4 ms·

People on M2 wouldn’t already upgrade.

pen2l 3y ago
Depends. Hardware-based ray tracing is pretty attractive. As soon as renderers start making use of it, you'll see render speeds practically double over the previous equivalent M2 machines and considering low power consumption and other things, for some the M3 quickly becomes a pretty enticing offer. HN might be missing this part, but I'm pretty happy that product people are still at the helm at Apple. We're talking about cores and this and that, but if you go to, for example, forums for Redshift renderer and hear what users of _tools_ who do things with these cores are saying, they are salivating over the M3. One of the sneakily genius things Apple seems to be doing is, it goes to developers of some of the most "popular" apps and works with them to make their apps work well. Behind the scenes it's working with Maxon, Autodesk, Adobe etc to make things run well, and the information it gathers from working with them informs direction of further R&D. Which is how we came to have hardware-based ray tracing and other things that will actually play a pivotal part in improving end user experience for power users.
- dantondwa 3y ago
  100%. They are even paying developers to work on optimizing Blender for Metal, so that Blender was ready for HWRT from day one.
- pdpi 3y ago
  > One of the sneakily genius things Apple seems to be doing is, it goes to developers of some of the most "popular" apps and works with them to make their apps work well This has been part of their playbook for decades. I distinctly remember some folks from Wolfram (maybe Stephen Wolfram himself?) demo Mathematica running on Intel macs (and talking about how easy it was to port) as part of announcing the transition to Intel.
  - naves 3y ago
    It was Theo Gray: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kcfGsOKXO5M&cbrd=1 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kcfGsOKXO5M&cbrd=1
- gumby 3y ago
  > One of the sneakily genius things Apple seems to be doing is, it goes to developers of some of the most "popular" apps and works with them to make their apps work well. What exactly is the problem? Microsoft, Sun etc did the same. Microsoft has a library of software and put in “fixes” so old code that used undefined behavior would continue to run as the os was upgraded.
  - acdha 3y ago
    I don’t think that’s a problem - more like it’s under-appreciated how smart it is. A lot of hardware enthusiasts like to talk about raw capabilities but you can end up with something like the Cell processor if you aren’t careful to make sure those features are used. This is where Apple’s approach is an interesting long-term play: they have been pushing things like the Accelerate framework since the PowerPC days (when you could see e.g. MATLAB get big performance wins simply by dropping in a new BLAS library to replace the unoptimized one it shipped with) and now they’re in the unusual position of being able to line everything up on the same release schedule, too. Sun could have done that on paper but their hardware was rarely competitive and they bit off more than they could chew trying to reinvent every concept of computing portably in Java, and Microsoft has always suffered from being downstream of Intel’s decisions.
    - dwaite 3y ago
      > ...but you can end up with something like the Cell processor if you aren’t careful to make sure those features are used. The Cell hardware didn't turn out how Sony expected either - hence adding an Nvidia GPU at the 11th hour, and bumping up the console price significantly.
      - acdha 3y ago
        I never used it on the console side but we had few pitches for HPC offerings. Back then nobody cared about the GPU but the test runs basically doomed it: the peak performance would have been nice but it required pretty massive rework of each program before the results weren’t bad and we had some memory-latency sensitive workloads which would have suffered horribly. We spent less money on Opterons which were faster on every existing app and since multiple supercomputing systems mixed the two I suspect that was a common decision.
- jorvi 3y ago
  > Hardware-based ray tracing is pretty attractive. As soon as renderers start making use of it, you'll see render speeds practically double over the previous equivalent M2 machines and considering low power consumption and other things, for some the M3 quickly becomes a pretty enticing offer. Even with hardware acceleration it’s so expensive there is no way they’ll make it a core part of any of their renderers.
  - wtallis 3y ago
    I think you may be talking about game engines and realtime rendering when the previous comment was about offline renderers.
    - usrusr 3y ago
      Your comment just made me google "apple m3 skyvase", because that's such a delightfully silly idea (using skyvase as an example for offline rendering in 2023, not talking about online renderers in general). (skyvase.pov was the customary benchmark scene back when pov-ray was a thing, somewhat popular as an FPU-centric real life benchmark in the early Pentium age)
- mpeg 3y ago
  You'd think large software makers like Autodesk would ensure their software works on Mac, but they are the main reason I still have PCs running windows at home – Revit doesn't have a Mac version, doesn't run on Wine and is extremely slow on Windows ARM
- JCharante 3y ago
  > One of the sneakily genius things Apple seems to be doing is, it goes to developers of some of the most "popular" apps and works with them to make their apps work well. Genuine question, what app is able to utilize ANE? It seems like it's been there for multiple generations and yet nothing makes use of it.
  - dwaite 3y ago
    > Genuine question, what app is able to utilize ANE? It seems like it's been there for multiple generations and yet nothing makes use of it. It is not directly exposed/documented, but instead leveraged by system ML-oriented frameworks like Core ML and Vision where appropriate.
traceroute66 3y ago
> People on M2 wouldn’t already upgrade. Absolutely this. And the small category of people upgrading from M2 from M3 will do it because they know what they need. They won't be dithering about with random evaluations or reading random blog posts. They'll just buy, infact they probably bought the day of the release.
kjreact 3y ago
I believe it’s simply that the performance gains from going to 3nm aren’t nearly as significant as going from 7nm to 5nm. Apple would love to show big performance gains between M2 and M3 if they could. It was curious when they announced Apple Vision Pro would still be using 5nm. This sheds some light on that decision.
datadrivenangel 3y ago
Some professionals on M2 will upgrade. Anecdotally, A professional photographer I know invests significantly in hardware that speeds him up, and he upgraded from the M1 to the M2 because it allowed him to edit photos faster, allowing him to spend less time per job, so he could do more jobs and make more money. He was able to do math and determine how much time it needed to save him to be a worthwhile investment.
- LTL_FTC 3y ago
  Many photographers suffer from gear acquisition syndrome, GAS, and I wonder how much time was actually saved by the purchase. Did they ever share the math they came up with?
nocoiner 3y ago
I suspect there’s no good reason to upgrade from M2 to M3. Nonetheless, I did it, and if anyone else is in the same boat I was, I encourage you to look at the trade-in values that Apple is offering for M2 MBPs. They offered something like 90+% of the out-of-pocket price I paid for the M2 six months ago, so it was basically a wash on the trade. I don’t in any way “need” an M3 but this was a particular painful turn of the ever-rotating upgrade wheel, and the generous valuation on the trade certainly took some of the sting off.

Depends. Hardware-based ray tracing is pretty attractive. As soon as renderers start making use of it, you'll see render speeds practically double over the previous equivalent M2 machines and considering low power consumption and other things, for some the M3 quickly becomes a pretty enticing offer. HN might be missing this part, but I'm pretty happy that product people are still at the helm at Apple. We're talking about cores and this and that, but if you go to, for example, forums for Redshift renderer and hear what users of _tools_ who do things with these cores are saying, they are salivating over the M3. One of the sneakily genius things Apple seems to be doing is, it goes to developers of some of the most "popular" apps and works with them to make their apps work well. Behind the scenes it's working with Maxon, Autodesk, Adobe etc to make things run well, and the information it gathers from working with them informs direction of further R&D. Which is how we came to have hardware-based ray tracing and other things that will actually play a pivotal part in improving end user experience for power users.

dantondwa 3y ago
100%. They are even paying developers to work on optimizing Blender for Metal, so that Blender was ready for HWRT from day one.
pdpi 3y ago
> One of the sneakily genius things Apple seems to be doing is, it goes to developers of some of the most "popular" apps and works with them to make their apps work well This has been part of their playbook for decades. I distinctly remember some folks from Wolfram (maybe Stephen Wolfram himself?) demo Mathematica running on Intel macs (and talking about how easy it was to port) as part of announcing the transition to Intel.
- naves 3y ago
  It was Theo Gray: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kcfGsOKXO5M&cbrd=1 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kcfGsOKXO5M&cbrd=1
gumby 3y ago
> One of the sneakily genius things Apple seems to be doing is, it goes to developers of some of the most "popular" apps and works with them to make their apps work well. What exactly is the problem? Microsoft, Sun etc did the same. Microsoft has a library of software and put in “fixes” so old code that used undefined behavior would continue to run as the os was upgraded.
- acdha 3y ago
  I don’t think that’s a problem - more like it’s under-appreciated how smart it is. A lot of hardware enthusiasts like to talk about raw capabilities but you can end up with something like the Cell processor if you aren’t careful to make sure those features are used. This is where Apple’s approach is an interesting long-term play: they have been pushing things like the Accelerate framework since the PowerPC days (when you could see e.g. MATLAB get big performance wins simply by dropping in a new BLAS library to replace the unoptimized one it shipped with) and now they’re in the unusual position of being able to line everything up on the same release schedule, too. Sun could have done that on paper but their hardware was rarely competitive and they bit off more than they could chew trying to reinvent every concept of computing portably in Java, and Microsoft has always suffered from being downstream of Intel’s decisions.
  - dwaite 3y ago
    > ...but you can end up with something like the Cell processor if you aren’t careful to make sure those features are used. The Cell hardware didn't turn out how Sony expected either - hence adding an Nvidia GPU at the 11th hour, and bumping up the console price significantly.
    - acdha 3y ago
      I never used it on the console side but we had few pitches for HPC offerings. Back then nobody cared about the GPU but the test runs basically doomed it: the peak performance would have been nice but it required pretty massive rework of each program before the results weren’t bad and we had some memory-latency sensitive workloads which would have suffered horribly. We spent less money on Opterons which were faster on every existing app and since multiple supercomputing systems mixed the two I suspect that was a common decision.
jorvi 3y ago
> Hardware-based ray tracing is pretty attractive. As soon as renderers start making use of it, you'll see render speeds practically double over the previous equivalent M2 machines and considering low power consumption and other things, for some the M3 quickly becomes a pretty enticing offer. Even with hardware acceleration it’s so expensive there is no way they’ll make it a core part of any of their renderers.
- wtallis 3y ago
  I think you may be talking about game engines and realtime rendering when the previous comment was about offline renderers.
  - usrusr 3y ago
    Your comment just made me google "apple m3 skyvase", because that's such a delightfully silly idea (using skyvase as an example for offline rendering in 2023, not talking about online renderers in general). (skyvase.pov was the customary benchmark scene back when pov-ray was a thing, somewhat popular as an FPU-centric real life benchmark in the early Pentium age)
mpeg 3y ago
You'd think large software makers like Autodesk would ensure their software works on Mac, but they are the main reason I still have PCs running windows at home – Revit doesn't have a Mac version, doesn't run on Wine and is extremely slow on Windows ARM
JCharante 3y ago
> One of the sneakily genius things Apple seems to be doing is, it goes to developers of some of the most "popular" apps and works with them to make their apps work well. Genuine question, what app is able to utilize ANE? It seems like it's been there for multiple generations and yet nothing makes use of it.
- dwaite 3y ago
  > Genuine question, what app is able to utilize ANE? It seems like it's been there for multiple generations and yet nothing makes use of it. It is not directly exposed/documented, but instead leveraged by system ML-oriented frameworks like Core ML and Vision where appropriate.

traceroute66 3y ago

> People on M2 wouldn’t already upgrade. Absolutely this. And the small category of people upgrading from M2 from M3 will do it because they know what they need. They won't be dithering about with random evaluations or reading random blog posts. They'll just buy, infact they probably bought the day of the release.

kjreact 3y ago

I believe it’s simply that the performance gains from going to 3nm aren’t nearly as significant as going from 7nm to 5nm. Apple would love to show big performance gains between M2 and M3 if they could. It was curious when they announced Apple Vision Pro would still be using 5nm. This sheds some light on that decision.

datadrivenangel 3y ago

Some professionals on M2 will upgrade. Anecdotally, A professional photographer I know invests significantly in hardware that speeds him up, and he upgraded from the M1 to the M2 because it allowed him to edit photos faster, allowing him to spend less time per job, so he could do more jobs and make more money. He was able to do math and determine how much time it needed to save him to be a worthwhile investment.

LTL_FTC 3y ago
Many photographers suffer from gear acquisition syndrome, GAS, and I wonder how much time was actually saved by the purchase. Did they ever share the math they came up with?

nocoiner 3y ago

I suspect there’s no good reason to upgrade from M2 to M3. Nonetheless, I did it, and if anyone else is in the same boat I was, I encourage you to look at the trade-in values that Apple is offering for M2 MBPs. They offered something like 90+% of the out-of-pocket price I paid for the M2 six months ago, so it was basically a wash on the trade. I don’t in any way “need” an M3 but this was a particular painful turn of the ever-rotating upgrade wheel, and the generous valuation on the trade certainly took some of the sting off.