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2022 Mac Studio (20-core M1 Ultra) Review
- ProllyInfamous 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson's_law
- Reason077 5y ago> "Nano-texture glass gives up a little bit of the sharp vibrant look you get with a glossy screen, but it’s worth the trade in usability, to be able to see the screen without distractions all day long." "Nano-texture glass" is pretty much just what all screens were like back in the days of CRTs and pre-glossy flat screens. Now Apple are charging $300 for it!
- jjtheblunt 5y agothe pixels are WAY smaller nowadays, though; perhaps that constrains the nanotexture fabrication process in an expensive way?
- astrange 5y ago"Nano-texture" is different from matte - matte LCDs don't have reflective glare, but they also have much lower contrast and you can see the grain if you look closely. Nanotexture doesn't have those issues, but it's expensive.
- olliej 5y agothat was my thought as well ("yay marketing") but apparently it's actually structurally different so that it maintains contrast. I ordered one in early march and if it ever actually arrives I'll try to remember to reply on visible difference :D (not kidding, it was due late march, then slipped to Aripl 22-27, and today moved to May 23-?? )
- numpad0 5y agoIt is a marketing name, but refers to a special procedure used to create the matte surface, not the fact that it’s matte. By the way, CRTs were glossy. We wiped them with wet towels.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago> By the way, CRTs were glossy. We wiped them with wet towels. I remember the crackling, if you wiped them, within a few minutes of last being on. Nowadays, there's lots of folks that think "CRT" is a political hotbutton topic.
- toast0 5y ago> Nowadays, there's lots of folks that think "CRT" is a political hotbutton topic. Well, who wants big government shoving their noses into how efficient our screens are, and whether they have leaded glass or not. :P
- Reason077 5y agoMost CRTs weren't glossy in the same way that modern flat panels are. They diffused reflections: you couldn't see a crystal-clear mirror image of yourself on a dark screen like you can with today's screens.
- cglong 5y agoEditorialized title. Original was "2022 Mac Studio (20-core M1 Ultra) Review".
- pvg 5y agoemail these in
- cglong 5y agoDone! Thank you for the reminder :)
- avidphantasm 5y agoCould you explain what “these” are that need to be emailed in?
- electroly 5y agoTitle corrections. @dang can't read every thread to see these posts, but if you email him, he can take a look.
- avidphantasm 5y agoMakes sense. Thank you for clarifying.
- MBCook 5y agoI didn’t submit it but in this case the original title is so generic no one would have looked at it so I’m kind of happy they put the important part in the headline here.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dang 5y agoChanged now. (Submitted title was 'Near-linear speedup for CPU compute on 20-core Mac Studio'.) Thanks!
- microtonal 5y agoAbove, we’re looking at parallel performance of the NASA USM3D CFD solver as it computes flow over a classic NACA 0012 airfoil section at low speed conditions. If this solver relies on matrix multiplication and uses the macOS Accelerate framework, you are seeing this speedup because M1 Macs have AMX matrix multiplication co-processors. In single precision GEMM, the M1 is faster than an 8 core Ryzen 3700X and a bit slower than a 12 core Ryzen 5900X. The M1 Pro doubles the GFLOPS of the M1 (due to having AMX co-processors for both performance core clusters). And the M1 Ultra again doubles the GFLOPs (4 performance core clusters, each with an AMX unit). Single-precision matrix multiplication benchmark results for the Ryzen 3700X/3900X and Apple M1/M1 Pro/M1 Ultra are here: https://twitter.com/danieldekok/status/1511348597215961093?s=21&t=2v6pZmDWSYGtShH61THtPA https://twitter.com/danieldekok/status/1511348597215961093?s...
- bee_rider 5y agoJust for anyone as out of touch with the MacOS ecosystem as me: Accelerate includes a BLAS implementation, so at least seems plausible (depending on how this library was compiled) that their special instructions might have been used.
- torginus 5y agoBut that makes me think, what prevents people from running these calculations on the GPU? Even the memory is shared - the few 100 gflops they get out of the M1 ultra is pocket change in GPU terms.
- the_svd_doctor 5y agoWell that particular NASA code is from the 90’s and in Fortran. Maybe with MPI. That’s probably part of the reason why.
- willis936 5y agoDon't all high performance math libraries have the option of LAPACK interfaces?
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- bebort45 5y agoI'm curious why Geekbench haven't put the Mac Studio on their Mac leaderboard yet - https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks. There are plenty of benchmarks submitted https://browser.geekbench.com/search?page=7&q=Apple+M1+Ultra&utf8=%E2%9C%93 https://browser.geekbench.com/search?page=7&q=Apple+M1+Ultra...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
- zamadatix 5y agoOutside the rest of the claim not making sense how exactly would one compare the price of the M1 Ultra to an Intel CPU in the first place? The M1 Ultra doesn't have a price tag and even if it did you'd still not have a number you'd compare to the cost of a CPU.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
- semigroupoid 5y agoIt is pretty useless to compare the price of a single CPU with the price of an entire PC…
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoTheodolite is an awesome app (that I hardly ever need to use). This guy def knows his math (and working with Apple apps).
- ac29 5y agoDoesnt this just suggest they are leaving some performance on the table then? The reason the Intel processors scale non-linearly is because they run each core faster when there are less cores under load.
- sliken 5y agoDunno, looks like classic memory bottleneck to me. The m1 ultra has 800GB/sec, but I believe a bit more than half of that is available to the CPUs. The rest is for the GPU and various on chip accelerators. So with about half the cores (16 vs 28) and twice the bandwidth (say 420GB/sec vs 180 GB/sec) it manages twice the performance. Looks pretty impressive to me. Looks like the Apple is significantly less memory bottle necked than the 6 channel Xeon W.
- ip26 5y agoOnly in a certain sense. You can only turn the voltage so high before things melt, and you can only turn the clocks so high until you crash, and then that's basically it, you can't go any faster. The perfect core could be dialed from fanless to water cooling with linear performance, but it doesn't quite exist today. Intel chips have top end, Apple chips have low end, but an i7 fed 3W isn't going to perform and an M1 can't take any more voltage. The tension is figuring out how to build very large structures to perform useful work with gobs of power, yet still scale down to low power budgets. Imagine a core that can dynamically morph from P core to E core & back on the fly.
- sydthrowaway 5y agoI bet you can build an AMD system that beats this handily and costs half as much.
- wildrhythms 5y agoAnd the power consumption?
- sudosysgen 5y agoDo you actually care about power consumption in a desktop computer under very heavy workload? By the way, the M1 Ultra has a 370W power supply, so really the question is do you really care about the difference between 300 and 400 watts in this use case?
- paulmd 5y ago> Do you actually care about power consumption in a desktop computer under very heavy workload? yes, many people do, especially since that becomes heat in your room. > By the way, the M1 Ultra has a 370W power supply, so really the question is do you really care about the difference between 300 and 400 watts in this use case? Complete non-sequitur, you could put a 1.5kw power supply on an R7 5700G or an i3, that doesn't mean it pulls 1.5kw. you also should be able to express this without using the flamebait style, that is not appropriate or welcomed on this site. Instead of "by the way...." you can simply say "the M1 Ultra pulls 370W so ...." (or you could, if that were true).
- sudosysgen 5y agoThere is no easy way to know how much the Mac Studio can pull without using a wall meter. We know that reported power consumption is inaccurate on M1 devices, from Anadtech's testing of the M1 Max, and I doubt it's very different on the Mac Studio. In any case, the difference is not going to be much. As far as heating a room, really, I can assure you that you will barely notice 100W. There are screens that will use more power than that (such as, amongst others, the XDR screen). I say this as someone who lived with a 900W power hog of a computer in places where temperature hits 42 in shade.
- mrjin 5y agoSo a new discovery of Amdahl's Law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
- MPSimmons 5y agoCan someone please project that curve out and estimate where it starts to flatten?
- sliken 5y agoThat's not very useful. That curve might be a combination of a few different bottlenecks, l1 cache misses, scheduling bubbles, efficient scheduling of instructions within a certain window, l2 cache misses, cache contention in L1 or L2, AMX utilization, memory utilization (latency or bandwidth limited), MMU contention/page misses, etc. etc. etc. The percentage of all those can change as you change the number of cores, and the different levels of the memory hierarchy get different levels of contention, latency limits, or bandwidth limits. So in an ideal world you can draw a graph and extrapolate, but in the real world you might do significant better or worse. There are cases (admittedly rather rare) where performance increases by more than linear in relation to cores.
- O_H_E 5y ago> There are cases (admittedly rather rare) where performance increases by more than linear in relation to cores. Ooh that's interesting, do you have any leads or examples?
- sliken 5y agoIt's called super linear scaling. If you have a fixed size problem, that doesn't communicate much, and is CPU intensive you can run on a single core and be limited by memory bandwidth or latency. But as you use more cores you can fit in L3, L2, and even L1 as you add more cores. It's seen sometime even on multinode jobs. But it's definitely the exception to the rule, but it does happen. It's helped by the fact that each level of cache is approximately 10x faster, so fitting in a cache is a huge win. So running in ram on 1 node might be 20x slower than running in cache on 10 nodes.
- pleb_nz 5y agoI was running a Lenovo p15v with fedora before changing over to m1 pro MacBook. The hardware is nice, but to be honest it's not much of a speed up over my Lenovo so I'm giving it more time. Docker is definitely a lot slower I have read of massive performance improvement with Linux on m1pro though so it might be a swap to that when more distros are available. Question is, has MacOS become bloated or not had attention to performance to make best use of the new hardware?
- jitl 5y agoAre you running x86 containers or ARM containers? I’m on a 64GB M1 and my x86 container build takes 15 mins from scratch on the M1, 10 mins from scratch on my 2019 Intel MBP, but the ARM container build takes 6 mins on the M1. With or without the Docker pain the battery life is so worth it. Can spend 2 days working from the couch without plugging it in.
- dmix 5y agoThe battery life really is amazing. This is the sort of thing that really takes a laptop’s UX to the next level, while still being highly performant. Plus for PC gaming I’ve been using a cloud server via Paperspace and I play games like Cyberpunk with 4K on ultra settings with pretty good latency (thanks to 1.5 gigabit fibre) and even some VR games using Steam VR + Parsec on a Quest 2. I really don’t see the point in building a PC anymore. And I was really really close to building a Ryzen one before I discovered Paperspace/https://shadow.tech/ https://shadow.tech/
- rufugee 5y agoWow...I mean, I love the battery life in my 16" M1 Max Pro. Similar specs to yours...64GB of ram and 8TB ssd...but I've never seen two days of use. Not even really a full day...I can get around 6-8 hours on the couch without plugging in. Huge, and I mean HUGE improvement over my previous 16" Intel, which seemed to make it around 3 hours before calling it a day...
- mechanical_bear 5y ago
- walrus01 5y ago> If we rescale (by double!) the vertical axis to fit here, a pretty amazing picture emerges: That second chart with the "amazing" redline is comparing it to 2010 through 2017 era CPUs. Now compare it to a current generation zen3 based $599 AMD CPU in a $350 motherboard with $450 of RAM. Or a $599 Intel 12th-gen "core" series. For $3999 nevermind $7999 you can build one real beast of a workstation that fits in a normal midtower ATX case.
- jachee 5y agoSure, but how many watts of power would those beasts need?
- hu3 5y agoAs much as it needs. My time is worth a lot more.
- s3p 5y agoTime would be a primary reason to not build your own machine, though.
- hu3 5y agoNo need to assemble. There are services for that.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- diffeomorphism 5y agoWho says it is my time? You can just buy custom workstations.
- s3p 5y agoOP did. The original comment was about building your own machine for the cost of a Mac studio.
- supernova87a 5y agoCould these processor leaps in performance inadvertently help us stop burning up so much coal in the quest for Bitcoin?
- bigcheesegs 5y agoNo. The economics of Proof of Work mean that increases in compute per watt just lead to an increase in global hash rate. Total energy usage never goes down as long as it's sufficiently profitable to use the energy.
- jillesvangurp 5y agoIt would be interesting to see a more serious effort by others to put together a high performance SOC system for gaming or workstations. I'm writing this on a cheap core i5 system with intel iris xe graphics. Mediocrity is the name of the game for this type of laptop. Everything is mediocre. The screen, the performance, the touchpad, etc. The only good thing about this system: no blazing fans. That seems to be a thing with most SOC based PCs/laptops. Mediocre performance. Non SOC based solutions exist of course but they suck up a lot more power to the point where laptops start having cooling issues and have to do thermal throttling. I've experienced that with multiple intel based macs. You spend all that money and the system almost immediately starts overheating if you actually bother to use what you paid for. I actually used to have a wooden plank that I used to insulate my legs from my mac book pro. It was simply too uncomfortable to actually use on my lap.
- bodge5000 5y agoI need a new computer. The smart move, especially considering the cost involved, is to go for what I know; a decent enough desktop build with 3 monitors, linux/windows dual boot. What I've used for years. But it must be said, I've been really tempted by the Macs. I'm not sure why, the 3 main things I do with my personal computer (game dev, playing games, watching things) are things that linux/windows can do at least as good if not better than a Mac, and yet here I am, holding off for months just trying to be convinced into the apple ecosystem. I think its probably just the simplicity of it. I really like the idea of replacing a load of bulk (3 monitors, the vesa mount to hold them, big keyboard, mouse, bulky tower and a metric tonne of cables) with just a single laptop that I can pickup and go with at a moments notice, though Im not sure of the practicalities of that, at least for me. I don't even travel much, it just seems nice. Edit: I know that a lot of people have a mac and a desktop to fill all needs, but that somewhat defeats the simplicity of it for me. One bulky computer is simpler for me than one bulky computer for some things and another much smaller computer for others.
- sofixa 5y agoBut the screen estate isn't even close between three monitors and a laptop. A nice middle ground is a laptop with a dock with monitors, that way you have the external screens when you need them, and can also be on the move, on the same computer. Of the three main things you do, i think only watching things is comparable between macOS and Windows/Linux. Gaming is nonexistent on macOS, unless you stream ( either a cloud service like Stadia/GeforceNow or locally from a PC with Steam in-house streaming/Parsec), and i can't imagine doing game dev somewhere you can't even test.
- bodge5000 5y ago> But the screen estate isn't even close between three monitors and a laptop Absolutely, which is a large part of the reason I'm not sure its practical for me, but its certainly true that one monitor is simpler than three. I suppose I could eventually get used to just having one monitor, it might even have some advantages, but I'm not sure I'd want to. > A nice middle ground is a laptop with a dock with monitors This is what I've currently got (laptop is a razer blade). In my case at least it just ended up being more messy and difficult than a desktop. Most docks for example are designed for business use and therefore don't provide "clean" USB power, which I found causes issues with audio interfaces and DACs. I just ended up having a small, poorly cooled, difficult to upgrade desktop. After that, I decided no more half measures. I either embrace the minimalism of a laptop alone, or return to a desktop. I know a dock works well for some people, sadly not for me. > Gaming is nonexistent on macOS... i can't imagine doing game dev somewhere you can't even test This is exactly it (plus game dev for apple sillicon is still somewhat lagging behind), it doesnt seem to be a practical option, yet as I still, here I am. Of course theres also non-apple laptops as well which would provide similar simplicity. I love my thinkpads, but I'm just not sure they're powerful enough for me to replace a desktop with, and as for the more powerful of the non-apple laptops, the blade has given me a mistrust of them (only had the thing for a year and the battery has bulged beyond being able to fit it in the chassis)
- sjg007 5y agoAre these things good for tensorflow and training 50GB AI models? Or is it better to stick with nvidia?