5 ms·

> 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 Ul

> 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.
  - kllrnohj 5y ago
    > 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. Nonsense. Nobody is going to just give up "free" performance. > I for one, agree with Apple - 450W beasts aren't really needed. Nobody makes a 450W consumer CPU, so this is a strawman. The M1 Ultra's 200W already puts it quite far beyond the typical consumer setup of 65-125W anyway. Regardless if 450W lets your work finish faster than 200W, that's a tradeoff ~everyone makes. Nothing about that is changing. > Most workflows can be (or already are) parallelized so multiple cores can demolish what a fast single-thread can tackle If this is truly the case for you then you'd already be on the Threadripper/Epyc train and the M1 Ultra would be kinda boring.
    - wtallis 5y ago
      Please try to be consistent or at least explicit about whether you're including a GPU in the power numbers you are referencing; changing that context mid-sentence makes it quite hard to tell whether you really have a solid position.
    - r00fus 5y ago
      > Nonsense. Nobody is going to just give up "free" performance. No, they're done with "free" waste. Apple chips idle at far lower and due to efficiency cores, handle moderate workloads with low TDP. > Nobody makes a 450W consumer CPU CPU, yes. But the M1 (along with all Apple chips) is a SoC so if you include graphics, storage, memory and motherboard - you can easily eclipse 450W for many enthusiast consumer (gaming) builds. Most gaming builds are 300-500W.
      - kllrnohj 5y ago
        > No, they're done with "free" waste. Apple chips idle at far lower and due to efficiency cores, handle moderate workloads with low TDP. Alder Lake also has efficiency cores. And everyone has aggressive power gating & ultra low idle states, that's not something Apple came up with or innovated. Apple's inability to turbo isn't some magic advantage. It's just a limitation, and there's no reason to believe they are happy with that limitation nor that others who don't have that limitation would for some reason copy that. Or more accurately, why would AMD & Intel regress back to where they were 5-10 years ago? > you can easily eclipse 450W for many enthusiast consumer (gaming) builds. Most gaming builds are 300-500W. If we're talking gaming builds then M1 Ultra is pretty much completely irrelevant as the gaming performance of the M1 Pro & Max were terrible (likely more a software problem than a hardware one, but still). The Max couldn't even keep up with a 3060 mobile. So a 300-500W desktop gaming build will be running laps around an M1 Ultra in games.
protomyth 5y ago
I never understand that criticism from the user point of view. A modern OS runs a lot of threads and the M1 isn't exactly a slow poke, and the M1 Ultra has a lot more cores to run all those threads.
zamalek 5y ago
> It's telling that almost the only "bad" thing that you can say about the M1 Ultra The M1 is truly a great thing. It beats the pants off the Intel 2019 MBP that work gave me while I fixed some M1 problems. That is, however, comparing Apple Intel to Apple Silicon. The 2019 Intel MBP is, on an absolute scale (vs. my own AMD laptop of the same year), completely and utterly incompetent. Comparing Apple Silicon to Intel and AMD isn't as straightforward, and there's a lot of good and bad for all three. Apple is now merely competitive.
sliken 5y ago
I do wonder if this will help adoption. Now the low end iphone, high end iphone, ipads (air or pro), mac mini, and everything faster has great single thread perf. The serious desktops (not including mac mini or 13" mbp) and laptops have 2x (200GB/sec), 4x (400GB/sec), or 8x (800GB/sec) memory systems that should help with CPU, AI/ML, and GPU tasks. Seems like a pretty awesome minimum level of performance to encourage developers to make the most of it. Seems just the opposite of what Intel's doing where you might get a fast core, slow core, AVX2, AVX512, etc on a new product. Doubly so when AVX512 worked on Alder lake chips... till it was disabled by Intel. I did hear that the m1 pro/max didn't do some GPU benchmarks particularly well, although I'm anxious waiting to hear how the M1 ultra does.

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.
- kllrnohj 5y ago
  > 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. Nonsense. Nobody is going to just give up "free" performance. > I for one, agree with Apple - 450W beasts aren't really needed. Nobody makes a 450W consumer CPU, so this is a strawman. The M1 Ultra's 200W already puts it quite far beyond the typical consumer setup of 65-125W anyway. Regardless if 450W lets your work finish faster than 200W, that's a tradeoff ~everyone makes. Nothing about that is changing. > Most workflows can be (or already are) parallelized so multiple cores can demolish what a fast single-thread can tackle If this is truly the case for you then you'd already be on the Threadripper/Epyc train and the M1 Ultra would be kinda boring.
  - wtallis 5y ago
    Please try to be consistent or at least explicit about whether you're including a GPU in the power numbers you are referencing; changing that context mid-sentence makes it quite hard to tell whether you really have a solid position.
  - r00fus 5y ago
    > Nonsense. Nobody is going to just give up "free" performance. No, they're done with "free" waste. Apple chips idle at far lower and due to efficiency cores, handle moderate workloads with low TDP. > Nobody makes a 450W consumer CPU CPU, yes. But the M1 (along with all Apple chips) is a SoC so if you include graphics, storage, memory and motherboard - you can easily eclipse 450W for many enthusiast consumer (gaming) builds. Most gaming builds are 300-500W.
    - kllrnohj 5y ago
      > No, they're done with "free" waste. Apple chips idle at far lower and due to efficiency cores, handle moderate workloads with low TDP. Alder Lake also has efficiency cores. And everyone has aggressive power gating & ultra low idle states, that's not something Apple came up with or innovated. Apple's inability to turbo isn't some magic advantage. It's just a limitation, and there's no reason to believe they are happy with that limitation nor that others who don't have that limitation would for some reason copy that. Or more accurately, why would AMD & Intel regress back to where they were 5-10 years ago? > you can easily eclipse 450W for many enthusiast consumer (gaming) builds. Most gaming builds are 300-500W. If we're talking gaming builds then M1 Ultra is pretty much completely irrelevant as the gaming performance of the M1 Pro & Max were terrible (likely more a software problem than a hardware one, but still). The Max couldn't even keep up with a 3060 mobile. So a 300-500W desktop gaming build will be running laps around an M1 Ultra in games.

protomyth 5y ago

I never understand that criticism from the user point of view. A modern OS runs a lot of threads and the M1 isn't exactly a slow poke, and the M1 Ultra has a lot more cores to run all those threads.

zamalek 5y ago

> It's telling that almost the only "bad" thing that you can say about the M1 Ultra The M1 is truly a great thing. It beats the pants off the Intel 2019 MBP that work gave me while I fixed some M1 problems. That is, however, comparing Apple Intel to Apple Silicon. The 2019 Intel MBP is, on an absolute scale (vs. my own AMD laptop of the same year), completely and utterly incompetent. Comparing Apple Silicon to Intel and AMD isn't as straightforward, and there's a lot of good and bad for all three. Apple is now merely competitive.

sliken 5y ago

I do wonder if this will help adoption. Now the low end iphone, high end iphone, ipads (air or pro), mac mini, and everything faster has great single thread perf. The serious desktops (not including mac mini or 13" mbp) and laptops have 2x (200GB/sec), 4x (400GB/sec), or 8x (800GB/sec) memory systems that should help with CPU, AI/ML, and GPU tasks. Seems like a pretty awesome minimum level of performance to encourage developers to make the most of it. Seems just the opposite of what Intel's doing where you might get a fast core, slow core, AVX2, AVX512, etc on a new product. Doubly so when AVX512 worked on Alder lake chips... till it was disabled by Intel. I did hear that the m1 pro/max didn't do some GPU benchmarks particularly well, although I'm anxious waiting to hear how the M1 ultra does.