apple server that has 10x the processing power of the next most powerful server running at 1/10th the Wattage The power efficiency of M1 is vastly overstated. Reminder here that the M1 Ultra is almost certainly a 200W TDP SoC (since the M1 Max was ~100W, and this is 2x of those...) So 10x M1 Max's would be ~1000W. That's possibly to put in a server chassis, but it's of course also not remotely 1/10th the wattage of existing server CPUs, either, which tend to be in the 250-350w range. And interconnects aren't free, either (or necessarily even cheap). The infinity fabric connecting the dies together on Epyc is like 70w by itself, give or take.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  >The power efficiency of M1 is vastly overstated. Reminder here that the M1 Ultra is almost certainly a 200W TDP SoC 114 Billion transistors are going to draw some power. An RTX 3090 is 28.3 Billion transistors drawing 350W or so for just the GPU portion of the system.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  The M1 Pro is slightly faster than other CPUs at that ~35W design point, but it doesn't scale up beyond that, or Apple just doesn't care if users can experience its latent scaling abilities, if they exist. I like this chart from "Hardware Unboxed" that puts current Apple, AMD, and Intel CPUs in context: https://imgur.com/PKHelVY https://imgur.com/PKHelVY

GeekyBear 5y ago

The most interesting new thing going on in the M1 Ultra: >combining multiple GPUs in a transparent fashion [is] something of a holy grail of multi-GPU design. It’s a problem that multiple companies have been working on for over a decade, and it would seem that Apple is charting new ground by being the first company to pull it off. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17306/apple-announces-m1-ultra-combining-two-m1-maxes-for-even-more-performance https://www.anandtech.com/show/17306/apple-announces-m1-ultr...

jayd16 5y ago
Not that it isn't good for the M1 but is such a setup really something other companies are attempting to pull off? It seems like GPU makers just put more cores on a single die. Does this tech apply to discrete graphics? You can't really connect separate cards with this, right? Are you saying this is a blow to Intel's graphics? Or maybe you're implying it's a way for integrated graphics to become dominant?

ossusermivami 5y ago

> A slightly orthogonal thought: because every word, every image of Apple Events is carefully vetted, one had to notice all six developers brought up to discuss the Mac Studio and Mac Ultra benefits inter work were women. it was international women day on that day, i think it was a nice touch from apple

MichaelRazum 5y ago

Would love if you could run linux on it. That would be really amazing.

WhyNotHugo 5y ago
Progress on this front has been going pretty well. It's still not ready for everyday usage (though the people working on porting it might already be using it), but it's way moving a lot faster than one would guess. I'm considering a Mac Mini build machine sometime during 2022, it might be feasible for that. See https://asahilinux.org/2021/12/progress-report-oct-nov-2021/ https://asahilinux.org/2021/12/progress-report-oct-nov-2021/ or follow https://twitter.com/marcan42 https://twitter.com/marcan42