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??? A 7950X is 50% faster than an M1 Ultra and it only costs 550 or so.

sliken 4y ago
Yes, sure, at somethings. The 7950x does really well at some cache friendly workloads. But it also burns way more power and generally lives in a large ATX case with at least 7 fans (2 intake, 1 exhaust, 1 power supply, 2 on the GPU, and one for the chipset). It also has 1/8th the memory bandwidth, a MUCH slower iGPU, and takes much more power. Sure you can add a nice GPU, which helps for GPU workloads, but if it's from the current gen it's at least another $800 and 300 watts. The M1 Ultra in comparison has the fastest iGPU out, competitive (depending on workload) with some of the mid range GPUs, but generally good enough for things except for gaming. The apple studio is small, quiet, sips power, and has a single large fan that under most workloads is silent.
- howinteresting 4y ago
  You can cap a 7950X to 105W, and put it in a mini-ITX case, if that's what you really want. Though an ATX case consumes not that much space in the grand scheme of things compared to eg a couple of large monitors. A 3070 goes for under $500 these days and is a very capable GPU, certainly significantly more powerful than a PS5. It's apparently around 50% faster than the M1 Ultra's GPU at OpenCL and gives you access to the CUDA ecosystem. The Mac hardware is a great piece of engineering, but for many workstation use cases the latest x86 beats it handily in both performance and price.
  - sliken 4y ago
    Depends on your use case. Sure you can cap a 7950X at 105 watts and fit a RTX 3070 in the case, but it's not going to be particularly small or quiet. The RTX3070 is physically large, does have a nice 448GB/sec or bandwidth, but only for 8GB ram, and of course only for things that can run on a GPU. The 7950X is limited for 83GB/sec (at least without overclocking), which is 5GB/sec per core. The M1 max is 400GB/sec and the M1 Ultra is 800GB/sec, granted the CPUs can only use approximately 50% of that, but as a bonus the GPU can access all of ram, not just 8GB. So even a MiniITX + 3070 is going to be physically large, power intensive, and hard to get silent, at least until you start getting pretty exotic and expensive with water cooling. PyTorch and related are supporting Apple's CPU, GPU, and AMX I believe. Benchmarks vary of course. One interesting development is I've just started seeing support for Apple's neural engine and on the models benchmarks it was something along the lines of 7x as fast as the M1's GPU. Something to keep an eye on. But if gaming framerate per $ is your goal I'd definitely get the 7950x, it's going to love the RTX3070, is cache friendly, and won't care that the 7950x has a 80GB/sec memory interface.
    - howinteresting 4y ago
      My point is just that while the M1 Ultra Mac Studio certainly hits a great point in the design space, there are many other points that will serve consumers and production users better and that the actual statement I was responding to: > it's going to take massive investment by intel or AMD to catch up in the price/power/performance category in the context of desktop workstations is simply untrue. The post compared a Mac Studio to a Threadripper that retails for over $3000, but my point was that it's not a fair comparison: a high-end consumer part that retails for less than 20% of the price also beats the Mac Studio at many use cases, such as code compilation. There's this weird thing I see where a lot of people think, probably due to Apple's marketing, that Apple Silicon hardware is not just "strictly better" but a gargantuan leap beyond x86. That just isn't true, now that AMD is on a comparable process node. Apple Silicon is better at some things and worse at others, which is great -- competition is good! -- and completely normal.

Yes, sure, at somethings. The 7950x does really well at some cache friendly workloads. But it also burns way more power and generally lives in a large ATX case with at least 7 fans (2 intake, 1 exhaust, 1 power supply, 2 on the GPU, and one for the chipset). It also has 1/8th the memory bandwidth, a MUCH slower iGPU, and takes much more power. Sure you can add a nice GPU, which helps for GPU workloads, but if it's from the current gen it's at least another $800 and 300 watts. The M1 Ultra in comparison has the fastest iGPU out, competitive (depending on workload) with some of the mid range GPUs, but generally good enough for things except for gaming. The apple studio is small, quiet, sips power, and has a single large fan that under most workloads is silent.

howinteresting 4y ago
You can cap a 7950X to 105W, and put it in a mini-ITX case, if that's what you really want. Though an ATX case consumes not that much space in the grand scheme of things compared to eg a couple of large monitors. A 3070 goes for under $500 these days and is a very capable GPU, certainly significantly more powerful than a PS5. It's apparently around 50% faster than the M1 Ultra's GPU at OpenCL and gives you access to the CUDA ecosystem. The Mac hardware is a great piece of engineering, but for many workstation use cases the latest x86 beats it handily in both performance and price.
- sliken 4y ago
  Depends on your use case. Sure you can cap a 7950X at 105 watts and fit a RTX 3070 in the case, but it's not going to be particularly small or quiet. The RTX3070 is physically large, does have a nice 448GB/sec or bandwidth, but only for 8GB ram, and of course only for things that can run on a GPU. The 7950X is limited for 83GB/sec (at least without overclocking), which is 5GB/sec per core. The M1 max is 400GB/sec and the M1 Ultra is 800GB/sec, granted the CPUs can only use approximately 50% of that, but as a bonus the GPU can access all of ram, not just 8GB. So even a MiniITX + 3070 is going to be physically large, power intensive, and hard to get silent, at least until you start getting pretty exotic and expensive with water cooling. PyTorch and related are supporting Apple's CPU, GPU, and AMX I believe. Benchmarks vary of course. One interesting development is I've just started seeing support for Apple's neural engine and on the models benchmarks it was something along the lines of 7x as fast as the M1's GPU. Something to keep an eye on. But if gaming framerate per $ is your goal I'd definitely get the 7950x, it's going to love the RTX3070, is cache friendly, and won't care that the 7950x has a 80GB/sec memory interface.
  - howinteresting 4y ago
    My point is just that while the M1 Ultra Mac Studio certainly hits a great point in the design space, there are many other points that will serve consumers and production users better and that the actual statement I was responding to: > it's going to take massive investment by intel or AMD to catch up in the price/power/performance category in the context of desktop workstations is simply untrue. The post compared a Mac Studio to a Threadripper that retails for over $3000, but my point was that it's not a fair comparison: a high-end consumer part that retails for less than 20% of the price also beats the Mac Studio at many use cases, such as code compilation. There's this weird thing I see where a lot of people think, probably due to Apple's marketing, that Apple Silicon hardware is not just "strictly better" but a gargantuan leap beyond x86. That just isn't true, now that AMD is on a comparable process node. Apple Silicon is better at some things and worse at others, which is great -- competition is good! -- and completely normal.