25 ms·
Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs
- adastra22 3y ago50% slower than the absolute best of class NVIDIA discrete GPU offering that consumes massively more wattage is hardly a damning statement.
- MBCook 3y agoThe complete lack of any power numbers is extremely telling.
- jacooper 3y agoAs if that matters on a desktop?
- mort96 3y agoIt matters when comparing performance numbers in general?
- jacooper 3y agoDepending on the usage, it why AMDs efficiency is impressive on laptops, but not so important on the desktop.
- ianai 3y agoPerformance per TDP is always relevant. Sure individuals may choose they just want whatever to maximize a metric, but that’s a different decision entirely. Like comparing a motorcycle and a truck without mentioning all the things different between the two.
- sokoloff 3y agoTDP is the wrong measure here. i9-13900K and i7-13700K both have 125W TDP with 253W PL2 specs. By that calculation, the 13900K is more performant per TDP, so is "better" for efficiency. Computation per kWh (or rate of computation per kW) is the right efficiency metric, not TDP (thermal design power).
- wtallis 3y agoIf you have a workload that pushes the 13700K and 13900K to their turbo limits (and have ensured that those limits are actually configured to be the same), then you really will find the 13900K getting more work done for the same power and energy. That's how the extra cores help in power-limited scenarios.
- throwaway5959 3y agoIt does when you multiply it across millions of CPUs. Saving 100 watts across 3 million CPUs (300 megawatts) is enough to shut down the equivalent of power plants.
- nightski 3y agoI'm all for efficiency but if we are to progress as a civilization we need to find a way to not have power hold us back. We can get to a point where we have nearly unlimited power with minimal impact on the environment around us. That needs to happen as soon as possible.
- chongli 3y agoThere are an estimated 3 billion people in the world who still rely on solid fuel (wood, coal, peat moss) to cook food and generate heat [1]. We are extremely far away from being able to use 100% electricity to meet two basic needs for the whole population. From that perspective power-plant-scale computing is an incredible luxury. [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/resrep27829.23.pdf https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/resrep27829.23.pdf
- nightski 3y agoThat demand will only increase, which further emphasizes my point. It can't be a luxury.
- alpaca128 3y ago> That needs to happen as soon as possible. But it won't happen before all M2/3 Macs will be obsolete. Having goals like that is great but until we reach that point efficiency is still important.
- st3fan 3y agoI don't like to listen to the sound of fans constantly running ...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- smoldesu 3y agoThe absolute "best of class" Nvidia card is currently the 4090, which can be up to 30% faster than the 4080 in scaling workloads. What would be more interesting is to see how Nvidia's laptop cards fare here though - they're constrained to much lower wattage (80-120w) and would make for a much fairer fight against the ~200w M2 Ultra.
- nordsieck 3y ago> What would be more interesting is to see how Nvidia's laptop cards fare here though - they're constrained to much lower wattage (80-120w) and would make for a much fairer fight against the ~200w M2 Ultra. Doesn't look like Apple offers Ultra in a laptop - just the Basic, Pro, and Max.
- arpanetus 3y agoIt's interesting. I assumed at least their power consumption should have been much better/lower than an avg orthodox desktop setup of current days.
- smoldesu 3y agoIt's not unreasonably high for a TDP, and the idle consumption of ARM is de-facto lower than power an x86 package. That being said, it's pretty obvious that Apple's mobile-style solution isn't really working out on the desktop side of things. The new iMac feels starkly pedestrian compared to the old ones, and the Mac Mini/Studio are both neat but not unprecedented. The M2 Ultra represents a lot of engineering effort going into flipping that status quo, but its still slipping behind by a considerable margin. Don't forget that a second "Ultra" style SOC with 4x M1 Maxes was supposedly cancelled for drawing too much power and being too hot. It's just not effective or efficient to force that much silicon that close together.
- smcleod 3y agoA decent 4090 GPU alone is over $3000 in Australia - that’s half the price of a Mac Studio with Ultra - just for the GPU. Then you’d be looking for a 24 core CPU, 64GB RAM, 1TB PCIe 5 SSD, mainboard with 6x thunderbolt ports, a silent cooling setup, high quality case that is both small and all the gear while running cool. and if you’re stuck with MS Windows - an Operating System.
- caycep 3y agogranted, wccftech is a grain of salt kind of site. To wit, here's another article....from the same site! https://wccftech.com/m2-ultra-only-10-percent-slower-than-rtx-4080-in-metal/ https://wccftech.com/m2-ultra-only-10-percent-slower-than-rt...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- olyjohn 3y ago[flagged]
- weego 3y agoMy audi S5 is slower than a GT3 Touring car. It's just excuses.
- peoplefromibiza 3y ago> that consumes massively more wattage power consumption doesn't scale linearly with performances the absolute best of class NVIDIA discrete GPU offering could possibly outperform the Apple GPU at the same power level Or, to put it in another way, to recover that remaining 50% of performances (2x) the increase in power consumption would be exponential (a lot more than 2x, like 10x)
- BoorishBears 3y agoThey said it's not faster than the desktop parts, which is almost a false statement since it actually is faster at multithreaded than both base desktop SKUs. And then they switch to providing a specific percentage when comparing the the 4080 (also based on an deceptively narrow comparison, one their other articles counter) for dramatic effect. I don't think it was ever meant to be the most informative article: it seems written to serve the contrarians because that's profitable from a readership perspective for a publication like this.
- jacooper 3y agoAbsolute best of class? What? A 4080 is best of class? And second of all, for the price it should be compared to the 4090, which absolutely demolishes it.
- garbagecoder 3y agoMy M1 Pro is about 33% as fast as a box with a 3060 in it on PyTorch and obviously it is way more efficient and doesn't require a special power supply, which is just taken for granted as something you have to do with a PC. The best case this article can make is that if you need to play the latest game or do intense ML stuff you probably want NVIDIA, but that's the same as it ever was.
- incrudible 3y agoIt also costs a lot more. For the money you can get a laptop with a 4080m and reduce its power limit and probably get the same or better efficiency, but with room to the top if you need it.
- garbagecoder 3y agoAnd I like it more, so I am willing to pay more. The implicit notion that I’m getting the same thing for less just isn’t true.
- incrudible 3y agoYou are getting better performance potential and equal or better efficiency at comparable wattage, for a better price. Of course you will not get it the shape of an Apple laptop. We were talking about how Apple chips supposedly have superior efficiency, but at least in terms of GPU that is not true at all.
- partiallypro 3y agoMost consumers don't care about wattage on a desktop, and when you compare the prices they are similar and it loses.
- readthenotes1 3y agoI wonder how long you have to run the Apple chip to save enough on electricity to make the price difference worthwhile? Does it only drop to one human lifetime in places where energy cost is insanely high?
- acdha 3y agoMany people do care - many Americans have subsidized low power but that’s not globally true and even if your power is free a hot CPU means you’re listening to fan noise and heating up the room. In a cold winter that’s not bad but I knew people who had to do things like leave their office doors open for cooling.
- 0zemp3c 3y agothe people you describe aren't buying $7k desktops
- acdha 3y agoThey certainly are. Being able to pay for the extra power doesn’t mean you like fan noise, not to mention the people who are doing things like video production in a trailer where overheating is a concern. I used to support scientists who didn’t appreciate the heat 4 workstations made in their shared offices, either.
- incrudible 3y agoA dedicated GPU with more die area and its own large fan will run both cooler and quieter when its power limit is reduced to match the performance of the Apple chip.
- captainbland 3y agoI think a useful way of thinking about this is it has something like $300-400 worth of discrete GPU equivalent performance assuming that the article's claims are correct (not exactly a given...) as it will get you something similar to a 3060 ti or 4060 ti.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoWait, a $7000 computer doesn’t come with a discrete GPU?
- StewardMcOy 3y agoIt's not just that it doesn't come with a discrete GPU. Apple Silicon doesn't support discrete GPUs to begin with. As far as I understand it—and this is just from watching Apple's presentations on the architecture—the lack of a discrete GPU is a big part of how the Apple Silicon machines achieve good performance per watt. Instead of having discrete RAM or a discrete GPU with its own VRAM, all of the RAM is accessible to the CPU and and the GPU in a unified memory architecture. On the M2 Ultra, this allows for 800 GB/s of memory bandwidth, and also eliminates a lot of the need to copy data from RAM to VRAM, as both the GPU and the CPU can access the same memory. In return, this allows the GPU to match the performance of discrete GPUs that have a lot more cores. Of course, the big downside is that you can't expand the RAM or install a beefier GPU. It's all baked in to the logic board.
- wtallis 3y ago> and also eliminates a lot of the need to copy data from RAM to VRAM, as both the GPU and the CPU can access the same memory. In return, this allows the GPU to match the performance of discrete GPUs that have a lot more cores. Plenty of PC hardware reviewers have done sensitivity analysis experiments to see how discrete GPU performance is affected by running with a slower or narrower PCIe link. The consensus is usually that GPUs connected by PCIe have more than sufficient bandwidth, and cutting it in half only affects gaming framerates by a few percent. Tighter coupling between CPU and GPU can plausibly have a bigger impact for some GPU compute workloads, but for traditional 3D graphics it doesn't help performance much.
- Retric 3y agoYou can generally ignore FPS numbers as irrelevant outside of extremes, what people notice is stutter and that’s where PCIe link bandwidth matters.
- TradingPlaces 3y agoThe article does not say if it’s a Mac Studio or Mac Pro. I think that matters. My understanding is that there is no TDP on Apple Silicon, and that it has a lot of runway in a less constrained thermal environment like the new Mac Pro vs Mac Studio. While I’m still surprised they didn’t put a second Ultra in the Mac Pro, I’m betting there’s a wider delta than people imagine between the two form factors.
- wmf 3y agoThe Mac Studio doesn't throttle so there is no extra headroom for the Mac Pro.
- TradingPlaces 3y agoWe’ll find out next week
- brucethemoose2 3y agoTake anything from wccf with a grain of salt. And yeah, as others point out, this is Apples to oranges. x86 desktops are great at some things, M2 Ultras are great at others, and the overlap that really matters is pretty small... Like, you have to be crazy to buy an M SoC for gaming, or buy a Nvidia GPU for workloads that won't fit in VRAM.
- perrohunter 3y agoI tested the new game porting kit on a Mac mini M2 and was surprised I was able to run Cyberpunk 2077 and it was running really well, I can imagine that more powerful M processors will be awesome, so the argument of games might go away soon
- katbyte 3y agoHow does it work? You install a windows game via steam and then tell it to port?
- stouset 3y agoIt’s basically Wine with a custom D12 translation to Metal calls. Right now it’s not really intended for end-users so the experience involves a lot of steps that aren’t consumer-friendly, but some folks are publishing wrappers that simplify the process. I imagine that in the future, something like Steam will wrap this functionality to provide the ability to run the whole library under the toolkit. And individually-published games will do the same so they install and run with a more consumer-friendly experience.
- imbnwa 3y agoCurious about settings for an idea of the ceiling, that game is insanely unoptimized
- Grazester 3y agoWhat is really well? Can me have a metric? What resolution and what frame rate?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoFor $7,000 there should be no caveats, it should be beating every measurable metric outright.
- liuliu 3y agoI don't know. Nowadays a top-of-the-spec Linux workstation without any cost on top (i.e. bare-components) is around ~10k. 5995WX in the graph wccf provided alone costs ~5k.
- microtonal 3y agoFirst, a Mac Studio with M1 Ultra is $3999. Second, people don't buy Macs only for performance. They also buy Macs for macOS, for integration between devices, for a system that is cool and quiet, for hardware acceleration of ProRes, for on-device privacy-preserving machine learning. Being a bit slower than competing AMD and Intel systems is acceptable, because you get so many other desirable properties in return. I'd definitely consider a Mac Studio with an M2 Max or M2 Ultra, if I didn't want something portable. I would never buy a machine with a competing machine with an Intel or AMD machine, because I don't want to deal with Windows or desktop Linux. Other people have another set of priorities and that is fine.
- microtonal 3y agoMaybe, but most of these comparisons are based on GPU performance (ie. games). For other workloads like machine learning, Tensor cores on NVIDIA GPUs will blow Apple Silicon GPUs out of the water. The M2 Ultra is 27 TFLOPS. The 4080't Tensor Cores are 48.7 TFLOPS in FP32, 194.9 TFLOPS in FP16, 389.9 TFLOPS in FP8 with FP16 accumulate. (IIRC on Apple Silicon GPUs FP16 performance is roughly the same as FP32.) (There is the Neural Engine which supports lower precision, but it limited in various ways.) Regardless, the strides that Apple has been making are impressive.
- sunflowerfly 3y agoOne differentiator is the amount of memory available. Apple's shared pool of memory means the GPU has potentially up to 96gb of ram at its disposal, where discrete GPU's are often limited to 8, 12, 16, etc. They mentioned in the keynote that the M2 can handle many tasks discrete GPUs cannot simply because they run out of ram.
- incrudible 3y ago$15,000 will buy you an A100 with 80GB of RAM at 2TB/s that will annihilate the biggest Apple chip.
- ElFitz 3y agoSure, but then that’s the price of multiple entire laptops. Or 2 Mac Pros. Not sure what point you’re trying to make here.
- incrudible 3y agoIt is also the performance of 4 Mac Pros. GP was talking about tasks that dedicated GPUs supposedly could not handle. Who is is running models needing 60+ GB of VRAM on their laptops?
- ElFitz 3y ago
- MegaDeKay 3y agoThe article reports that the M2 Ultra is basically even with a 4060 Ti in OpenCL compute which they refer to as a mainstream card. It is more a notch above entry level. The "best of class" 4090 is actually 2.5x faster. But again, this is OpenCL so who knows how the two compare in a more relevant benchmark. Regardless, wccftech is far from reliable. IIRC, /r/amd blocks links to the site.
- incrudible 3y agoNVIDIA still beats Apple even in efficiency, or so I have read. If you care about wattage that much, you can just underclock and undervolt your GPU. It is free and the police can not stop you.
- the8472 3y ago> best of class NVIDIA discrete GPU offering Those are nvidia's best consumer GPUs. I think the cheese grater falls into the pro segment. In that segment nvidia has the A6000s with 48GB VRAM and 91 SP TFlops compared to the 4090's 24GB and 73 SP TFlops. But that costs as much as the Mac Pro alone. And even bigger options (segmented for server/datacenter use) are available.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago4090 is what it should be compared to, that's the equivalent card you'd be looking at for those workflows.
- murmansk 3y agoAhhaha, Intel's TDP is 2-4 times bigger under full load (and I guess ~10-15x under moderate load) while having negligible perf advantage over M2. The author can not be serious.
- jacooper 3y agoSince when was TDP a deciding factor in desktop purchasing decisions? Sure M SOCs are great on laptops, but there are no reasons to get them on the desktop, slower, more expensive and with less compatibility.
- zbrozek 3y agoWhere and when electric energy is $0.51/kWh, one might care quite a bit.
- jacooper 3y agoI doubt the target customers of the M2 ultra aren't going to be able to cover extra energy costs for a cheaper and more performant device.
- zbrozek 3y agoOh sure, but I was responding to the comment above saying that desktop users in general shouldn't care about power consumption. That's too broad.
- ianai 3y agoIt’s such a strawman point. But this comparison is totally bonkers. If you’re doing a workload meant for a 4080/4090 then you really have no business pointing at the M2 Ultra as a competitor. Then there’s comparing like technology to like technology. Something like the 5700G AMD line, and that’s not even nvidia. But that probably isn’t as interesting to the authors.
- readthenotes1 3y agoWhoever is doing the caring should reconsider their life choices at that price. At 51 cents per kilowatt hour, personal solar + batteries are a vailable alternative. If you cared about the planet, you'd move
- scarface_74 3y agoThis and the introduction of the new slower less expandable - at least with respect to GPUs and memory - is indicative that it was a mistake for Apple to completely transition to ARM and should have kept high end options on Intel until they had a better GPU story to tell. They already had the Mac Studio, they could have kept the Mac Pro on Intel.
- jacooper 3y agoThe Intel Mac pro was too slow, unless you mean refreshing it, which I doubt is possible, because apple doesn't want to do anything related to X86 anymore.
- scarface_74 3y agoYou could add GPUs to it at least. For many high end workloads, you need GPU horsepower. How is not wanting to do x86 on the high end? The article says just as much.
- jitl 3y ago3rd party GPUs don’t mesh with the Metal strategy. Apple dropped and deprecated OpenGL a long time ago - and they’re the only one building metal GPUs
- lxgr 3y agoDoesn’t Metal support multiple GPU architectures just like OpenGL?
- jitl 3y agoYou’re right, there is some support - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202239 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202239
- scarface_74 3y agoThe Intel Mac Pro supported third party GPUs and there were Thunderbolt based officially supported GPUs for later Intel Macs. Apple made a big deal about them. This was after their transition to Metal
- olyjohn 3y agoQueue the "But power consumption..." as though it makes fuckall difference on a workstation.
- peepeepoopoo9 3y ago*cue
- satysin 3y agoPerhaps not to you but to me it matters a lot. I live in a country where it gets very hot in the summer. I prefer to keep my environment cool without needing AC. Unfortunately I have found that is not possible to do with my beefy Dell workstation that consumes in the 1kW range thanks to the Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU. It isn't just a feeling but a hard fact that my thermostat can confirm that running my Intel workstation puts my office up to uncomfortable temps. No such thing happens with my M1 Ultra Mac Studio running with a third to a quarter less power consumption. Perhaps I am alone in this but I dislike having to use AC to cool my office when I can just not make it so damn hot in the first place. It is all just a waste of energy and energy isn't free. If it's not an issue for you then fair enough buy a 1kW+ Intel/Nvidia system but to say "it makes fuckall difference on a workstation" is disingenuous.
- unusualmonkey 3y agoHave you tuned your workstation for power efficiency? Dropping cpu and GPU frequencies even a few % might have a significant impact.
- anthonyryan1 3y agoWhere are the performance per watt numbers? Anyone can get the performance crown by having an unlimited energy budget. Performance per watt is much more valuable in data centers (TCO) and consumer devices (battery life).
- jacooper 3y agoWell, the article is speaking about the M2 ultra, which only going to be used in the Mac pro under Mac studio, both desktop computers.
- kemayo 3y agoThe Mac Pro does have a rack-mounted configuration for the non-desktop data centers case. (I have no idea whether people will actually use it that way, but it exists.) https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/rack https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/rack
- charrondev 3y agoI can see those being bought up for Datcenters and CI use. There have been companies hosting huge racks of Mac minis for ages to do CI for MacOS and iOS software.
- peoplefromibiza 3y ago> Anyone can get the performance crown by having an unlimited energy budget Not really. No. > Performance per watt is much more valuable in data centers Assuming performance can be combined. You can't get the same performances of an Nvidia RTX 4080 using 2 M2
- solomatov 3y agoNot always, if you are connected to a source of electricity and doing something limited by speed performance is critical. For me, Desktop use is almost perfect on Apple due to battery life and perf but professional use is much better on Intel/AMD+NVidia. Also you could get much more perf for $ on such machines
- jitl 3y agoI think the most interesting benchmark of the M2’s potential advantage conventional Intel/Nvidia machines would be a memory-heavy ML training or inference workload. Apple made some noises about having 190GB of unified memory as an advantage for that scenario, since the system wouldn’t need to wait for copying from COU RAM to GPU RAM but I’d like to see that put to the test. I’m also disappointed that Apple didn’t go for a 2-socket Mac Pro so they could offer a compute advantage over Mac Studio in addition to the PCI Express slots. Other than the IO, I can’t think of a reason to pick the Mac Pro.
- gumby 3y agoPoorly written, resulting in what could look like a bias. The article mentions that apple has focused on single core performance while the x86 processors in question are designed for multi core use cases. This reflects two different markets being addressed and the sad state (small amount) of multicore code today. Also it’s silly to claim that the M2 Ultra is so expensive — you can get the same performance from a 3K “studio” desktop that you do from the >7K “Mac Pro”. I use apple for all my “terminals” (macs, iPhone, etc) but really want AMD and Intel to keep working on these multithreaded powerhouses because I depend on that on the cloud side. I don’t see this ever being in Apple’s markets. Articles that further that are needed, but this isn’t one of them.
- KerrAvon 3y agohaven’t read the article, but there are no single threaded use cases on Apple platforms that Apple cares about, so I’d take any claim that Apple is optimizing for single threaded performance with an enormous bag of salt
- gumby 3y agoI'm pretty sure I remember discussion from Srouji and others on this specific topic at the "apple silicon" WWDC introduction. But I can't find anything useful from Apple in a web search, so it seems my statement is just a "some guy on the Internet" assertion. It seems pretty clear and unsurprising that Apple optimises their design for their use case (e.g. major consideration of bandwidth to screen in handheld devices, reminiscent of one of the Alto's design criteria) but how that plays out doesn't support my claim either. But Apple's intended use cases aren't the same as the threadripper's.
- MBCook 3y ago> but there are no single threaded use cases on Apple platforms that Apple cares about I don’t see how that could be true. A huge amount of software tasks are basically single threaded. Remember since Apple does everything soup-to-nuts they have a ton of performance data from their computers to know what real user workloads look like so they can optimize the hardware + the software for them.
- kokonoko 3y agoThanks for the correct albeit clickbait title, now let's see the power usage, performance per watt etc. Hint: M2 destroys the competition
- partiallypro 3y agoDo general consumers care about wattage being used on a desktop? I don't think many consider it at all, they just want the performance. It matters on a mobile device like a laptop, tablet or phone, but that's about where consumers stop caring.
- MikeTheRocker 3y agoDepends on the use case. I personally undervolt my AMD 7950X in my gaming PC to use less power and thus generate less heat and fan noise. It makes a big difference.
- LegitShady 3y agoGetting quieter fans on a better cooler might make a bigger difference.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- detrites 3y agoHow is comparing a 16GB GPU to a 64GB - 192GB GPU on the same terms useful or informative?
- smoldesu 3y agoGood question, apparently it seems to matter to Apple as well: https://youtu.be/CUwg_JoNHpo?t=1834 https://youtu.be/CUwg_JoNHpo?t=1834
- spacemadness 3y ago“Apple M2 Ultra Is Slow Than Last-Year CPUs.” This site is pretty low on attention to detail. Get an editor at least.
- trustingtrust 3y agohttps://wccftech.com/m2-ultra-only-10-percent-slower-than-rtx-4080-in-metal/ https://wccftech.com/m2-ultra-only-10-percent-slower-than-rt... They also posted this.
- mrcwinn 3y agoThe results speak for themselves (Apple is slower than some) but the context does matter: Apple has been talking about performance per watt since Steve Jobs showed a keynote slide announcing the transition from PowerPC. The cynical view is that Apple is intentionally misleading customers with their ambiguous graph axes. Another perspective is they’re simply demonstrating the metric they’ve optimized for in the first place.
- kayson 3y agoDo people really care about efficiency for plugged-in devices? There is the environmental factor, but there are people on 100% renewable a too...
- acdha 3y agoEven if your power is free, heat means a toasty office and fan noise, not to mention being careful about air flow around your furniture. Not a deal breaker but 100% of the Apple Silicon users I know have mentioned not previously having appreciated just how much noise their old systems made.
- IneffablePigeon 3y agoI bought an m series device to replace my windows desktop mostly for efficiency reasons. It saves me hundreds a year in electricity costs at the moment (quite literally, I calculated it beforehand and checked real usage afterwards). It also means my office is now silent and cool. It’s a big QoL improvement for me.
- tokamak-teapot 3y agoSimilar story here. I replaced an AMD 3xxx series Hackintosh workstation with an M1 Air after running both together and finding they were exactly as fast as each other.
- menus 3y agoWas cost of the device also taken into consideration in your overall cost calculation? What was the cost of your Windows desktop and what was the cost of your M series device you replaced it with? Have you ever upgraded any components of your Windows desktop (RAM, GPU, CPU, motherboard) or did you discard the entire thing?
- mrangle 3y agoDefinitely have to adjust for TDP. The new gen Intel processors match the M2 performance for $100-150. TDP is triple but still relatively low. There isn't really anything available from non-niche retailers that approaches the TDP of Apple chips. And what does tends to be a binned just to be sold as mobile. Better to buy the standard chip and limit clock speed. What also shocks me is more expensive chips that offer inconsequential gains in processing for double TDP. I'm more likely to invest in a slight performance hit for much lower TDP.
- znpy 3y agoJust wondering, what is the cpu that you picked? But I agree, tdp should really be kept in consideration.
- mrangle 3y agoLook at the i3. Though it isn't much different than last gen, and that buying decision should be mostly determined by price (for the same price, go later). Unless there are significant enough non-speed related architecture differences that I am not aware of and that are important to you (possible). Try to catch a sale. Going upline will double the TDP for little gain, especially if dollars spent is important as well. People that have a specific interest in more L2 and L3 cache may see the logic in going upline. The TDP and price equivalent Ryzen will equate to about 10% better gaming performance, and better multi-thread performance, but lesser single thread performance.
- wtallis 3y ago> Look at the i3. Though it isn't much different than last gen IIRC, the desktop i3 and i5 processors are in many cases literally last-gen, since Intel is using a mix of Alder Lake and Raptor Lake dies on most of the "13th gen" desktop products that do not have more cores or cache than Alder Lake did.
- mrangle 3y agoRight. Price should determine what one buys. There is a marginal performance bump between them for the same advertised TDP, and so suppose if price is the same then next gen it is. Otherwise buy what is cheapest.
- tiffanyg 3y agoAs usual, hard to evaluate claims of A better/worse than B, and fanboyas and fanchicas massively boosting the noise:signal ratio. https://youtu.be/u7ocWDNrfRs https://youtu.be/u7ocWDNrfRs Or, of course, there's the classic Twain / Disraeli quote ... take your pick.
- redundantly 3y agoThe comments here are strange. So many people making claims that power utilization doesn't matter. Perhaps not to them, but it does for many. Energy prices are getting higher and higher in many parts of the country, heck in the world. Devices that consume more power generate more heat. So now one is likely using more electricity to keep their home or office cool and comfortable. Noise matters for many people using workstations. Running a system at full tilt can be irritating, distracting, because of the active cooling. Some people are just simply conscious of how much electricity they use and want to have a lower environmental impact. And then there's the large scale matter. One workstation might not be a big deal in terms of energy usage, but millions of them absolutely is. Saying no one cares how much power a workstation uses is disingenuous.
- ksec 3y agoBecause Workstation, by a lot of people's definition, are suppose to be the power hungry in exchange for absolute performance?
- redundantly 3y agoYou're doing it too. You're assuming how someone would define a workstation, you're assuming that definition includes it being power hungry. A workstation can be a single core, 256MB RAM, 1 watt SBC. It can be a 96 core, 2TB RAM, 1 kw beast. It can be anything in between or even outside of that range. I'm not saying everyone cares about power consumption, but several people here seem to be saying that no one does, and that's simply not true.
- ksec 3y ago-Deleted-, Thx @wtallis
- wtallis 3y ago"Workstation" in this context refers to a specific target market and product segment that by industry consensus (and in some cases codified by regulators) carries specific connotations about a machine's capabilities and intended use. Your attempts to use the word in the broadest possible meaning are not helpful; you're deliberately communicating badly.
- lopkeny12ko 3y agoOne of my biggest gripes about Macs is that their thermal engineers refuse to get off their high horses and build real cooling solutions that don't artifically limit the capabilities of an objectively performance-competitive CPU. I don't care if it consumes 200 W of power. I don't care if the chassis needs to be thicker to accommodate a larger heatsink. I don't care if you need to run the fans at 100%. Just let me use the full power of the CPU created by the chip designers god dammit!
- tiffanyh 3y agoI was expecting the MacPro (M-series) to be exactly that. A high wattage, highly cooled proc. But nope, they did what you described.
- throw0101b 3y ago> I was expecting the MacPro (M-series) to be exactly that. MKBHD put forward an interesting hypothesis in his last podcast: this generation Mac Pro has simply to get the refresh out the door. They took their existing designs (SoC/chips, cases) and simply mashed them together. Similarly to how they simply mashed the M-chips into existing laptop case designs first, and then optimized with Gen2. Now that they have something, they can iterate on a more harmonious solution that allows for the advantages of each.
- gumby 3y agoYeah, I did too. The use case for the Mac Pro is even more limited than what you would expect (it's not like there are a lot of supported PCI boards). It's hard to think of many users who would choose it over a Studio. I doubt Apple will make any money on the Pro. They could use this version as a stepping stone to a future faster device. But I suspect this form factor is a dead end for the Apple customer base. Maybe it exists for bragging (i.e. marketing) rights, the same reason Honda funds a Formula 1 team.
- oneplane 3y ago> I don't care if That's the thing: they aren't building it just for you. We can speculate about their internal requirements documents, but what's for sure is that they calculate a projected market adoption based on various factors like cost, market segmentation, power draw, heat transfer, noise etc. If it turns out that they project a bigger profit with a lower power limit than technically possible, that's what they'll do. Personally, it would be nice of this were to apply to any CPU, GPU, SoC and even VRM and DC-DC regulators; let me worry about the dissipation, just pump out as many cycles as possible. But that's not really something that covers any significant market that Apple (or most multinationals) is targeting. What I find much more surprising is that all of their M1/M2 deployments seem to be far fewer bin-limited; normally you'd get a crapton of SKUs for a SoC because they are so hard to manufacture, but Apple seems to get away with only 15 to 20. Perhaps this is also why there are much clearer power limits on most of their devices.
- galad87 3y agoComparing the OpenCL GeekBench score is unfair. "More popular"? I don't really think so. Anyway of course it's going to be slower than a machine with more then two times its number of cores.
- sudosysgen 3y agoWhy isn't it fair? NVidia GPUs are notoriously terrible at OpenCL.
- daedalusred 3y agoOpenCL has been deprecated on macOS since the M1 was released so the M1 drivers won't optimise for OpenCL.
- cjbprime 3y agoReasons to still prefer an M2 for a HEDT situation, despite the article claims: * The latest Intel/AMD desktops only have two channels of DDR5, and if you put as little as 64GB RAM in them they can drop to DDR4 speeds (2DPC, dual-rank), less than 10% of M2 memory bandwidth. * You can (surprisingly cheaply) buy an M2 with 192GB GPU VRAM, but you can't buy a DDR5 PC with the same amount. If we all start wanting to run LLMs locally that'll be a pretty big deal.
- phonon 3y ago> can't buy a DDR5 PC with the same amount. Should be available soon. https://www.techpowerup.com/306005/asus-teases-192-gb-ddr5-memory-support-on-amd-x670-chipset-motherboard https://www.techpowerup.com/306005/asus-teases-192-gb-ddr5-m...
- gautamcgoel 3y agoWhy is it that using 64GB of RAM causes bandwidth to drop?
- cjbprime 3y agoThe bandwidth is fastest with one single-rank DIMM per channel, and there are four slots and two channels, so you ideally want two single-rank (chips on one side) DIMMs total. It'll get slower with 2DPC (DIMMs Per Channel), and slower still with dual-rank 2DPC. Some people are even seeing instability, with that setup at the slow DDR4 speeds. There aren't any 32GB single-stick DDR5 DIMMs yet, let alone 32GB single-rank single-stick, so if you want 64GB then you're using four sticks of dual-rank 16GB, the worst scenario.
- gautamcgoel 3y agoThanks, this makes sense!
- webaholic 3y agoAMD/Intel run at ~5 GHz at peak. Using that vs Apple's 3.7 GHz, you can see that the M2 is roughly ~20% better than the others at iso power.
- llm_nerd 3y agoThe M2 has been a bit underwhelming in general through all of its iterations: Apple jumped into such a lead with the M1 [1], so it was disappointing when they slowly iterated while Intel and AMD have made enormous strides catching up. Everyone keeps citing TDP, but given that we're talking about desktops that just isn't a huge factor. Having said that, the 7950X was released late February, and the 13900KS was released in mid January. Both of this year. Both are their premiere available chips right now in the segment. Referring to them like they're last year's junk is rather silly. [1] Though fun fact with the M1, I remember super disappointing Geekbench results leaking before its release. People do know how low trust the site is, right? The computer identifiers on the claimed "M2 Ultra" devices claim to be Macbook Pro 14" devices....which aren't getting M2 Ultras for obvious reasons. In all likelihood someone is making guesses and posting nonsense.
- birdyrooster 3y agoWith power in city downtowns (eg San Jose) at $0.50+/kWh it’s definitely becoming a huge factor. My Mac uses almost an order of magnitude less power than the PC and I keep the PC powered off.
- theevilsharpie 3y ago> My Mac uses almost an order of magnitude less power than the PC and I keep the PC powered off. Either you are not measuring power consumption correctly, or there is something very wrong with your PC.
- veselin 3y agoI find the article quite informative. Yes, M2 and the other chips are completely different products with different goals. If one wants to say that something completely trumps the other, it will be wrong. But here is what is visible: The M2 core is probably in the same ballpark as Zen 4 core, likely a tiny bit below. That may become very tiny if Zen 4 core runs at lower frequency to equalize the power. This doesn't account for the AVX512 of Zen4. 24 M2 cores manage to beat 16 Zen 4 cores also at lower power, but these are different products. Zen 4 does scale to far more cores, 96 in an EPYC chip. AMD and Intel have far more investments in interconnects and multi-die chips to do these things. The M2 GPU is in the same league as a 300$ mid-range nVidia card. It is not competitive at all - Apple produces the largest chip it can manufacture to go against a high margin smaller chip that nVidia orders. Again all of this doesn't mean each product is not good on its own.
- rbanffy 3y ago> The M2 GPU is in the same league as a 300$ mid-range nVidia card It still has the advantage of a much larger memory pool. I did a quick comparison exercise - I priced two workstations with similar configurations, one from Dell, the other from Apple. While there are x86 (and ARM) machines that'll blow the biggest M2 out of the water, the prices, as far as Apple can go, aren't much different. https://twitter.com/0xDEADBEEFCAFE/status/1667476129987297280 https://twitter.com/0xDEADBEEFCAFE/status/166747612998729728...
- doctorpangloss 3y ago> It still has the advantage of a much larger memory pool. Why do you think NVIDIA doesn't "just add" "more memory"? To its $40,000 H100s, which top out at "just" 80GB? The answer isn't price segmentation.
- 411111111111111 3y agoYes, it's not price segmentation, it's planned obsolescence. The 3080 series would be fine for likely beyond the 50x0 series gpu-wise, but current games are already starting to stutter unless you downgrade textures because of its limited VRAM
- cubefox 3y agoI assume the high price makes the advantage in power consumption (lower energy cost) not that relevant.
- dehrmann 3y agoAll all the M2 variants just Apple going down the binning path because of yields?
- wmf 3y agoM2, M2 Pro, and M2 Max are different dies; they aren't binned versions of the same die. Apple showed "photos" of the dies and you can see they are different sizes with different stuff on them.
- dehrmann 3y agoAre their yields actually that good, then? Are some of these chips massively underclocked? Do they add extra cores and cache for redundancy? Or maybe they have no idea, and TSMC delivers only chips that pass QA. For as big as Apple is, TSMC is in the stronger negotiating position.
- mark_l_watson 3y agoI don’t feel comfortable with these comparisons because I think Apple designs their SoCs specifically for the software they expect to be most used on their devices. I noticed, for example, that an older iPadPro with an A series SoC compiled Swift code in Playground twice as fast as my then current beefy Intel MacBook Pro. Similar design for running specific neural network architectures, handling their displays, etc. A few days ago I was thinking of getting a beefy Mac Studio for deep learning since M1 and M2 are now fairly well supported. I didn’t because this felt like swimming up river, using something not as it was designed to be used. (I decided to use $10 or $50/month Google Colab instead).
- snird 3y agoThe selling point is those chips' efficiency, not raw power. And in that regard, they are far better than their X86 competitors.
- visionscaper 3y agoI'm wondering to what extend these benchmarks, especially the GPU benchmarks, are really optimised for the specific Apple M2 architecture? And to what extent the high GPU-GPU bandwidth is benchmarked, this also influences real-world performance.
- daviddever23box 3y agoI watched the first three Mad Max films last night, in one sitting...while there is certainly an argument for absolute performance over time, it's becoming a lot more difficult to justify the power consumption of the current Intel (and, to a lesser degree, AMD) offerings, especially for sustained personal productivity and burst compilation tasks. We cannot speak of performance without the per-watt quotient. Battery life is a real concern, and current Wintel laptops just don't compete. Energy concerns are real (as depicted in the George Miller-directed films mentioned above), and it may be the case that the premium paid for Apple Silicon-based devices is actually a bargain.
- avidphantasm 3y agoYeah, my reaction the whole time to reading OP is, “now do performance per Watt…”
- cbsmith 3y agoThe chips it is being compared to are a year older. If there wasn't an advantage somewhere, it'd be an absolute failure.
- Salgat 3y agoIntel and AMD sell laptop chips with comparable performance per watt to M2 laptops. If you're buying an M2 Ultra desktop computer, your primary concern is performance period, not performance per watt.
- threeseed 3y agoBut many of us don't want that performance to come in a large tower that requires fans to be constantly running. I own a Mac Studio and PC 10980xe with 4090 and the latter has to live in a separate room because of the noise.
- LeoNatan25 3y agoI don’t know what tower case you are using, or what cooling system you have set up, but in modern times, if you hear much noise from your cooling solution, you have chosen components poorly. From fans to pumps to dampened cases, you could have build a relatively silent system.
- pavelevst 3y agoI’ve used core i9 mbp16 for almost 3 years and this week I’ve used M1 Pro mbp, seeing hide differences in performance and knowing the actual difference in tests of these 2, it make me think that apple international slowdown and heat up intel macs, like they did (and may be still do) with iPhones I also remember my macbook unibody 2008 and mbp 2012, with them I could do a lot with 4gb ram, even on hdd, nowadays 8gb is kinda too small for most of programming jobs, it look like macs keep getting better hardware every year and macOS using it more and more aggressively
- pram 3y agoI’ve had the i9 MBP with the 5500m from launch and it was always hot and noisy fwiw. For most people just having a second monitor plugged in made the fans always run because of a voltage issue. I sincerely doubt Apple needs to intentionally make it any worse. I hate that laptop!
- charlie0 3y agoOne thing I haven't seen mentioned is thermal throttling. Performance per watt absolutely matters if you're working in a place where the temp is 75deg or hotter. Those powerful Wintel laptops will certainly throttle down. The M architecture has a lot more headroom in this regard.
- kalleboo 3y agoIt's pretty clear from the rumors that Apple wanted a quad-die CPU for the Mac Pro (which would have had double this performance) but couldn't get it working, and had to compromise here to get anything out. I wonder if they'll give up on going past 2 dies and leave their high-end eternally lacking or if there is something else coming down the pipe.
- nateb2022 3y agoCPUs are intentionally engineered for a target market. When engineering the M2, Apple had a certain market in mind, and design and performance trade-offs were made accordingly. As others have noted, power efficiency seems to be a big priority. The M2 Ultra has a TDP of 60W. The i9-13900K has a base consumption of 125W, and draws up to 253W under stress. So do the math. Intel achieves 32% better single-core performance and 41% better multi-core performance (Cinebench) for 422% of Apple's power consumption. If there's something impressive here, it's that Apple is able to do so much with so little. If Apple wanted to, they could probably conjoin two M2 Ultra's and soundly beat the i9-13900K by a considerable margin and still use about half the same power to do so. The real question is why any consumer would need that much compute, and the target market for such a niche is probably very small which is why Apple didn't do that
- Dylan16807 3y ago> If Apple wanted to, they could probably conjoin two M2 Ultra's and soundly beat the i9-13900K by a considerable margin and still use about half the same power to do so. You can play that in the other way too. Use multiple 13700Ts at 35W each.
- yunohn 3y ago> The real question is why any consumer would need that much compute, and the target market for such a niche is probably very small which is why Apple didn't do that This is a lazy argument. Why did they make the M1 faster than other CPUs? I would argue that most people don’t need even that performance. Why do they put M chips in iPads - they can’t even use it optimally.
- nateb2022 3y agoThe way I framed my argument, it's a matter of trade-offs. Regarding the iPad, it's definitely possible that they might have used an A15/A16 from their iPhone line rather than the M1 and still have good performance, but the M1 was probably better for marketing and for consumer appeal hence its inclusion.
- pocketarc 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Ambix 3y agoIntel and AMD might be fast on the paper... but the RAM bandwidth matter much more now (thing of gen AI applications) than raw CPU power. So Apple Silicon is really the only CPU doing crazy 200 / 400 / 800 GB/s on the consumer market.
- shaman1 3y agoAs a side note, the difference in quality between the comments from HN and the linked site is from sky to earth. Thank you HN mods and users