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Apple M1 Ultra's 64-Core GPU Fails to Dethrone the Mighty RTX 3090

173 points by magoghm 5y ago

spoonjim 5y ago
It's wild that Apple has gotten this close with an integrated GPU. This is really the best engineering organization on the planet attached to an extremely annoying marketing/ecosystem/revenue team.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  Is it that wild? This isn't a dinky little laptop chip, it has almost 150(!) Billion transistors on a very efficient process.
  - morganvachon 5y ago
    Given that Apple has finally conceded that a laptop thicker than an iPad is acceptable (M1 Pro/Max models), we may see the Ultra chip in a new flagship Macbook Pro soon. It won't be cranked all the way up like it is in the Mac Studio obviously, but it's definitely possible to put one (or the inevitable M2 version) in a large laptop.
    - jsjohnst 5y ago
      > we may see the Ultra chip in a new flagship Macbook Pro soon I’m not hopeful to be honest, at least not without a significant thermal reduction penalty. The M1 Ultra in the Mac Studio has a 1kg heavier heat sink vs the Max due to the extra heat.
  - djmips 5y ago
    Yes. It's wild. It's their opinion OK?
catfishx 5y ago
> Why does Apple even bother with these fanciful benchmark graphs to tout superiority over processors and GPUs from the PC sphere? Because most consumers dont search for these articles, so they blindly believe all the fake comparisons that apple makes on their webpage
- mdp2021 5y ago
  Is it the time in history to publish and broadcast in awareness campaigns clear definitions of the term 'immoral'?
- cute_boi 5y ago
  In short, Gullible Also, we forget that these new "techs" come every year and its boring to track each of these. Companies are using this as advantage.
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    > "In short, Gullible" More like, "inexperienced". Tech aside (contexts where complexities offer controversial space in some comparisons, out of benchmarks that may not measure the actual general goal), many are convinced that the spread of false information is severely limited through social and legal devices: loss of reputation, sanctions (e.g. "false advertisement") etc.
- newaccount74 5y ago
  Because they have a week where they can control the narrative before the press gets their hands on actual devices. Every news site on the planet wants to write about the new Apple stuff, and since there are no 3rd party benchmarks yet, they have to parrot Apple's claims. A week later, most of the press has already forgotten about Apple's new stuff already, and noone cares about the actual benchmarks. Except us techies, who didn't believe Apple's claims in the first place. To be honest I'm much more disappointed that they shipped yet another crappy webcam in the Studio display after claiming it's the best webcam ever. (The webcams in all the M1 Macs suck ass, despite what Apple and the early press reviews claim)
  - zamalek 5y ago
    > Except us techies, who didn't believe Apple's claims in the first place. That's very debatable. Even individuals on HN (which is rare atmosphere) defended Apple's claims. The other side of this is that people have been exclusively using Apple products for so long, that they don't have the experience to compare what Apple is doing with the rest of the industry. Apple only has to outdo themselves.
sirwhinesalot 5y ago
Do I really need to be the one pointing out that M1 Ultra has an "integrated" GPU and that these tests are disadvantaging it due to Rosetta and weak engine support for Metal? The results are nuts.
- knolan 5y ago
  The discussion over on blender devtalk is that they now have cycles working on Metal (including AMD GPUs) and now they can start to optimise. https://devtalk.blender.org/t/cycles-apple-metal-device-feedback/21868/217 https://devtalk.blender.org/t/cycles-apple-metal-device-feed... I’ve already seen a significant CPU improvement on my 2019 16” and I can now use my 5500M to render. My PC’s RTX 2080 Super is significantly faster but it draws more than 200W. This indeed is great progress!
- pornel 5y ago
  The weird insistence on supporting only Metal and nothing outside of Apple's own bubble is entirely Apple's own doing.
  - sirwhinesalot 5y ago
    I agree, but that is still something we need to take into account when comparing the hardware. Imagine if Arm Windows gets popular and it somehow has great drivers for this GPU (unlikely, but humor me here). Then the actual power of the hardware would be a lot more relevant for gaming related benchmarks.
    - darkwater 5y ago
      You mean that we should take into account how actually complicated is to get software that fully support the hardware into account for HW comparisons where a type of HW can only run with a specific OS?
      - sirwhinesalot 5y ago
        No, I mean that's not relevant to compare what the hardware can do. It's like how the PS3 was super hard to program but in the end it was producing more impressive results than the Xbox360. This was not a surprising result, it was to be expected from the hardware. It's not that different from what is happening here, benchmarks running on x86 emulation on engines running compatibility layers for Metal are not representative of the hardware.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
With such great performance per watt all smart crypto miners will be switching to Apple M1 Ultra machines right?
- Macha 5y ago
  They also have to consider the $ cost of the GPU and time to earn back the initial investment. The AMD 5000 series and 3080 were already more popular than the 3090 for miners because of the hashrate/$ - considering you can't slot more GPUs into a M1 Studio and need to buy a whole other system, I'd imagine that it's current price would leave it uncompetitive for miners even if it did match the 3090 perf. (nvidia had the same issue with miners still preferring their LHR consumer card to their attempts to push miners to their business tier cards)
1_player 5y ago
Intel has been sitting twiddling its thumbs for years, so it was easy for Apple to actually innovate and create an incredible processor, also controlling the entire stack and being able to switch from x86 helps. But on the GPU side NVIDIA and AMD have been battling it out for a while, competition is tight, and thinking Apple could come, compete and actually beat the fastest GPU currently available for consumers is a bit of a pipe dream, in hindsight. The GPU market hasn't been sitting on laurels for as long as Intel has been. That said, I am still positively surprised at how close they managed to reach the 3090, but alas, no cigar.
- q-big 5y ago
  > Intel has been sitting twiddling its thumbs for years, What evidence do you have for that? Intel really wanted to release (in my opinion) very interesting processors, but had serious problems over years with getting their 10 nm process "stable" (i.e. sufficiently high and reproducible yield rates). They even back-ported some of their planned CPU architectures to their working 14 nm process "just to get something out". Since these processors were not developed with 14 nm in mind, they of course were not as good as they could have been.
  - ColonelPhantom 5y ago
    Intel did have any major advances from 2nd gen all the way until the 7th. The advancements were generally small (single-digit often) IPC or clock speed improvements. Only after AMD released Ryzen, Intel had to respond at their 8th gen by cranking up core counts. And IPC did not have any increases, until 11th gen(the backported arch you mentioned). In my opinion, the performance delta between 28nm Sandy Bridge and 14nm Kaby Lake is ridiculously small.
    - morganvachon 5y ago
      > In my opinion, the performance delta between 28nm Sandy Bridge and 14nm Kaby Lake is ridiculously small. Two of my Linux workstations are Sandy Bridge and Kaby Lake, and my real world experience bears this out. I can't distinguish between the two for everyday use cases; only synthetic benchmarks show any real advantage in the newer system. I can't speak for Windows performance differences, as my only Windows system is my gaming rig with a Ryzen 5 3600, which of course trounces both of the workstations no matter the OS.
daviddever23box 5y ago
Was the game in question run under Rosetta 2 emulation? If so, given the overhead, that would have been incredibly important to disclose. Bring on the marketing and PR battles!
- bkolobara 5y ago
  Yes, but if there are close to 0 games that don't require Rosetta, what's the point? Disclosing a theoretical emulation overhead that can't be proven would even be worse. It's either this or no comparison at all. And it's a game that apple often uses in their promotional materials.
  - Closi 5y ago
    > Yes, but if there are close to 0 games that don't require Rosetta, what's the point? Because it's not being marketed as a gaming computer, and other use-cases aren't run under Rosetta (e.g. 3D rendering, video editing etc). e.g. Apple's marketing doesn't claim gaming performance, it claims this: > You can run complex particle simulations or work with massive 3D environments that were previously impossible to render. And with twice the media engine resources, M1 Ultra can support up to 18 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video playback — something no other personal computer can do. Their marketing page doesn't even mention games...
andy_ppp 5y ago
I'm interested to see what the next 10 years of Apple Silicon bring... they must have thought about it. What does everyone think?
- SirHound 5y ago
  Personally I think this entire situation has been at the behest of the AR push. Same with stuff like putting LIDAR in the iPhone. Push that price/performance down in a proprietary way so that when AR/VR becomes a market you have an unassailable advantage. At least that's my pet theory. In the meantime it's paid dividends as a Mac fan.
  - andy_ppp 5y ago
    Yes was thinking that - AR/VR is going to be interesting - I definitely wouldn't trust Facebook recording everything I do and adding their ad tech to everything I see while in AR...
- mhh__ 5y ago
  Better intel CPUs
- neogodless 5y ago
  Increasingly improbable marketing claims. /s (the M1 variants are awesome, but as per the article, their marketing... stretches the truth)
dtx1 5y ago
These Benchmarks are all rather useless because they lack the necessary details on methodology and context. For example Shadow of the Tomb raider may very well CPU Bottlenecked with that 3090 give it only runs a 10900 (non-k?) and who knows how the port for the M1 Ultra is done? Is it running x86 Emulation and something like DXVK or is it a truly native port?
- my123 5y ago
  It's emulated. That brings down GPU perf by a noticeable amount on its own. (more barriers to be able to run with existing GPU API semantics)
  - dtx1 5y ago
    If it's emulated than the benchmark is completely useless
  - Macha 5y ago
    Though DirectX emulation on Linux via DXVK usually matches and sometimes outperforms native DirectX on Windows, so it's not a given.
    - dtx1 5y ago
      Even if true for M1 Macs, it will still invalidate the benchmarks because it's not an objective comparison edit: so i get downvoted for commenting that a benchmark needs to control external variables (like emulation vs native) in order to get a valid comparison of the underlining hardware? Never change apple fanboys, never change!
      - Macha 5y ago
        The dispute between what makes a fair benchmark is because the of the question of whether it's fair to test the M1 Ultra from the single deployment it's available in (with its fixed OS, API support and therefore required emulation for many use cases), or whether you can come up with some test that somehow tests the M1 Ultra in isolation. Until either Asahi/Windows support for M1 gets further along, there are more M1 Ultra equipped machines, or more workloads get ported to Apple native (either because there's incentive enough despite the difficulties Apple introduces, or because Apple reduces those difficulties), it's hard to have an apples-to-apples comparison of the M1 Ultra vs 3090. I fall more to the camp that we have to evaluate the package of the Mac Studio as presented for now. Especially as it's not like Apple is going to sell this standalone, so the only other deployment in the near future is a likely M1 Ultra Mac Pro. This means it can have the advantages (lower power draw, OS specifically optimised for it) and disadvantages (emulation for common workloads) that come with that.
captainbland 5y ago
That's not super surprising. The 3090 is a beast. The fact that they've gotten into a similar ballpark to maybe the 3070 based on those numbers with a SoC is pretty impressive, though. That said, am I the only one getting annoyed with shallow comparisons of the M1 products? Or is SEO BS hiding the good stuff? It seems like the rule most sites are following is 50% or more of your benchmark graphs should be Geekbench which is quite eye-roll inducing when you've been spoiled by comprehensive benchmarks in the PC market for decades.
- q-big 5y ago
  > That said, am I the only one getting annoyed with shallow comparisons of the M1 products? Or is SEO BS hiding the good stuff? Could "Many tech 'journalists' are Apple fanboys" be a reasonable explanation?
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    I think it's closer to the truth to say that many tech "journalists" aren't actual trained journalists. Just bloggers cosplaying journalism.
    - rjzzleep 5y ago
      Looking at the media right now, it seems many professional journalists are the same.
      - reaperducer 5y ago
        It depends on how you define "the media" and "professional journalist." It's more complicated than most people think. Some of the world's best actual journalists, like Peter Jennings, were high school dropouts. At the same time, some of the world's most prominent people who often present themselves as journalists are absolutely not.
        greggsy 5y ago
sinuhe69 5y ago
Perhaps against the RTX 3080 mobile but not the RTX 3090 on a PC?
tpush 5y ago
I don't understand why people compare hardware using software benchmarks that don't actually do the same work. Geekbench's Compute is useless for M1s with more than 32 Cores, according to Anandtech. Shadow of the Tomb Raider runs as an x86 program under Rosetta 2. Isn't there a single GPU benchmark that actually does the same work so that comparisons can actually be made?
- Tenoke 5y ago
  Presumably because it's a real life workload that is more relevant to consumers and easier to understand.
  - tpush 5y ago
    Sure, if the consumer wants to run Shadow of the Tomb Raider, that's true. But benchmarks where one hardware has to do much more work than the other is obviously not fit to determine the actual performance differences between hardware; and that is exactly what the article we're commenting on is doing.
    - MAGZine 5y ago
      Everyone understands the point you're making, it's just a pointless point. People aren't concerned about the hardware itself. They're concerned about what it can do. If circumstances mean that your powerful hardware can't be utilized, then the powerful hardware is just extra cost and no benefit.
      - trvr 5y ago
        Tom's Hardware. ;-)
- ggreg84 5y ago
  > Isn't there a single GPU benchmark that actually does the same work so that comparisons can actually be made? Apple does not support OpenGL or Vulkan, only Metal, and most app devs have better things to do than rewriting code for the Mac. The recommended way of gaming on a mac is to use emulation by emulating whatever the game is used with a metal wrapper. IMO the claim that these benchmarks aren't fair is naive. I don't care about how good the hardware is, but about what performance I get. If I get poor performance because the software, drivers, etc. are poor, I want to know that.
Mashimo 5y ago
> delivering 142 fps at 4K and 114 fps at 1440p Why does the FPS go down with lower resolution?
- Teledhil 5y ago
  That graph from the verge can’t be right. There is no way you get more FPS at 4K than at 1080p on Shadow of the Tomb Raider while keeping all the other settings the same.
- maverwa 5y ago
  I was wondering the same and checked the source (the verge) and they have the resolutions swapped which makes more sense. https://www.theverge.com/22981815/apple-mac-studio-m1-ultra-max-review https://www.theverge.com/22981815/apple-mac-studio-m1-ultra-...
bitL 5y ago
All Apple has to do is to enable workstation-level features in its drivers and they'd beat 3090 handily. Even Titan RTX demolishes 3090 with workstation drivers in software that uses those features. As for raw performance, 3090 is far ahead.
- oblio 5y ago
  What are "workstation level features in drivers"?
- rowanG077 5y ago
  What does Apple gain gimping their highest tier hardware product?
  - flembat 5y ago
    If this transition is like the others the performance of Apple software and the operating system are going to increase with every new release for the next couple of years as they optimize it.
  - bitL 5y ago
    Where do you see any gimping? It's known that NVidia gimps its consumer range by shipping drivers that are slow in some tasks despite the same hardware being able to be much faster. My comment was about Apple getting an easy win just by not doing that in pro tasks that matter, in other words beating 3090 in some apps is fairly easy due to NVidia's politics.
    - rowanG077 5y ago
      Yes Nvidia gimps because they have other products that are not gimped. But Apple doesn't. The M1 Ultra is the best of the best they have to offer. I'm not saying Apple gimps their hardware. I'm asking because you are saying Apple gimps their hardware by not releasing "workstation drivers". Thus I ask you why would apple Gimp their hardware.
      - 5y ago
matthewmacleod 5y ago
This article is infuriatingly bad. First off, I don't doubt for a second that Apple has over-egged the performance of the M1 Ultra's GPU – or has, at least, selected performance indicators which aren't totally representative of common workflows. It's important that we have reviews that make it clear that this is the case and look at more useful numbers. But this article is a terrible example of doing that. It's just a republishing of minimal benchmark results from another outlet, but without even the tiny amount of analysis that was conducted there. Even the original article gives us close to no information about the scope or setup of this testing, and proceeds to draw conclusions that are suspect at best – for instance, there's a <20% gap in 1440p "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" framerate between the Ultra and the RTX3090 – not mentioning that this is a game that's running under Rosetta – and no 4K comparison, which is the only one likely to be GPU-bound. More importantly, the actual benchmark results are clearly and obviously wrong, with the numbers for 1080p and 4k performance being switched (unless graphics cards magically now render faster at higher resolution). The Verge has fixed the original, but how can you realistically quote these numbers and make a judgement on them without noticing this? Just an absolutely embarrassing indictment of the state of technology journalism.
- smilespray 5y ago
  ...not to mention the never-ending comment threads on HN where Apple Is Evil, and All Apple Users Are Idiots.
jmyeet 5y ago
I'm wary of synthetic benchmarks. Are they representative of anything meaningful? Are they gamed? It's why people tend to look for real-world performance. For GPUs this often means games. This system too can be gamed (eg drivers silently optimizing for performance). Some games will also favour a particular architecture. Taken in totality you tend to get a good big picture view. Such real-world benchmarks are thin on the ground for the M1 Ultra thus far and are clouded by things like programs and drivers not being optimized and/or translation layers. This will improve over time. But I've seen a couple of game benchmarks for the M1 Ultra that seem to show it's >50% of the FPS of the 3090. That's honestly astounding. I'm still confused by the power draw of the M1 Ultra. It's claimed to be 60W but the Mac Studio seems to draw >300W so what's the reality? But if a CPU/GPU combo does in fact draw 60W (compared to the 350W+ for the 3090 alone and another 100W+ for any likely CPU) and gets over 50% of the performance? That is absolutely huge (if true). This is still a first-generation product. Many expect the M2 later this year. That may bring respectable (but definitely not cutting edge) GPU performance to the Mac Mini. Apple still has a lot of headroom here.
- Someone 5y ago
  https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/specs/ https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/specs/ says “Maximum continuous power: 370W” I think that’s because it has to power all those ports, too. Google tells me Thunderbolt 4 can go up to 100W.
- philistine 5y ago
  Thunderbolt 4 can support one hundred watts and needs a power supply to account for that.
YetAnotherNick 5y ago
But they never said that that it is faster than 3090, they said it uses 60% less power for the same performance. The shady thing they did is they trimmed the plot by watts to remove full performance of 3090, which might be intentional to give wrong idea to most. But it was clear to me it doesn't have same performance as 3090.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/oWgfEtRLYJkM3sQZm5UcQY-970-80.png.webp https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/oWgfEtRLYJkM3sQZm5UcQY-970...
- microtonal 5y ago
  On the other hand, the plot of the 3090 flattens so much @ 320W, that you wouldn't suspect a doubling of performance at its peak wattage (which I think is ~360W?). Of course, this is marketing material. But as far as I am concerned, the jury is still out, I'd like to see a benchmark with native binaries (non-Rosetta) and some optimization for Metal. Though even if the performance was half of the RTX 3090, that would be mighty impressive. I have an RTX 3090 on my desk and under full load it is loud and consumes a lot of power. Mac Studio + M1 Ultra's fans are apparently barely audible.
nottorp 5y ago
However the 3090 eats more power than the whole mac system? That’s a compromise I’m very willing to make.
- komuher 5y ago
  3090 is on Samsung 8nm 2+years old node so it will always be worse and still apple gpu claims are always oversaturated and its good people are talking about it considering apple propaganda of FASTEST CONSUMER GPU. Despite this m1 ultra gpu is a big step for all people intrested in apple market and DL/ML workloads
  - microtonal 5y ago
    3090 is on Samsung 8nm 2+years old node so it will always be worse While the M1 Ultra is the latest CPU, it still uses A14/M1 cores from 2020. It's likely that Apple made a lot of progress on the microarchitecture since then, plus rumors are that M2 will switch to a 4nm node.
    - komuher 5y ago
      Samsung 8nm was almost 2 years old when rtx 3090 was coming to the market (english isnt my native language in my head it was clearer :D) Apple is on TSMC 5nm here comment from 2years ago about 8nm samsung vs 7nm TSMC "Hell, Samsung 8nm is really a 10nm process, it's just an extension of Samsung 10nm with a ~15-20% improvement in transistor density. TSMC 7nm (EUV 4 layer) is nearly twice as dense as Samsung 8nm. non-EUV (first gen TSMC 7nm) is still far denser than Samsung 8nm."
  - nottorp 5y ago
    > considering apple propaganda of FASTEST CONSUMER GPU Well as a mostly Apple user, I don't read Apple propaganda. Or nvidia propaganda for that matter. The M1 Max mac studio's full system consumption on load seems to be ~50 W. I wonder how much performance nvidia can deliver with that. I think ... they simply don't have a product in that power budget? I know most people only care about FASTEST CONSUMER GPU (yay, it doubles as a leaf blower and a space heater) but I still think nvidia's best product was the 1050Ti ... decent 1080 performance in 75 W.
throwaway4good 5y ago
Thanks for that; then ethereum miners don't have to buy this thing.
Shadonototra 5y ago
People miss the fking point What about power usage? ;) At equal power usage, M1 decimates the RTX 3090
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  Those who buy 3090 don't care about power usage.
  - StreamBright 5y ago
    So on one hand we have a man made climate change and on the other hand we do not care how much power a GPU uses. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
lvl102 5y ago
I’ve yet to see a fair comparison/assessment on M1 Ultra’s GPU performance in terms of ML potential. The same with 3D rendering outside of Blender 3.1 speeds which is not optimal (I also wonder if industrial rendering engines such as Renderman will support ARM in the future). As more and more softwares optimize for ARM, I see a great deal of potential for these machines above and beyond what is possible right now within limited ecosystem. I am 100% convinced Apple struck gold with this.
sod 5y ago
If we don't eschew praising nvidia for its glorious performance, I guess we deserve that the rumored 4090 will draw 600 watts of power. Nvidia delivers what the majority wants.
radiKal07 5y ago
Why do they always benchmark Tomb Raider?
- Sporktacular 5y ago
  It's available natively on both platforms.
  - EugeneOZ 5y ago
    Then why Rosetta 2 was used?
    - Sporktacular 5y ago
      Was it? My mistake.
jasoneckert 5y ago
The most frustrating part about reading this article for me isn't the article itself, but that Apple - in fine tradition - didn't back up their graphics and performance claims with anything concrete and reproducible. With M1, I think they can move beyond these shady marketing tactics entirely and focus on what they're developing. In other words, promote the merits of their architecture and systems (which are excellent) rather than try to compare Apples with oranges.
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  Been like this for years now, always remember the Apple twittersphere gushing about how insanely powerful the iPhone and iPad processors were yet even years after the news of this we didn't really see the platforms doing any remarkable forms of processing.
  - auggierose 5y ago
    They are insanely powerful, and if you write the right apps for it, you will see that. I've written a custom CAD app from scratch for iPad, and was blown away by the speed I saw with Metal. I mean, they turned these chips into desktops, because that's how good they are. Wtf are you talking about?
  - post_break 5y ago
    The phone in my pocket renders 4k60 video faster than my desktop, with no moving pieces. My iPad is even faster. It wasn't until that iPad processor went into my Mac that I could do that without getting burned or putting my bose headphones on.
- seanw444 5y ago
  Good pun. I agree. M1 with Metal is already quite good. Just leave it at that. You're not going to be able to compete with a high-end discrete GPU in most areas, so stop pretending.
EugeneOZ 5y ago
So it's around 3080, with insanely lower power consumption? Sounds really amazing. Apple, with such capabilities you need to invest in gaming/APIs/consoles.
Sporktacular 5y ago
"Sure, there might be a few specific benchmarks where the M1 Ultra's GPU might come out ahead on the performance-per-watt scale" M1 performance-per-watt ruins any GPU by Nvidia on any such benchmark.
- rat9988 5y ago
  Do you have a benchmark to back it up? Genuinely curious.
  - Sporktacular 5y ago
    Not benchmarks but a back of the envelope calculation. When idling a 3090 draws ~20W and an M1 ~200mW. At full power its ~400W vs 100W, so considering the performance of both at maximum and interpolating between those power values it's a pretty sold bet. Older GPUs with larger node sizes would fare even worse.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
pacifika 5y ago
Performance per dollar is my benchmark
- xena 5y ago
  With how much it costs to get a GPU these days it may just be worth it to get the Mac lol
Decabytes 5y ago
One question I’ we never gotten an answer for is what about arm makes these apple chips so good? Is it just that Apple can design them themselves compared to when they were with Intel? Or is there something about Arm that makes it better for making the processors that Apple likes? Outside of the M1 ultra I feel like most of the advancements are just due to be on the newest processes
- ZetaZero 5y ago
  ARM makes instruction decoding simpler. More memory bandwidth also helps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25257932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25257932
- sliken 5y ago
  Well apple got an architecture license, has been iterating on their design for many years, has bought companies with significant expertise, and has been pretty aggressive with making their Iphone/Ipad CPUs the best that they can be, and more recently applied a very similar design to MBPs, Mini, and Studio. M1 is based on the Apple A14 core and the future M2 will be based on the A15 core that's been shipping for awhile now in iphones. Sadly you can't take advantages of Apple's CPU designs unless you buy into their ecosystem. Here's hoping ASAHI linux (Marcan's port to the M1) goes well. There's little things like ditching the 32 bit ISA, not a big deal, but does make each new iteration that much easier from a design and testing standpoint. ARM also has a loser memory model, which makes it easier to use more effectively use existing bandwidth. But there's no magic. It's a straight up aggressive design, wide instruction decode (yes that's easier for arm than x86-64), large re-order buffer, wide issue, etc. Anandtech has a nice summary comparing various M1 features to the Intel and AMD competition. Apple has a high IPC and they make the most of their lower clocks (usually around 3.2 GHz). The chips from Intel/AMD that they are compared against are often in the 4-5 GHz range and burn significantly more power because of that.
kloch 5y ago
I don't think there are any 3090's with 128GB of ram however. If you need that much ultra high bandwidth ram the M1 Ultra is the only game in town.
gandalfff 5y ago
Are there any Speedometer benchmark results for the M1 Ultra yet? I've looked, but haven't found any. Given how much time I spend in the browser/Electron apps, browser benchmarks are the only benchmarks that are relevant to me (tongue placed firmly in cheek, I'm sure the entry-level M1 would suit me just fine).
officeplant 5y ago
I find it strange that people even keep pushing the comparison with the death of EGPU's for modern Macs. I'm just glad we have some serious GPU muscle for both gaming and graphical work.
tromp 5y ago
For applications that are performance limited by memory bandwidth, the M1 Ultra should perform at 85% of a 3090 given their respective bandwidth of 800 GB/s versus 936.2 GB/s. People using such applications where additionally power efficiency is paramount, such as memory hard proof-of-work, should be very keen in seeing whether the M1 Ultra lives up to its promise...
rayiner 5y ago
> Not everyone puts a lot of stock in synthetic benchmarks like Geekbench, so the Verge also fired up Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and the RTX 3090 easily mopped the floor with the M1 Ultra, delivering 142 fps at 4K and 114 fps at 1440p. Unfortunately, the Mac Studio could only muster 108 fps and 96 fps, respectively. Games are always less optimized for Mac/Metal than for Windows. It would have been better to use a content creation benchmark.
- Maursault 5y ago
  > delivering 142 fps at 4K and 114 fps at 1440p... Why and how would these GPUs deliver more fps with higher resolution. 4K is 2160p or 2x1080. Shouldn't 1440p (2x720) deliver more fps? Someone please tell me what is going on here.
KolenCh 5y ago
May be an unpopular take here: comparing the spec, we already knew that (3090 is faster.) We can look at theoretical peak FLOPS (32bit), and also available memory, and internal bandwidth. Of the 3, 3090 clearly wins in FLOPS, kind of a draw in internal bandwidth depending on how you read into it, and M1 Ultra has more memory. Now, Apple’s benchmark, like all benchmark releases by their own manufacturer including Intel, use tests that’s favorable to their specific hardwares. No 2 workloads are the same, there probably exists some workload that your hardware run fastest comparing to the competition. In this case, relying on GPU alone doesn’t seem to make the M1 Ultra comes first, but they have a secret weapon: unified memory. Anyone who uses GPGPU for example will know that the latency to copy back and forth between main and GPU memory can be a deal breaker in some workload. So to choose a a benchmark making M1 Ultra stands out then would involve picking some intensive workload that involve moving data between the GPU and CPU. That movement would diminish a bit of the gain from 3090 and if choosing the mix right, M1 Ultra can come out on top. I’m not accusing Apple to be disingenuous, at least not in the sense that is not a common practice in the industry. Apple’s chart is very uncommon though. Eg at a few points they keep showing the same statistics comparing it to another thing, where consecutive charts are just changing the “other thing”. Any sane person would put all of them in the same chart. The reason? Probably because nothing is in scale so drawing all of them in the same chart is meaningless.
JohnTHaller 5y ago
The graph from the Verge embedded in this article is mislabeled. 4K should have the lowest fps and 1080p the highest. From the Verge's testing, the $6,200 M1 Mac Ultra's performance in Shadow of the Tomb Raider is as follows: 4K: 60fps 1440p: 96fps 1080p: 108fps The Verge doesn't mention what graphics setting SoTR is set at, but assuming it is Ultra, the M1 Ultra's performance is about on par with an RTX 3060 Ti (MSRP $400): 4K: 54fps 1440p: 96fps 1080p: 130fps Here's what a 3070 Ti (MSRP $600) gets: 4K: 67fps 1440p: 111fps 1080p: 162fps Here's what a 3080 Ti (MSRP $1200) gets: 4K: 83fps 1440p: 147fps 1080p: 210fps GPU performance in games doesn't scale linearly. You pay a lot more for a small boost in fps. Sourced from gpucheck.com which loosely matches up with the reviews I checked.

173 points by magoghm 5y ago

It's wild that Apple has gotten this close with an integrated GPU. This is really the best engineering organization on the planet attached to an extremely annoying marketing/ecosystem/revenue team.

mhh__ 5y ago
Is it that wild? This isn't a dinky little laptop chip, it has almost 150(!) Billion transistors on a very efficient process.
- morganvachon 5y ago
  Given that Apple has finally conceded that a laptop thicker than an iPad is acceptable (M1 Pro/Max models), we may see the Ultra chip in a new flagship Macbook Pro soon. It won't be cranked all the way up like it is in the Mac Studio obviously, but it's definitely possible to put one (or the inevitable M2 version) in a large laptop.
  - jsjohnst 5y ago
    > we may see the Ultra chip in a new flagship Macbook Pro soon I’m not hopeful to be honest, at least not without a significant thermal reduction penalty. The M1 Ultra in the Mac Studio has a 1kg heavier heat sink vs the Max due to the extra heat.
- djmips 5y ago
  Yes. It's wild. It's their opinion OK?

catfishx 5y ago

> Why does Apple even bother with these fanciful benchmark graphs to tout superiority over processors and GPUs from the PC sphere? Because most consumers dont search for these articles, so they blindly believe all the fake comparisons that apple makes on their webpage

mdp2021 5y ago
Is it the time in history to publish and broadcast in awareness campaigns clear definitions of the term 'immoral'?
cute_boi 5y ago
In short, Gullible Also, we forget that these new "techs" come every year and its boring to track each of these. Companies are using this as advantage.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  > "In short, Gullible" More like, "inexperienced". Tech aside (contexts where complexities offer controversial space in some comparisons, out of benchmarks that may not measure the actual general goal), many are convinced that the spread of false information is severely limited through social and legal devices: loss of reputation, sanctions (e.g. "false advertisement") etc.
newaccount74 5y ago
Because they have a week where they can control the narrative before the press gets their hands on actual devices. Every news site on the planet wants to write about the new Apple stuff, and since there are no 3rd party benchmarks yet, they have to parrot Apple's claims. A week later, most of the press has already forgotten about Apple's new stuff already, and noone cares about the actual benchmarks. Except us techies, who didn't believe Apple's claims in the first place. To be honest I'm much more disappointed that they shipped yet another crappy webcam in the Studio display after claiming it's the best webcam ever. (The webcams in all the M1 Macs suck ass, despite what Apple and the early press reviews claim)
- zamalek 5y ago
  > Except us techies, who didn't believe Apple's claims in the first place. That's very debatable. Even individuals on HN (which is rare atmosphere) defended Apple's claims. The other side of this is that people have been exclusively using Apple products for so long, that they don't have the experience to compare what Apple is doing with the rest of the industry. Apple only has to outdo themselves.

sirwhinesalot 5y ago

Do I really need to be the one pointing out that M1 Ultra has an "integrated" GPU and that these tests are disadvantaging it due to Rosetta and weak engine support for Metal? The results are nuts.

knolan 5y ago
The discussion over on blender devtalk is that they now have cycles working on Metal (including AMD GPUs) and now they can start to optimise. https://devtalk.blender.org/t/cycles-apple-metal-device-feedback/21868/217 https://devtalk.blender.org/t/cycles-apple-metal-device-feed... I’ve already seen a significant CPU improvement on my 2019 16” and I can now use my 5500M to render. My PC’s RTX 2080 Super is significantly faster but it draws more than 200W. This indeed is great progress!
pornel 5y ago
The weird insistence on supporting only Metal and nothing outside of Apple's own bubble is entirely Apple's own doing.
- sirwhinesalot 5y ago
  I agree, but that is still something we need to take into account when comparing the hardware. Imagine if Arm Windows gets popular and it somehow has great drivers for this GPU (unlikely, but humor me here). Then the actual power of the hardware would be a lot more relevant for gaming related benchmarks.
  - darkwater 5y ago
    You mean that we should take into account how actually complicated is to get software that fully support the hardware into account for HW comparisons where a type of HW can only run with a specific OS?
    - sirwhinesalot 5y ago
      No, I mean that's not relevant to compare what the hardware can do. It's like how the PS3 was super hard to program but in the end it was producing more impressive results than the Xbox360. This was not a surprising result, it was to be expected from the hardware. It's not that different from what is happening here, benchmarks running on x86 emulation on engines running compatibility layers for Metal are not representative of the hardware.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

With such great performance per watt all smart crypto miners will be switching to Apple M1 Ultra machines right?

Macha 5y ago
They also have to consider the $ cost of the GPU and time to earn back the initial investment. The AMD 5000 series and 3080 were already more popular than the 3090 for miners because of the hashrate/$ - considering you can't slot more GPUs into a M1 Studio and need to buy a whole other system, I'd imagine that it's current price would leave it uncompetitive for miners even if it did match the 3090 perf. (nvidia had the same issue with miners still preferring their LHR consumer card to their attempts to push miners to their business tier cards)

1_player 5y ago

Intel has been sitting twiddling its thumbs for years, so it was easy for Apple to actually innovate and create an incredible processor, also controlling the entire stack and being able to switch from x86 helps. But on the GPU side NVIDIA and AMD have been battling it out for a while, competition is tight, and thinking Apple could come, compete and actually beat the fastest GPU currently available for consumers is a bit of a pipe dream, in hindsight. The GPU market hasn't been sitting on laurels for as long as Intel has been. That said, I am still positively surprised at how close they managed to reach the 3090, but alas, no cigar.

q-big 5y ago
> Intel has been sitting twiddling its thumbs for years, What evidence do you have for that? Intel really wanted to release (in my opinion) very interesting processors, but had serious problems over years with getting their 10 nm process "stable" (i.e. sufficiently high and reproducible yield rates). They even back-ported some of their planned CPU architectures to their working 14 nm process "just to get something out". Since these processors were not developed with 14 nm in mind, they of course were not as good as they could have been.
- ColonelPhantom 5y ago
  Intel did have any major advances from 2nd gen all the way until the 7th. The advancements were generally small (single-digit often) IPC or clock speed improvements. Only after AMD released Ryzen, Intel had to respond at their 8th gen by cranking up core counts. And IPC did not have any increases, until 11th gen(the backported arch you mentioned). In my opinion, the performance delta between 28nm Sandy Bridge and 14nm Kaby Lake is ridiculously small.
  - morganvachon 5y ago
    > In my opinion, the performance delta between 28nm Sandy Bridge and 14nm Kaby Lake is ridiculously small. Two of my Linux workstations are Sandy Bridge and Kaby Lake, and my real world experience bears this out. I can't distinguish between the two for everyday use cases; only synthetic benchmarks show any real advantage in the newer system. I can't speak for Windows performance differences, as my only Windows system is my gaming rig with a Ryzen 5 3600, which of course trounces both of the workstations no matter the OS.

daviddever23box 5y ago

Was the game in question run under Rosetta 2 emulation? If so, given the overhead, that would have been incredibly important to disclose. Bring on the marketing and PR battles!

bkolobara 5y ago
Yes, but if there are close to 0 games that don't require Rosetta, what's the point? Disclosing a theoretical emulation overhead that can't be proven would even be worse. It's either this or no comparison at all. And it's a game that apple often uses in their promotional materials.
- Closi 5y ago
  > Yes, but if there are close to 0 games that don't require Rosetta, what's the point? Because it's not being marketed as a gaming computer, and other use-cases aren't run under Rosetta (e.g. 3D rendering, video editing etc). e.g. Apple's marketing doesn't claim gaming performance, it claims this: > You can run complex particle simulations or work with massive 3D environments that were previously impossible to render. And with twice the media engine resources, M1 Ultra can support up to 18 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video playback — something no other personal computer can do. Their marketing page doesn't even mention games...

andy_ppp 5y ago

I'm interested to see what the next 10 years of Apple Silicon bring... they must have thought about it. What does everyone think?

SirHound 5y ago
Personally I think this entire situation has been at the behest of the AR push. Same with stuff like putting LIDAR in the iPhone. Push that price/performance down in a proprietary way so that when AR/VR becomes a market you have an unassailable advantage. At least that's my pet theory. In the meantime it's paid dividends as a Mac fan.
- andy_ppp 5y ago
  Yes was thinking that - AR/VR is going to be interesting - I definitely wouldn't trust Facebook recording everything I do and adding their ad tech to everything I see while in AR...
mhh__ 5y ago
Better intel CPUs
neogodless 5y ago
Increasingly improbable marketing claims. /s (the M1 variants are awesome, but as per the article, their marketing... stretches the truth)

dtx1 5y ago

These Benchmarks are all rather useless because they lack the necessary details on methodology and context. For example Shadow of the Tomb raider may very well CPU Bottlenecked with that 3090 give it only runs a 10900 (non-k?) and who knows how the port for the M1 Ultra is done? Is it running x86 Emulation and something like DXVK or is it a truly native port?

my123 5y ago
It's emulated. That brings down GPU perf by a noticeable amount on its own. (more barriers to be able to run with existing GPU API semantics)
- dtx1 5y ago
  If it's emulated than the benchmark is completely useless
- Macha 5y ago
  Though DirectX emulation on Linux via DXVK usually matches and sometimes outperforms native DirectX on Windows, so it's not a given.
  - dtx1 5y ago
    Even if true for M1 Macs, it will still invalidate the benchmarks because it's not an objective comparison edit: so i get downvoted for commenting that a benchmark needs to control external variables (like emulation vs native) in order to get a valid comparison of the underlining hardware? Never change apple fanboys, never change!
    - Macha 5y ago
      The dispute between what makes a fair benchmark is because the of the question of whether it's fair to test the M1 Ultra from the single deployment it's available in (with its fixed OS, API support and therefore required emulation for many use cases), or whether you can come up with some test that somehow tests the M1 Ultra in isolation. Until either Asahi/Windows support for M1 gets further along, there are more M1 Ultra equipped machines, or more workloads get ported to Apple native (either because there's incentive enough despite the difficulties Apple introduces, or because Apple reduces those difficulties), it's hard to have an apples-to-apples comparison of the M1 Ultra vs 3090. I fall more to the camp that we have to evaluate the package of the Mac Studio as presented for now. Especially as it's not like Apple is going to sell this standalone, so the only other deployment in the near future is a likely M1 Ultra Mac Pro. This means it can have the advantages (lower power draw, OS specifically optimised for it) and disadvantages (emulation for common workloads) that come with that.

captainbland 5y ago

That's not super surprising. The 3090 is a beast. The fact that they've gotten into a similar ballpark to maybe the 3070 based on those numbers with a SoC is pretty impressive, though. That said, am I the only one getting annoyed with shallow comparisons of the M1 products? Or is SEO BS hiding the good stuff? It seems like the rule most sites are following is 50% or more of your benchmark graphs should be Geekbench which is quite eye-roll inducing when you've been spoiled by comprehensive benchmarks in the PC market for decades.

q-big 5y ago
> That said, am I the only one getting annoyed with shallow comparisons of the M1 products? Or is SEO BS hiding the good stuff? Could "Many tech 'journalists' are Apple fanboys" be a reasonable explanation?
- reaperducer 5y ago
  I think it's closer to the truth to say that many tech "journalists" aren't actual trained journalists. Just bloggers cosplaying journalism.
  - rjzzleep 5y ago
    Looking at the media right now, it seems many professional journalists are the same.
    - reaperducer 5y ago
      It depends on how you define "the media" and "professional journalist." It's more complicated than most people think. Some of the world's best actual journalists, like Peter Jennings, were high school dropouts. At the same time, some of the world's most prominent people who often present themselves as journalists are absolutely not.
      - greggsy 5y ago

sinuhe69 5y ago

Perhaps against the RTX 3080 mobile but not the RTX 3090 on a PC?

tpush 5y ago

I don't understand why people compare hardware using software benchmarks that don't actually do the same work. Geekbench's Compute is useless for M1s with more than 32 Cores, according to Anandtech. Shadow of the Tomb Raider runs as an x86 program under Rosetta 2. Isn't there a single GPU benchmark that actually does the same work so that comparisons can actually be made?

Tenoke 5y ago
Presumably because it's a real life workload that is more relevant to consumers and easier to understand.
- tpush 5y ago
  Sure, if the consumer wants to run Shadow of the Tomb Raider, that's true. But benchmarks where one hardware has to do much more work than the other is obviously not fit to determine the actual performance differences between hardware; and that is exactly what the article we're commenting on is doing.
  - MAGZine 5y ago
    Everyone understands the point you're making, it's just a pointless point. People aren't concerned about the hardware itself. They're concerned about what it can do. If circumstances mean that your powerful hardware can't be utilized, then the powerful hardware is just extra cost and no benefit.
    - trvr 5y ago
      Tom's Hardware. ;-)
ggreg84 5y ago
> Isn't there a single GPU benchmark that actually does the same work so that comparisons can actually be made? Apple does not support OpenGL or Vulkan, only Metal, and most app devs have better things to do than rewriting code for the Mac. The recommended way of gaming on a mac is to use emulation by emulating whatever the game is used with a metal wrapper. IMO the claim that these benchmarks aren't fair is naive. I don't care about how good the hardware is, but about what performance I get. If I get poor performance because the software, drivers, etc. are poor, I want to know that.

Mashimo 5y ago

> delivering 142 fps at 4K and 114 fps at 1440p Why does the FPS go down with lower resolution?

Teledhil 5y ago
That graph from the verge can’t be right. There is no way you get more FPS at 4K than at 1080p on Shadow of the Tomb Raider while keeping all the other settings the same.
maverwa 5y ago
I was wondering the same and checked the source (the verge) and they have the resolutions swapped which makes more sense. https://www.theverge.com/22981815/apple-mac-studio-m1-ultra-max-review https://www.theverge.com/22981815/apple-mac-studio-m1-ultra-...

bitL 5y ago

All Apple has to do is to enable workstation-level features in its drivers and they'd beat 3090 handily. Even Titan RTX demolishes 3090 with workstation drivers in software that uses those features. As for raw performance, 3090 is far ahead.

oblio 5y ago
What are "workstation level features in drivers"?
rowanG077 5y ago
What does Apple gain gimping their highest tier hardware product?
- flembat 5y ago
  If this transition is like the others the performance of Apple software and the operating system are going to increase with every new release for the next couple of years as they optimize it.
- bitL 5y ago
  Where do you see any gimping? It's known that NVidia gimps its consumer range by shipping drivers that are slow in some tasks despite the same hardware being able to be much faster. My comment was about Apple getting an easy win just by not doing that in pro tasks that matter, in other words beating 3090 in some apps is fairly easy due to NVidia's politics.
  - rowanG077 5y ago
    Yes Nvidia gimps because they have other products that are not gimped. But Apple doesn't. The M1 Ultra is the best of the best they have to offer. I'm not saying Apple gimps their hardware. I'm asking because you are saying Apple gimps their hardware by not releasing "workstation drivers". Thus I ask you why would apple Gimp their hardware.
    - 5y ago

matthewmacleod 5y ago

This article is infuriatingly bad. First off, I don't doubt for a second that Apple has over-egged the performance of the M1 Ultra's GPU – or has, at least, selected performance indicators which aren't totally representative of common workflows. It's important that we have reviews that make it clear that this is the case and look at more useful numbers. But this article is a terrible example of doing that. It's just a republishing of minimal benchmark results from another outlet, but without even the tiny amount of analysis that was conducted there. Even the original article gives us close to no information about the scope or setup of this testing, and proceeds to draw conclusions that are suspect at best – for instance, there's a <20% gap in 1440p "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" framerate between the Ultra and the RTX3090 – not mentioning that this is a game that's running under Rosetta – and no 4K comparison, which is the only one likely to be GPU-bound. More importantly, the actual benchmark results are clearly and obviously wrong, with the numbers for 1080p and 4k performance being switched (unless graphics cards magically now render faster at higher resolution). The Verge has fixed the original, but how can you realistically quote these numbers and make a judgement on them without noticing this? Just an absolutely embarrassing indictment of the state of technology journalism.

smilespray 5y ago
...not to mention the never-ending comment threads on HN where Apple Is Evil, and All Apple Users Are Idiots.

jmyeet 5y ago

I'm wary of synthetic benchmarks. Are they representative of anything meaningful? Are they gamed? It's why people tend to look for real-world performance. For GPUs this often means games. This system too can be gamed (eg drivers silently optimizing for performance). Some games will also favour a particular architecture. Taken in totality you tend to get a good big picture view. Such real-world benchmarks are thin on the ground for the M1 Ultra thus far and are clouded by things like programs and drivers not being optimized and/or translation layers. This will improve over time. But I've seen a couple of game benchmarks for the M1 Ultra that seem to show it's >50% of the FPS of the 3090. That's honestly astounding. I'm still confused by the power draw of the M1 Ultra. It's claimed to be 60W but the Mac Studio seems to draw >300W so what's the reality? But if a CPU/GPU combo does in fact draw 60W (compared to the 350W+ for the 3090 alone and another 100W+ for any likely CPU) and gets over 50% of the performance? That is absolutely huge (if true). This is still a first-generation product. Many expect the M2 later this year. That may bring respectable (but definitely not cutting edge) GPU performance to the Mac Mini. Apple still has a lot of headroom here.

Someone 5y ago
https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/specs/ https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/specs/ says “Maximum continuous power: 370W” I think that’s because it has to power all those ports, too. Google tells me Thunderbolt 4 can go up to 100W.
philistine 5y ago
Thunderbolt 4 can support one hundred watts and needs a power supply to account for that.

YetAnotherNick 5y ago

But they never said that that it is faster than 3090, they said it uses 60% less power for the same performance. The shady thing they did is they trimmed the plot by watts to remove full performance of 3090, which might be intentional to give wrong idea to most. But it was clear to me it doesn't have same performance as 3090.

vbezhenar 5y ago
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/oWgfEtRLYJkM3sQZm5UcQY-970-80.png.webp https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/oWgfEtRLYJkM3sQZm5UcQY-970...
microtonal 5y ago
On the other hand, the plot of the 3090 flattens so much @ 320W, that you wouldn't suspect a doubling of performance at its peak wattage (which I think is ~360W?). Of course, this is marketing material. But as far as I am concerned, the jury is still out, I'd like to see a benchmark with native binaries (non-Rosetta) and some optimization for Metal. Though even if the performance was half of the RTX 3090, that would be mighty impressive. I have an RTX 3090 on my desk and under full load it is loud and consumes a lot of power. Mac Studio + M1 Ultra's fans are apparently barely audible.

nottorp 5y ago

However the 3090 eats more power than the whole mac system? That’s a compromise I’m very willing to make.

komuher 5y ago
3090 is on Samsung 8nm 2+years old node so it will always be worse and still apple gpu claims are always oversaturated and its good people are talking about it considering apple propaganda of FASTEST CONSUMER GPU. Despite this m1 ultra gpu is a big step for all people intrested in apple market and DL/ML workloads
- microtonal 5y ago
  3090 is on Samsung 8nm 2+years old node so it will always be worse While the M1 Ultra is the latest CPU, it still uses A14/M1 cores from 2020. It's likely that Apple made a lot of progress on the microarchitecture since then, plus rumors are that M2 will switch to a 4nm node.
  - komuher 5y ago
    Samsung 8nm was almost 2 years old when rtx 3090 was coming to the market (english isnt my native language in my head it was clearer :D) Apple is on TSMC 5nm here comment from 2years ago about 8nm samsung vs 7nm TSMC "Hell, Samsung 8nm is really a 10nm process, it's just an extension of Samsung 10nm with a ~15-20% improvement in transistor density. TSMC 7nm (EUV 4 layer) is nearly twice as dense as Samsung 8nm. non-EUV (first gen TSMC 7nm) is still far denser than Samsung 8nm."
- nottorp 5y ago
  > considering apple propaganda of FASTEST CONSUMER GPU Well as a mostly Apple user, I don't read Apple propaganda. Or nvidia propaganda for that matter. The M1 Max mac studio's full system consumption on load seems to be ~50 W. I wonder how much performance nvidia can deliver with that. I think ... they simply don't have a product in that power budget? I know most people only care about FASTEST CONSUMER GPU (yay, it doubles as a leaf blower and a space heater) but I still think nvidia's best product was the 1050Ti ... decent 1080 performance in 75 W.

throwaway4good 5y ago

Thanks for that; then ethereum miners don't have to buy this thing.

Shadonototra 5y ago

People miss the fking point What about power usage? ;) At equal power usage, M1 decimates the RTX 3090

vbezhenar 5y ago
Those who buy 3090 don't care about power usage.
- StreamBright 5y ago
  So on one hand we have a man made climate change and on the other hand we do not care how much power a GPU uses. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

lvl102 5y ago

I’ve yet to see a fair comparison/assessment on M1 Ultra’s GPU performance in terms of ML potential. The same with 3D rendering outside of Blender 3.1 speeds which is not optimal (I also wonder if industrial rendering engines such as Renderman will support ARM in the future). As more and more softwares optimize for ARM, I see a great deal of potential for these machines above and beyond what is possible right now within limited ecosystem. I am 100% convinced Apple struck gold with this.

sod 5y ago

If we don't eschew praising nvidia for its glorious performance, I guess we deserve that the rumored 4090 will draw 600 watts of power. Nvidia delivers what the majority wants.

radiKal07 5y ago

Why do they always benchmark Tomb Raider?

Sporktacular 5y ago
It's available natively on both platforms.
- EugeneOZ 5y ago
  Then why Rosetta 2 was used?
  - Sporktacular 5y ago
    Was it? My mistake.

jasoneckert 5y ago

The most frustrating part about reading this article for me isn't the article itself, but that Apple - in fine tradition - didn't back up their graphics and performance claims with anything concrete and reproducible. With M1, I think they can move beyond these shady marketing tactics entirely and focus on what they're developing. In other words, promote the merits of their architecture and systems (which are excellent) rather than try to compare Apples with oranges.

whywhywhywhy 5y ago
Been like this for years now, always remember the Apple twittersphere gushing about how insanely powerful the iPhone and iPad processors were yet even years after the news of this we didn't really see the platforms doing any remarkable forms of processing.
- auggierose 5y ago
  They are insanely powerful, and if you write the right apps for it, you will see that. I've written a custom CAD app from scratch for iPad, and was blown away by the speed I saw with Metal. I mean, they turned these chips into desktops, because that's how good they are. Wtf are you talking about?
- post_break 5y ago
  The phone in my pocket renders 4k60 video faster than my desktop, with no moving pieces. My iPad is even faster. It wasn't until that iPad processor went into my Mac that I could do that without getting burned or putting my bose headphones on.
seanw444 5y ago
Good pun. I agree. M1 with Metal is already quite good. Just leave it at that. You're not going to be able to compete with a high-end discrete GPU in most areas, so stop pretending.

EugeneOZ 5y ago

So it's around 3080, with insanely lower power consumption? Sounds really amazing. Apple, with such capabilities you need to invest in gaming/APIs/consoles.

Sporktacular 5y ago

"Sure, there might be a few specific benchmarks where the M1 Ultra's GPU might come out ahead on the performance-per-watt scale" M1 performance-per-watt ruins any GPU by Nvidia on any such benchmark.

rat9988 5y ago
Do you have a benchmark to back it up? Genuinely curious.
- Sporktacular 5y ago
  Not benchmarks but a back of the envelope calculation. When idling a 3090 draws ~20W and an M1 ~200mW. At full power its ~400W vs 100W, so considering the performance of both at maximum and interpolating between those power values it's a pretty sold bet. Older GPUs with larger node sizes would fare even worse.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

pacifika 5y ago

Performance per dollar is my benchmark

xena 5y ago
With how much it costs to get a GPU these days it may just be worth it to get the Mac lol

Decabytes 5y ago

One question I’ we never gotten an answer for is what about arm makes these apple chips so good? Is it just that Apple can design them themselves compared to when they were with Intel? Or is there something about Arm that makes it better for making the processors that Apple likes? Outside of the M1 ultra I feel like most of the advancements are just due to be on the newest processes

ZetaZero 5y ago
ARM makes instruction decoding simpler. More memory bandwidth also helps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25257932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25257932
sliken 5y ago
Well apple got an architecture license, has been iterating on their design for many years, has bought companies with significant expertise, and has been pretty aggressive with making their Iphone/Ipad CPUs the best that they can be, and more recently applied a very similar design to MBPs, Mini, and Studio. M1 is based on the Apple A14 core and the future M2 will be based on the A15 core that's been shipping for awhile now in iphones. Sadly you can't take advantages of Apple's CPU designs unless you buy into their ecosystem. Here's hoping ASAHI linux (Marcan's port to the M1) goes well. There's little things like ditching the 32 bit ISA, not a big deal, but does make each new iteration that much easier from a design and testing standpoint. ARM also has a loser memory model, which makes it easier to use more effectively use existing bandwidth. But there's no magic. It's a straight up aggressive design, wide instruction decode (yes that's easier for arm than x86-64), large re-order buffer, wide issue, etc. Anandtech has a nice summary comparing various M1 features to the Intel and AMD competition. Apple has a high IPC and they make the most of their lower clocks (usually around 3.2 GHz). The chips from Intel/AMD that they are compared against are often in the 4-5 GHz range and burn significantly more power because of that.

kloch 5y ago

I don't think there are any 3090's with 128GB of ram however. If you need that much ultra high bandwidth ram the M1 Ultra is the only game in town.

gandalfff 5y ago

Are there any Speedometer benchmark results for the M1 Ultra yet? I've looked, but haven't found any. Given how much time I spend in the browser/Electron apps, browser benchmarks are the only benchmarks that are relevant to me (tongue placed firmly in cheek, I'm sure the entry-level M1 would suit me just fine).

officeplant 5y ago

I find it strange that people even keep pushing the comparison with the death of EGPU's for modern Macs. I'm just glad we have some serious GPU muscle for both gaming and graphical work.

tromp 5y ago

For applications that are performance limited by memory bandwidth, the M1 Ultra should perform at 85% of a 3090 given their respective bandwidth of 800 GB/s versus 936.2 GB/s. People using such applications where additionally power efficiency is paramount, such as memory hard proof-of-work, should be very keen in seeing whether the M1 Ultra lives up to its promise...

rayiner 5y ago

> Not everyone puts a lot of stock in synthetic benchmarks like Geekbench, so the Verge also fired up Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and the RTX 3090 easily mopped the floor with the M1 Ultra, delivering 142 fps at 4K and 114 fps at 1440p. Unfortunately, the Mac Studio could only muster 108 fps and 96 fps, respectively. Games are always less optimized for Mac/Metal than for Windows. It would have been better to use a content creation benchmark.

Maursault 5y ago
> delivering 142 fps at 4K and 114 fps at 1440p... Why and how would these GPUs deliver more fps with higher resolution. 4K is 2160p or 2x1080. Shouldn't 1440p (2x720) deliver more fps? Someone please tell me what is going on here.

KolenCh 5y ago

May be an unpopular take here: comparing the spec, we already knew that (3090 is faster.) We can look at theoretical peak FLOPS (32bit), and also available memory, and internal bandwidth. Of the 3, 3090 clearly wins in FLOPS, kind of a draw in internal bandwidth depending on how you read into it, and M1 Ultra has more memory. Now, Apple’s benchmark, like all benchmark releases by their own manufacturer including Intel, use tests that’s favorable to their specific hardwares. No 2 workloads are the same, there probably exists some workload that your hardware run fastest comparing to the competition. In this case, relying on GPU alone doesn’t seem to make the M1 Ultra comes first, but they have a secret weapon: unified memory. Anyone who uses GPGPU for example will know that the latency to copy back and forth between main and GPU memory can be a deal breaker in some workload. So to choose a a benchmark making M1 Ultra stands out then would involve picking some intensive workload that involve moving data between the GPU and CPU. That movement would diminish a bit of the gain from 3090 and if choosing the mix right, M1 Ultra can come out on top. I’m not accusing Apple to be disingenuous, at least not in the sense that is not a common practice in the industry. Apple’s chart is very uncommon though. Eg at a few points they keep showing the same statistics comparing it to another thing, where consecutive charts are just changing the “other thing”. Any sane person would put all of them in the same chart. The reason? Probably because nothing is in scale so drawing all of them in the same chart is meaningless.

JohnTHaller 5y ago

The graph from the Verge embedded in this article is mislabeled. 4K should have the lowest fps and 1080p the highest. From the Verge's testing, the $6,200 M1 Mac Ultra's performance in Shadow of the Tomb Raider is as follows: 4K: 60fps 1440p: 96fps 1080p: 108fps The Verge doesn't mention what graphics setting SoTR is set at, but assuming it is Ultra, the M1 Ultra's performance is about on par with an RTX 3060 Ti (MSRP $400): 4K: 54fps 1440p: 96fps 1080p: 130fps Here's what a 3070 Ti (MSRP $600) gets: 4K: 67fps 1440p: 111fps 1080p: 162fps Here's what a 3080 Ti (MSRP $1200) gets: 4K: 83fps 1440p: 147fps 1080p: 210fps GPU performance in games doesn't scale linearly. You pay a lot more for a small boost in fps. Sourced from gpucheck.com which loosely matches up with the reviews I checked.