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I 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 com

I 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 ago
    Yes, 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
    - doctorpangloss 3y ago
      The performance of the chip is matched to the memory size. I think it’s a U shaped curve. Beyond 80GB, today, the larger chip would maybe all of these: yield less, scale worse, take too much power, etc. Like this matching of compute resources to RAM is partly the difference between CPUs and GPUs. Anyway, it’s just to say that it isn’t a business decision. The extra RAM in the M2 doesn’t help the GPU much for the same tasks the H100 excels at, because it isn’t performant enough to use that RAM anywhere near the same way an H100 would, and if it were, there would have to be less RAM. The H100 doesn’t even have a graphics engine. It’s complicated.
      - wtallis 3y ago
        > The performance of the chip is matched to the memory size. That may be approximately true if you only look at a single generation of consumer graphics cards at a time. If you compare across generations or include non-gaming workloads the correlation falls apart.
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  > It still has the advantage of a much larger memory pool. I wonder if given roughly equal power to the GPUs in current gen consoles (PS5/XBSX), it'd yield some advantage in porting console games since those consoles also have a large shared pool of memory (16GB), and neither AMD nor Nvidia want to give up using VRAM as an upsell.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    With the M2 Ultra prices, it'd be cheaper to buy a 4090 than to go the Apple route. With the M2 pro you'll probably still be better off with a 4080 unless you really need more than 16GB of VRAM. I don't know the M2's efficiency for things like machine learning, but the M1's machine learning performance seemed to have been beaten 4-5x by the 3060Ti so I'm pretty sure "more VRAM" is all it's got going for it in ML tasks.
    - kitsunesoba 3y ago
      Well yeah, the market here would be people who already have a reasonably powerful Mac and would rather have that fill their gaming needs instead of having to build or buy a separate dedicated device for that. But what I was really getting at is the trouble that game studios have been encountering lately when porting PS5 and Xbox titles to Windows, which is that these games are so reliant on those consoles' 16GB shared memory pool that they perform terribly on PCs. The impact is double, because not only are most GPUs in usage right now anemic when it comes to VRAM (even my last-gen high end 3080 Ti comes up short at only 12GB), traditional PCs also have to copy data between RAM and VRAM. Significant re-architecting for the Windows port is required to work around this. M-series Macs are much more similar to current gen consoles with their shared memory pool, which in theory could make porting from console to Mac (at least when targeting Macs with 16GB+ of RAM) more straightforward than porting to Windows. While some work would need to be done to support Metal, the two most popular engines already do much of that legwork and the work that remains can be shared across multiple titles.
      - rbanffy 3y ago
        I can’t imagine using my work computer for gaming, as maintaining the software install has so many different requirements, but, then, I’m no PC gamer and would rather have a console plugged into the big TV in the living room than on my desktop monitors. It’s also much less of a hassle maintaining a console than a gaming PC. As a side-note, my living room TV is a rather small 43 inch one (limited in size by the surrounding overflowing book shelves) but, if I were a gamer, I’d probably have gone with a 60+ inch or wall projector. If I lived alone, I’d get an Apple Vision Pro instead of the humongous TV, as it’d be cheaper.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  If you buy anything labeled as "workstation", you're paying twice the price already. The article describes the M2 being blown out of the water by a 4080 and a 13900KS. That's about $2000 + RAM, motherboard, and power supply. Plus you can use the built in GPU in your CPU for acceleration things like transcodes. You can get a pre-built gaming PC with a 4090 for about $4000, that'll crush the M2 in compute if you use any kind of GPU acceleration. Of course the M2 has some other advantages (the unified memory and macOS) and some other disadvantages (you're stuck with the amount of RAM you pick at checkout, macOS, you have to sacrifice system RAM for GPU RAM) so it all depends on your use case. I think the M2 still reigns supreme for mobile devices, though AMD is getting closer and closer with their mobile chips, but if you've got a machine hooked into the wall you'll have to pay some pretty excessive electricity rates for the M2 to become competitive.
  - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
    > If you buy anything labeled as "workstation", you're paying twice the price already. The price of workstation-class machines also includes the cost of higher build-quality and stability, things like same-day support and service - at least the option for a long-term (5-6 year) warranty, and FRUs - you don't get that with consumer-grade computers - and those things matter when a machine is something you depend on professionally.
    - Nullabillity 3y ago
      $4k will buy you a hell of a lot of troubleshooting time before "same-day service" actually wins out.
    - sounds 3y ago
      Your random acronym decrypter: FRU: Field-Replaceable Unit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-replaceable_unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-replaceable_unit What the poster means is that a "workstation" is designed with quickly swappable components, often not even needing to use any tools. Businesses may benefit from this. While it doesn't necessarily mean the swappable components are standardized or easy to procure, they usually are. That's a separate item that "workstation" machines typically offer: longer availability of replacement parts.
jeroenhd 3y ago
Apple's GPU performance is what makes me sceptical about their gaming related advertising. Sure, you can do 1080p gaming with the highest SKU, but you're paying through the nose if you bought an M2 to play games. It seems strange to me for Apple to advertise something they haven't exactly mastered yet on stage. Maybe they have some kind of optimization up their sleeves that will roll out later? I can imagine Apple coming out with their own answer to DLSS and FSX2 based on their machine learning hardware, for example. On the other hand, I would've expected them to demonstrate that in the first place when they shoed off their game port toolkit.
- achandlerwhite 3y ago
  They announced MetalFX for their upscaling tech last year and by all accounts it works well if developers take advantage of it.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    Not familiar with DLSS at all, does it requires developers to do something in order to take avantage of it too? I had imagined it was automatic but then again I know nothing about it beyond the marketing pitch to consumers.
    - jml78 3y ago
      Yes, games have to do work to support DLSS. I am not knowledgeable enough to know how much work it is but I have played games that didn’t initially support it but eventually released an updated that added support. There are also multiple “levels” for DLSS in games that support it, eg. Quality, performance, etc
      - littlestymaar 3y ago
        Thanks
    - GeekyBear 3y ago
      > Not familiar with DLSS at all Here's a video comparing DLSS and MetalFX upscaling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iXx9lfe62w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iXx9lfe62w
411111111111111 3y ago
> same league as a 300$ mid-range nVidia card. $300 midrange Nvidia card? Did you get stuck in 2010? That's way below entry-level at this point. You're likely comparing it with a 1666 cards or something, which is based on a chip from 2012. I wish Apple silicone was actually competitive on performance. Nvidia needs competition or they'll likely double prices again with the next generation.
llm_nerd 3y ago
>The M2 core is probably in the same ballpark as Zen 4 core, likely a tiny bit below. The 7950x is running at 5.7Ghz when only a single thread is saturated. The M2 Ultra caps its cores at 3.5Ghz. A 62% higher clock speed, at a monster power profile, to barely beat it isn't evidence of a core advantage. >24 M2 cores manage to beat 16 Zen 4 cores also at lower power The M2 ultra has 16 real cores, with 8 additional efficiency cores that are very low performance. And of course the M2 Ultra could pretty handily trounce the 7950x because the latter has to dramatically scale back the clock speed, as the power profile of all 16 cores at 5.7Ghz would melt the chip. And of course the 7950x has hyper-threading and hardware for mini-versions of 16 more cores, so in a way it has more cores than the Apple chip. >This doesn't account for the AVX512 of Zen4. AVX512 is used by a tiny, minuscule fraction of computers ever in their history of existence. It is the most absolute non-factor going. I mean...in an ideal world Apple would get the GPU off the core. It limits their core and power profile, and takes up a huge amount of die space. They could then individually mega-size the GPU and the CPU. They could investigate mega interconnects like nvidia's latest instead of trying to jam everything together. Was Apple correct to call it the most powerful chip? Certainly not. And there is a huge price penalty. But they're hugely, ridiculously powerful machines that will never leave the user wanting.
- veselin 3y ago
  It is true that nobody competes in the low power high efficiency workstation market or maybe such a market does not exist yet and Apple is creating it. But also as users, some were expecting the M series are so good that they are going to take many markets by storm. And it seems it is not happening.

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 ago
  Yes, 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
  - doctorpangloss 3y ago
    The performance of the chip is matched to the memory size. I think it’s a U shaped curve. Beyond 80GB, today, the larger chip would maybe all of these: yield less, scale worse, take too much power, etc. Like this matching of compute resources to RAM is partly the difference between CPUs and GPUs. Anyway, it’s just to say that it isn’t a business decision. The extra RAM in the M2 doesn’t help the GPU much for the same tasks the H100 excels at, because it isn’t performant enough to use that RAM anywhere near the same way an H100 would, and if it were, there would have to be less RAM. The H100 doesn’t even have a graphics engine. It’s complicated.
    - wtallis 3y ago
      > The performance of the chip is matched to the memory size. That may be approximately true if you only look at a single generation of consumer graphics cards at a time. If you compare across generations or include non-gaming workloads the correlation falls apart.
kitsunesoba 3y ago
> It still has the advantage of a much larger memory pool. I wonder if given roughly equal power to the GPUs in current gen consoles (PS5/XBSX), it'd yield some advantage in porting console games since those consoles also have a large shared pool of memory (16GB), and neither AMD nor Nvidia want to give up using VRAM as an upsell.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  With the M2 Ultra prices, it'd be cheaper to buy a 4090 than to go the Apple route. With the M2 pro you'll probably still be better off with a 4080 unless you really need more than 16GB of VRAM. I don't know the M2's efficiency for things like machine learning, but the M1's machine learning performance seemed to have been beaten 4-5x by the 3060Ti so I'm pretty sure "more VRAM" is all it's got going for it in ML tasks.
  - kitsunesoba 3y ago
    Well yeah, the market here would be people who already have a reasonably powerful Mac and would rather have that fill their gaming needs instead of having to build or buy a separate dedicated device for that. But what I was really getting at is the trouble that game studios have been encountering lately when porting PS5 and Xbox titles to Windows, which is that these games are so reliant on those consoles' 16GB shared memory pool that they perform terribly on PCs. The impact is double, because not only are most GPUs in usage right now anemic when it comes to VRAM (even my last-gen high end 3080 Ti comes up short at only 12GB), traditional PCs also have to copy data between RAM and VRAM. Significant re-architecting for the Windows port is required to work around this. M-series Macs are much more similar to current gen consoles with their shared memory pool, which in theory could make porting from console to Mac (at least when targeting Macs with 16GB+ of RAM) more straightforward than porting to Windows. While some work would need to be done to support Metal, the two most popular engines already do much of that legwork and the work that remains can be shared across multiple titles.
    - rbanffy 3y ago
      I can’t imagine using my work computer for gaming, as maintaining the software install has so many different requirements, but, then, I’m no PC gamer and would rather have a console plugged into the big TV in the living room than on my desktop monitors. It’s also much less of a hassle maintaining a console than a gaming PC. As a side-note, my living room TV is a rather small 43 inch one (limited in size by the surrounding overflowing book shelves) but, if I were a gamer, I’d probably have gone with a 60+ inch or wall projector. If I lived alone, I’d get an Apple Vision Pro instead of the humongous TV, as it’d be cheaper.
jeroenhd 3y ago
If you buy anything labeled as "workstation", you're paying twice the price already. The article describes the M2 being blown out of the water by a 4080 and a 13900KS. That's about $2000 + RAM, motherboard, and power supply. Plus you can use the built in GPU in your CPU for acceleration things like transcodes. You can get a pre-built gaming PC with a 4090 for about $4000, that'll crush the M2 in compute if you use any kind of GPU acceleration. Of course the M2 has some other advantages (the unified memory and macOS) and some other disadvantages (you're stuck with the amount of RAM you pick at checkout, macOS, you have to sacrifice system RAM for GPU RAM) so it all depends on your use case. I think the M2 still reigns supreme for mobile devices, though AMD is getting closer and closer with their mobile chips, but if you've got a machine hooked into the wall you'll have to pay some pretty excessive electricity rates for the M2 to become competitive.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  > If you buy anything labeled as "workstation", you're paying twice the price already. The price of workstation-class machines also includes the cost of higher build-quality and stability, things like same-day support and service - at least the option for a long-term (5-6 year) warranty, and FRUs - you don't get that with consumer-grade computers - and those things matter when a machine is something you depend on professionally.
  - Nullabillity 3y ago
    $4k will buy you a hell of a lot of troubleshooting time before "same-day service" actually wins out.
  - sounds 3y ago
    Your random acronym decrypter: FRU: Field-Replaceable Unit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-replaceable_unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-replaceable_unit What the poster means is that a "workstation" is designed with quickly swappable components, often not even needing to use any tools. Businesses may benefit from this. While it doesn't necessarily mean the swappable components are standardized or easy to procure, they usually are. That's a separate item that "workstation" machines typically offer: longer availability of replacement parts.

jeroenhd 3y ago

Apple's GPU performance is what makes me sceptical about their gaming related advertising. Sure, you can do 1080p gaming with the highest SKU, but you're paying through the nose if you bought an M2 to play games. It seems strange to me for Apple to advertise something they haven't exactly mastered yet on stage. Maybe they have some kind of optimization up their sleeves that will roll out later? I can imagine Apple coming out with their own answer to DLSS and FSX2 based on their machine learning hardware, for example. On the other hand, I would've expected them to demonstrate that in the first place when they shoed off their game port toolkit.

achandlerwhite 3y ago
They announced MetalFX for their upscaling tech last year and by all accounts it works well if developers take advantage of it.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  Not familiar with DLSS at all, does it requires developers to do something in order to take avantage of it too? I had imagined it was automatic but then again I know nothing about it beyond the marketing pitch to consumers.
  - jml78 3y ago
    Yes, games have to do work to support DLSS. I am not knowledgeable enough to know how much work it is but I have played games that didn’t initially support it but eventually released an updated that added support. There are also multiple “levels” for DLSS in games that support it, eg. Quality, performance, etc
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      Thanks
  - GeekyBear 3y ago
    > Not familiar with DLSS at all Here's a video comparing DLSS and MetalFX upscaling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iXx9lfe62w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iXx9lfe62w

411111111111111 3y ago

> same league as a 300$ mid-range nVidia card. $300 midrange Nvidia card? Did you get stuck in 2010? That's way below entry-level at this point. You're likely comparing it with a 1666 cards or something, which is based on a chip from 2012. I wish Apple silicone was actually competitive on performance. Nvidia needs competition or they'll likely double prices again with the next generation.

llm_nerd 3y ago

>The M2 core is probably in the same ballpark as Zen 4 core, likely a tiny bit below. The 7950x is running at 5.7Ghz when only a single thread is saturated. The M2 Ultra caps its cores at 3.5Ghz. A 62% higher clock speed, at a monster power profile, to barely beat it isn't evidence of a core advantage. >24 M2 cores manage to beat 16 Zen 4 cores also at lower power The M2 ultra has 16 real cores, with 8 additional efficiency cores that are very low performance. And of course the M2 Ultra could pretty handily trounce the 7950x because the latter has to dramatically scale back the clock speed, as the power profile of all 16 cores at 5.7Ghz would melt the chip. And of course the 7950x has hyper-threading and hardware for mini-versions of 16 more cores, so in a way it has more cores than the Apple chip. >This doesn't account for the AVX512 of Zen4. AVX512 is used by a tiny, minuscule fraction of computers ever in their history of existence. It is the most absolute non-factor going. I mean...in an ideal world Apple would get the GPU off the core. It limits their core and power profile, and takes up a huge amount of die space. They could then individually mega-size the GPU and the CPU. They could investigate mega interconnects like nvidia's latest instead of trying to jam everything together. Was Apple correct to call it the most powerful chip? Certainly not. And there is a huge price penalty. But they're hugely, ridiculously powerful machines that will never leave the user wanting.

veselin 3y ago
It is true that nobody competes in the low power high efficiency workstation market or maybe such a market does not exist yet and Apple is creating it. But also as users, some were expecting the M series are so good that they are going to take many markets by storm. And it seems it is not happening.