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CPUs 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 m

by nateb2022 3y ago

CPUs 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 ago
  The 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
The M2 Ultra comes on a $7000 workstation; it's not exactly consumer-level hardware. What you're saying is absolutely true - they could just double it up (like they do from the normal to the Pro, and from the Pro to the Ultra). And I hope they do, for an M3 Ultra. It'd be great if they pushed it even harder and showed Intel/AMD that they can beat them at both the low end and the high end, with plenty of power consumption to spare. As you said though, it's a very niche thing, so even without beating Intel at the top end they're not going to be losing much. It's just a bit of a shame. The i9-13900K is only $500, it's not like it's some wildly out-of-reach thing.
- alphabettsy 3y ago
  It’s comes on a $4000 workstation, the Studio, but point stands.
bee_rider 3y ago
The Apple processors are definitely impressive efficiency-wise (and by many other metrics). But of course, combining any number of M2’s won’t increase their single core scores. Intel’s desktop chips are there for people who want high clock speeds and are happy to pay in power for that (and the power cost is super linearly related to clock frequency). The Intel chips are just designed for different use-cases, it doesn’t make sense to assume either company could just linearly scale things to reproduce each other’s products. The relevance of multi-core scores depends on how parallel the workload is. If we all had perfectly parallel workloads I guess Xeon Phi’s would have sold better.

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 ago
The 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

The M2 Ultra comes on a $7000 workstation; it's not exactly consumer-level hardware. What you're saying is absolutely true - they could just double it up (like they do from the normal to the Pro, and from the Pro to the Ultra). And I hope they do, for an M3 Ultra. It'd be great if they pushed it even harder and showed Intel/AMD that they can beat them at both the low end and the high end, with plenty of power consumption to spare. As you said though, it's a very niche thing, so even without beating Intel at the top end they're not going to be losing much. It's just a bit of a shame. The i9-13900K is only $500, it's not like it's some wildly out-of-reach thing.

alphabettsy 3y ago
It’s comes on a $4000 workstation, the Studio, but point stands.

bee_rider 3y ago

The Apple processors are definitely impressive efficiency-wise (and by many other metrics). But of course, combining any number of M2’s won’t increase their single core scores. Intel’s desktop chips are there for people who want high clock speeds and are happy to pay in power for that (and the power cost is super linearly related to clock frequency). The Intel chips are just designed for different use-cases, it doesn’t make sense to assume either company could just linearly scale things to reproduce each other’s products. The relevance of multi-core scores depends on how parallel the workload is. If we all had perfectly parallel workloads I guess Xeon Phi’s would have sold better.