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The M1 Ultra gets fully half of the performance of a desktop RTX 3090 in both synthetic and real world benchmarks. That’s extremely impressive. Sure, no one ha

The M1 Ultra gets fully half of the performance of a desktop RTX 3090 in both synthetic and real world benchmarks. That’s extremely impressive. Sure, no one has CUDA except NVidia but it looks like Apples GPU architecture really truly does work quite well at this stage. I wouldn’t be shocked to see them catch up to the highest performance GPUs in the next 5 years or so. I mean I also would t be shocked if they didn’t, but it seems like a reasonable possibility at this point. Which is crazy for a SOC, especially one borne from mobile phone architectures. I also feel like M1 rackmount servers could be amazing if Linux ran on them.

novok 5y ago
So the m1 ultra is like a 2070S or a little bit slower than a 3060ti? A ryzen 5950 also has a similar amount of cores, and if most of the power efficiency is coming from being a process node ahead due to special tsmc contracts and covid, its not a durable advantage either because it is not due to technical innovation from apple. The m1 ultra and max basically targeted for video editing as their target market. Same with the m1 max pro with it’s xdr screen to become a great hdr editing laptop. M1 studio similarly is targeted for the video editors that want a mac mini made for them.
- josephg 5y ago
  You won’t take advantage of the GPU cores, but the M1 is also a fantastic chip for compiling code. The core count and memory bandwidth are delightful.
  - novok 5y ago
    Your paying a lot for all of that GPU compute with the amount of die space it takes up. Apple's Intel CPU options were also pretty old and low power, so it feels like a much bigger difference if you are stuck on apple platforms to do your work, like iOS. If apple kept up with x86 CPUs the difference on macOS wouldn't have been as wide. When you compare a Ryzen 5000 series with the same core count, they are fairly comparable in compile times AFAIK.
    - josephg 5y ago
      > they are fairly comparable in compile times AFAIK. Yeah I can confirm that. I have an 8 core ryzen 5800, and its performance when compiling rust code is almost identical to my 8+2 core macbook pro. The macbook pulls ahead slightly in single core performance, but I think the ryzen takes longer before thermally throttling - which makes sense given its a desktop workstation.
- runnerup 5y ago
  You’re looking at it from a perspective of “this instant in time”. I’m assuming that some of the phenomenal, market-beating growth of the Apple Silicon architecture over the past 5-10 years will continue. Also if Apple merely creates a quad M1 Pro, as some prognosticate, that would likely match the 3090 in performance.
justsomehnguy 5y ago
> M1 rackmount servers could be amazing With only 128 GB RAM max? No.

novok 5y ago

So the m1 ultra is like a 2070S or a little bit slower than a 3060ti? A ryzen 5950 also has a similar amount of cores, and if most of the power efficiency is coming from being a process node ahead due to special tsmc contracts and covid, its not a durable advantage either because it is not due to technical innovation from apple. The m1 ultra and max basically targeted for video editing as their target market. Same with the m1 max pro with it’s xdr screen to become a great hdr editing laptop. M1 studio similarly is targeted for the video editors that want a mac mini made for them.

josephg 5y ago
You won’t take advantage of the GPU cores, but the M1 is also a fantastic chip for compiling code. The core count and memory bandwidth are delightful.
- novok 5y ago
  Your paying a lot for all of that GPU compute with the amount of die space it takes up. Apple's Intel CPU options were also pretty old and low power, so it feels like a much bigger difference if you are stuck on apple platforms to do your work, like iOS. If apple kept up with x86 CPUs the difference on macOS wouldn't have been as wide. When you compare a Ryzen 5000 series with the same core count, they are fairly comparable in compile times AFAIK.
  - josephg 5y ago
    > they are fairly comparable in compile times AFAIK. Yeah I can confirm that. I have an 8 core ryzen 5800, and its performance when compiling rust code is almost identical to my 8+2 core macbook pro. The macbook pulls ahead slightly in single core performance, but I think the ryzen takes longer before thermally throttling - which makes sense given its a desktop workstation.
runnerup 5y ago
You’re looking at it from a perspective of “this instant in time”. I’m assuming that some of the phenomenal, market-beating growth of the Apple Silicon architecture over the past 5-10 years will continue. Also if Apple merely creates a quad M1 Pro, as some prognosticate, that would likely match the 3090 in performance.

justsomehnguy 5y ago

> M1 rackmount servers could be amazing With only 128 GB RAM max? No.