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How does the M2 Ultra stack up against the PC world? Apple Silicon is a SoC so it’s hard to quantity the difference between it and the individual parts in a PC.

How does the M2 Ultra stack up against the PC world? Apple Silicon is a SoC so it’s hard to quantity the difference between it and the individual parts in a PC. You can get individual parts that are performing better in a PC but the SoC design, I’m sure, must bring something to the table right? Performance per watt is not important on desktop and that’s Apple’s biggest advantage. If we take that way, what does the M2 Ultra Mac Studio give people who spend so much money? Is it for video and photo editors who want a lot of performance in a quiet and small package?

dagmx 3y ago
It’s quite hard to answer because the characteristics of each makes for huge swings where a PC will outperform in some use cases but a Mac will in others. I’ll just address some areas where the SoC design helps that were featured in the WWDC keynote and other recent sessions. 1. Large 3D scenes were featured with the island from Moana. It’s something you can’t actually load on a workstation GPU because it takes over a hundred gigs of memory. The M2 Ultra can load it because of the massive memory the GPU has access to. Even my MBP is capable of loading scenes that my professional workstation cannot. 2. Similarly , GPU compute is another area the M2 pulls ahead when you cross memory limits that PC GPUs offer. Once you cross that memory limit, the mac takes a huge performance lead. This is useful for GPU based rendering and simulations. 3. Video decoding is huge. You can work in much higher quality streams and resolutions due to the many onboard decoders. On a PC, you’d be forced to make low resolution proxies 4. If you let me extend it to the non ultra SOCs, you get portability with desktop performance. I know you said to exclude that, but consider that people like to have unified experiences. So what’s good for one also affects the other.
sudosysgen 3y ago
It's much slower than comparable PCs, but uses about half the power (not that it matters).
- brailsafe 3y ago
  I don't really understand why people are disregarding the power draw. Seems like a wasteful perspective.
  - sudosysgen 3y ago
    Because it really doesn't matter. If you're actually using all the power you can, half the speed at half the power consumption actually means you're going to use more energy. Apple's GPUs aren't actually any better at performance per watt compared to NVidia once you start using large chips, and AMD's CPUs are not that much worse either.

dagmx 3y ago

It’s quite hard to answer because the characteristics of each makes for huge swings where a PC will outperform in some use cases but a Mac will in others. I’ll just address some areas where the SoC design helps that were featured in the WWDC keynote and other recent sessions. 1. Large 3D scenes were featured with the island from Moana. It’s something you can’t actually load on a workstation GPU because it takes over a hundred gigs of memory. The M2 Ultra can load it because of the massive memory the GPU has access to. Even my MBP is capable of loading scenes that my professional workstation cannot. 2. Similarly , GPU compute is another area the M2 pulls ahead when you cross memory limits that PC GPUs offer. Once you cross that memory limit, the mac takes a huge performance lead. This is useful for GPU based rendering and simulations. 3. Video decoding is huge. You can work in much higher quality streams and resolutions due to the many onboard decoders. On a PC, you’d be forced to make low resolution proxies 4. If you let me extend it to the non ultra SOCs, you get portability with desktop performance. I know you said to exclude that, but consider that people like to have unified experiences. So what’s good for one also affects the other.

sudosysgen 3y ago

It's much slower than comparable PCs, but uses about half the power (not that it matters).

brailsafe 3y ago
I don't really understand why people are disregarding the power draw. Seems like a wasteful perspective.
- sudosysgen 3y ago
  Because it really doesn't matter. If you're actually using all the power you can, half the speed at half the power consumption actually means you're going to use more energy. Apple's GPUs aren't actually any better at performance per watt compared to NVidia once you start using large chips, and AMD's CPUs are not that much worse either.