Performance 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.
TDP 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).
If 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.
It 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.
I'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.
There 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.
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.
The 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.
> 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.
It'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.
A 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.
Yeah, you gotta pay a premium if you want the highest performance on the market. If you're just looking to match the GPU performance of the M2 Ultra though, there are several gaming laptops that will run circles around it in Blender. Many are cheaper than the base model Mac Studio.
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)
They 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.
My 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.
It 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.
You 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.
I 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?
Many 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.
They 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.
A 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.
The die area matters in terms of how much performance you can still get out of it when lowering the power to match up with the (not actually) more efficient integrated chip.
If Apple clocked their GPU to match the performance of a comparable dedicated chip, it would be just as inefficient, noisy and hot. Except they can not do even do that. They turned a limitation of the design into a supposed feature.
I 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.
It'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.
> 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.
I think it's more accurate to say that PCIe link bandwidth matters when your VRAM capacity starts to become insufficient, a problem that Apple sidesteps. The key advantage of Apple's unified memory strategy isn't fast communication between CPU and GPU, but in granting the GPU access to a high-capacity memory pool (with some side benefits of giving the CPU access to GPU-like memory bandwidth).
Measured as one percent lows and again, most GPUs under most Conditions simply don't saturate PCIe enough for that to make a difference. Der8auer and GamersNexus on youtube have plenty of examples.
1% lows in a given benchmark isn’t really measuring stutter in practice, what you want is percentage of frames that don’t finish in time.
If once a minute you miss 4 frames in a row that’s noticeable even if everything else is rock solid. The thing is people adjust their resolution/settings to reach acceptable FPS, thus it’s fairly GPU independent. What matters is rendering volatility as assets are loaded etc.
If the pipeline stalls for 70ms it’s a problem even if in theory you don’t “miss” a frame you still aren’t getting new frames until rendering finishes.
All adaptive refresh rates do is avoiding unwanted delays after the frame finishes.
That's not how it works. A 70ms pipeline stall means a ~90ms frame which means that your 1% framerate low is going to be reduced.
Adaptive refresh rate means that only frame rate matters. You can't miss a frame, you can only have a frame take longer, and that's measured perfectly well by 1% or 0.1% low frame rates.
Also I don't see why an M series CPU is going to be any better at feeding the (asynchrous, multiple frames in flight) GPU rendering pipeline than a modern x86 CPU, when both are just as fast. macOS is also pretty bad at realtime scheduling for heavy workloads compared to modern Linux and Windows.
Yes occasional 90ms stall reduces 1% frame rates, but less than how annoying it is.
A 10 minute test at 120 FPS is 10 * 60 * 120 ~= 72,000 frames. Your 1% lows is an average of ~720 frames but so what if of 300 them are at 60 FPS you’re going to have trouble noticing.
While if you’re almost rock solid at 120FPS a dozen 70ms stalls it’s really obvious that something is wrong but the calculated 1% low’s may actually look better. This is especially true as those stalls generally correlate with interning things happening.
The M series CPU comparison people are talking about isn’t average FPS or even 1% lows where dedicated graphics cars have an advantage, the comparison is what happens when things go very wrong. And it’s in that very specific case when they may have an advantage.
> While if you’re almost rock solid at 120FPS a dozen 70ms stalls it’s really obvious that something is wrong but the calculated 1% low’s may actually look better.
I think this is an instance of the coordinated omission problem: you cannot simply measure the latency of the frames that were completed, but instead have to consider the frames that should have been delivered during a stall. Looking at frame time percentiles means a stall only penalizes your metric with one bad frame, when it should be penalized for missing several frames and showing the user an increasingly stale image for several average-frametimes.
This isn't actually true. Looking at aveeages will in fact reflect correctly on average frame staleness over a sampling period. A single frame that's 5x too long or 4 frames that are 2x too long have the same impact on the average delta of frame staleness on the total sum.
Think of it like Little's law in queing theory , it's better to simply just look at different percentiles, like 99 or 99.9th. The average framerate correctly indicates the average staleness.
> A single frame that's 5x too long or 4 frames that are 2x too long have the same impact on the average delta of frame staleness on the total sum.
It's not clear to me: are you saying those two scenarios should be quantified as equally bad? Because it seems pretty obvious to me that the 5x outlier is qualitatively much worse.
The fact that the 5x outlier may be qualitatively worse is something that you pin down using percentiles, which is what everyone does, either 1% or 0.1% low. The argument about time-weighted frame staleness is not mathematically valid.
There’s nothing inherently mathematically special about 1% or 0.1%, you can also use 0.0042% or 0.00069% which highlights this kind of extreme outliers more.
Benchmarking sites use 1% or 0.1% because they better highlight the commodity PC hardware rather than the games bugs and architecture.
That's not true. You can't use 0.0042% because then you don't have enough frames to be statistically significant without running for a very long time. It's also true that a frame pacing issue that is so rare that it isn't even impacting the 0.1% frame time isn't going to be noticeable, really.
These benchmarks are controlled for game bugs and architecture by simply averaging over ~40-50 games, on repeatable loops.
This is a completely misguided analysis. First of all, there is nothing in the M series architecture that's going to avoid pipeline stalls, let aloe huge 70ms graphics pipeline stalls. As I've explained above, games keep multiple frame pipelines in flight at once, so you don't have these kind of issues unless there is a scheduling or I/O issue. There is no advantage here.
The only advantage is that the transfer from GPU to CPU is faster in terms of latency. This doesn't cause pipeline stalls, because as I've explained above, frames are kept in flight, so latency is not critical. At the same time, modern CPU-GPU interconnects have similar bandwidth to RAM.
Additionally, you're not the first person to have thought about frame pacing. Dozens of reviewers have full frame pacing graphs with the frame times of every frame, as well as 0.1% lows, and we simply don't see what you're describing. 100ms+ frames are not a problem on modern games and modern hardware, and when they are, it's because of some blocking read to storage or to some scheduling issue, not because of CPU/GPU speed.
The impact of link speed on 0.1% low framerates has already been investigated, and it's minimal, and there isn't even an advantage here.
That's true to an extent, but when discussing the current performance of GPU hardware the context is necessarily software that actually exists rather than hypothetical software that could exist in the future. The high CPU-to-GPU bandwidth is not currently enabling Apple's GPUs to punch above their weight class (GFLOPS or whatever) except in scenarios where competing GPUs simply don't have enough VRAM. In a future where applications are written with Apple's architecture in mind, any advantage this provides would pretty much boil down to using more VRAM because VRAM capacity isn't as limited anymore.
Or memory slots, or dual/quad socket capability, or compatibility with the GPU card for previous gen Mac Pro. You get one multicore ARM SoC with 192GB of on-package L4 cache and integrated graphics, and that’s it.
While 192GB of RAM is more than I would need, for people looking to use 1.5TB of RAM and a pair of NVIDIA GPU they had from previous model, they’d have to go elsewhere.
Which leaves me wondering; how much engineering at Apple are happening on Mac?
The 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.
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.
I 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
It’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.
I have seen the demos, but I am skeptical of the actual practicality or value proposition until a 3rd party publishes some frametime benchmarks, and games out in the wild get battle tested.
I 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.
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.
Maybe, 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.
One 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.
It 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?
FLOPS are one thing, but 192 GB of unified memory that can be used as VRAM is something else. That could be a big win on the inference side of things, where even an RTX 4090 GPU is limited to only 24 GB.
Then there's the power consumption difference to consider. This seems like one of those cases where benchmarks reveal only a fraction of the larger picture.
I think the exciting thing with Apple silicone and "AI" is inference, not training. Due to their unified memory, you can potentially have enormous local model inference. That's potentially much more expensive on a PC with a GPU having its own memory.
Apple have an opportunity, if they 2-4x the memory on the entry level devices (not beyond the realms of possibility), to make local inference a thing available to all.
Sure, but for inference it’s much easier to work in lower precision. Training with very low precision is also possible, but is often more tricky due to numerical stability.
A lot of work is going on in 8-bit inference and even 4 bit inference. So, models that need 64 GB in FP32 can do with 16GB VRAM in FP8 or INT8, which is well within the realm of consumer NVIDIA cards. And the latest NVIDIA tensor cores will absolutely destroy Apple Silicon GPUs or the Neural Engine in 8 bit.
So, I don’t think it’s really a strong argument. And as someone who is a Mac user and a ML practitioner, I’d be very happy if they started supporting eGPUs again.
Apple Silicon has many strengths and the GPU core are fine for many ends, from games to graphics apps.
But let’s not pretend that Apple is beating NVIDIA at their own game (yet). That day might come, but currently it only leads to disappointed users in ML forums who were hyped into thinking that their vanilla M2 MacBook Airs can almost compete with a 4090 in training a deep transformer model. (Yes, that happens.)
Multiple NVIDIA GPUs also have unified memory from an application perspective, one GPU has up to 80GBs right now. They also have a proper software stack. If NVIDIA saw any credible threat there, they could ramp that up, DRAM is not beholden to Apple.
The 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.
NVIDIA 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.
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.
Ahhaha, 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.
Since 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.
It’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.
Whoever 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
I considered it an important factor even 15 years ago, long before the reality of the environmental and energy crises really dawned on us. Surely I can't be alone.
Lower power consumption means less heat, which means you might see more reliable performance (less likelihood of throttling in the middle of intensive workloads)
This doesn’t matter for everyone’s use case, but it is a factor some people might consider.
I've never tried to water cool a 125 watt processor and so I can't speak to that. But especially if one uses air cooling or ideally passive cooling, one's ability to reduce noise is proportional to the chip's TDP. Noise reduction is important to many.
> Core i9-13900KS consumes 150W with 24 cores (8P+16E)
No, the 13900KS has a nominal "TDP" of 150W. That's a marketing number, not a measurement and not even a control target parameter for the default boost management settings. Out of the box, a 13900KS in a typical desktop motherboard will happily draw more than twice that, indefinitely, if you can cool it and have a workload that can actually keep all of those cores busy: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/18728/13900KS%20Power%20Gr...
If you want to compare per-core power, you either have to use a power number for a workload that's actually loading all the cores, or divide the measured power by the number of cores actually in use.
> Economically and environmentally it's absolutely a problem.
[citation needed]
Economically the Intel CPU of the 90s that had a very bad perf/watt compared to today's standards have been awesomely worth it
Environmentally, CPU have been getting better and better, the difference of a few 10s of watts doesn't really make any difference, unless you have numbers to back up your very strong claim.
Citation needed? Do you live in some alternate reality?
> "... the difference of a few 10s of watts doesn't really make any difference, unless you have numbers to back up your very strong claim."
We have a billion power-hungry PCs running on the planet. Power-efficiency matters for economy and for environment, because power isn't free and only a tiny speck of the world runs on clean energy. It always mattered.
According to the IEA about 2-3% of electricity is used by all communication services and data centers (and about 0.5% is used by cryptocurrencies [1]). Electricity represents about 20% of all final energy use. Desktop systems represent a tiny fraction of systems, especially if you weigh by system power.
It matters... but not a lot.
[1] Which is a truly awesome comparison of value generated. Cryptocurrencies use as much as half as much energy as THE ENTIRE GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS INFRASTRUCTURE, but only generates about 0.00000001% of meaningful value in comparison (it almost doesn't matter how you define meaningful value for this to hold).
Most of those systems sit at idle, when they are on at all. Idle power is not the same as TDP. The idle difference is not so great that it's a big deal.
It's not apples vs apples. Literally and figuratively. The I/O or board features on PC boards will eat power. So you will end up with a 15-30 W idle vs probably 5-8 for the Mac. I doubt the PCIe on the pro does much to the power unless there is an extra I/O die on system, you need active chips to eat power. That is vs Intel.
AMD will add a bunch more watts to the idle number as their multi CCX CPUs just eat more power at idle. You'll be closer to 30-45 W idle. This is a guess, it's widely acknowledged but not really quantified that I've found.
AMD monolithic dies are more in line with Intel. IE the laptop/mini PC line will be nice and low.
The difference is vastly diminished when you add the display that's using 80 Ws. So that's 85 vs 100 W total system power? 15% difference that gets bigger when you peg your processor.
Apple numbers are better in pretty much every way on power. But we're talking a handful of watts. Even at really high power rates it isn't going to add to up much.
Sources: I have a Mac mini and an Intel raptor lake desktop. I take measurements. And I have read various sources. This is my best information.
According to [1] Human production of energy is even lower at an estimated 160,000 TW-hr for all of year 2019 (a COVID year)
Let's hypothesize the difference is on average 10watt/hour (rather large for the average device), the difference for a billion devices would be 10GW/hour.
Which is exactly 1/16,000,000th of the total.
Assuming every Apple computer consumes 100watts less than the equivalent non Apple, assuming there are 20 million new low power Apple computers (probably there are much less), assuming the CPU are 100% of the time in sustained mode (of course on average CPU do not run at 100% of the power all the time continuously, but let's assume they all do in this example) it would mean 2GW/hour saved, which corresponds to a 1/80,000,000th of the total.
It would allow, maybe, to shutdown an average power plant (the largest one produces 23GW/hour)
Unfortunately there are over 65,000 power plants in the World, 2,500 of which run on coal.
Unfortunately the energy saved could come from renewables, so the difference on emissions would be even less relevant than it already is.
Economically those 2GW even at the Denmark prices ($0.50/KW) would cost one million dollars (2GW = 2,000,000KW). AKA nothing.
As you can see the difference must be quite large to make a real measurable difference.
Yep - the total TDP of the comparison is like 600W. The Pro is also for people with strange PCIe card needs - the Mac Studio delivers this performance in a tall MacMini form factor and nearly silent operation. Not that there aren't things to complain about, but Apple Silicon architecture is impressive for what it is. The GPU suffers more for its uncommon architecture that is similar to a phones but is harder to optimize for. Adobe, Logic, and the like will make that effort. I doubt game engines will. But that's why I also have a power hungry windows laptop.
I think Epic could get Unreal to run just fine. Unfortunately they don’t have a great relationship with Apple (I can’t remember why but I think it was something Apple did).
The Mac Pro makes sense for only a few true professionals who need those PCI slots for non-GPU things. But those people are have BIG budgets to spend and are good customers.
Maybe the future Pros will improve, this one is a bit odd. But it has a purpose for those who truly need it.
This 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.
The 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
The 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.
Many need things that aren't media encoders. The 24 4K streams are impressive, but it's less impressive when you realize it comes from having overly redundant video encoders from gluing two M2 Maxes together. For raster graphics performance, BVH traversal, ray tracing and machine learning purposes, it's entirely understandable why someone might prefer an older Intel Mac for performance purposes.
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.
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).
The 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.)
I 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.
Not 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
Something with intention to make you money and directly related to powerful machine, i.e. writing code, editing videos, images, etc. As opposed to casual use where you plan simple games, browse internet, etc.
'plan simple games' so are you counting complex games as professional use in your example?
Let's say I'm a professional researcher for some oil company. My job will primarily consist of browsing the web and writing stuff up, does that make that job not fit into the 'professional' category? You're being paid to browse the web and just report on what you found....
I'm a professional that gets paid to do things and a MacBook Pro with M1 Max works perfectly for me. This whole 'professional' thing is absurd and full of holes.
I 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.
Poorly 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.
haven’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
I'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.
> 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.
I made this claim (single threaded performance matters) but in a parallel comment to yours noted that I was unable to find substantiating statements from apple that I believe led to my assertion.
So in that spirit I will point out that Apple's support code / framworks etc do a bunch of multithreaded UI and network stuff even when and app's code is putatively single threaded.
Now that stuff IMHO is pretty high latency (e.g. waiting on user action) so as a developer I still think my statement, and your impression, are correct. But I'd like to see something from Apple on the topic.
UI latency, the entire point of a device, is a single threaded use case.
Multithreaded performance is only good when you don't care about power use, but that's never true on a battery powered phone. It's actually more often the case that you optimize software by removing accidental excess concurrency than by adding it. Junior engineers love them some unstructured concurrency.
Do 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.
Depends 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.
The 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.
Even 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.
I 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.
Similar 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.
Was 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?
Realistically, assume you were going to upgrade anyway.
$1200 PC vs $1500-$2000 MacBook is really only 300-800 difference, and MacBooks hold their value on the second hand market EXPONENTIALLY better than windows.
So 3-8 years at 100$ a year, but also it’s worth 3x as much as the comparable PC in 5 years
Like I said in another comment, the results say Apple is faster than both base SKUs on multithreaded and within the margin of error on single threaded once you consider they only used one Geekbench result.
I don't think it's misleading anyone to say they're faster, when their on SoC graphics are 4060 level, they definitely are overall.
Definitely 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.
Look 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.
> 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.
Right. 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.
I consider price and TDP as the two important variables, for performance, that aren't completely reconcilable. They should be considered separately, and then together for a buying decision for example.
To illustrate and acknowledging that this calculation is more practical than satisfying to mathematicians:
I wouldn't say that a chip that takes half of the power and costs half as much, while performing three times better, than a decade old chip is twelve times better all around. Even though the gains exceed both those indicated by price and watts, taken on their own. It performs roughly six times better per dollar spent and watt consumed, respectively. These performance differences are not reconcilable into a single number that most would quickly understand, but they should be considered together. And this in fact was the specific situation for the processor that I replaced. Not accounting for processing improvements that aren't included in thread processing speed. Try playing 4k video with a decade old processor while monitoring its utilization.
Not to be argumentative as everyone is certainly entitled to their own weighting. I value TDP more than I do dollars spent. Though, both will always be unavoidably important.
Yes, there is. AMD has desktop chips with the same TDP as Mac laptops. The latest series of AMD chips are more powerful and more power-efficient.
I think power efficiency by itself is a laudable goal, but the idea that other chipmakers don't optimize this doesn't make sense...you have to if you are building a laptop. A lot of the desktop chips are ludicrously overtuned, even AMD's chips, but the laptop chips have to be power-efficient due to the limitations on cooling.
I would look in particular at the AMD APUs that are being used in handheld devices. Unlike Mac's chips, which promised much but delivered little, they are actually delivering desktop GPU-tier (in the range of 1050/1060) performance in a 20W package and under.
I know that there are chips with TDPs in this range. My point was that they aren't readily available to consumers as a component. Obviously, I wasn't talking about purchasing pre-built devices. Anyone can buy a mobile device, laptop, or Alibaba router / pc with 10-20 watt TDP chips. The context was for stand alone chip purchases.
Would you point out where it is trivial to purchase a new AMD chip under 30 watts TDP? I'd sincerely be interested and the question isn't asked rhetorically.
You'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.
"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.
The term does have a generally recognized meaning, which is something like "computer that is designed for computationally expensive tasks".
That's a relative thing, so "workstation" has continued to mean "computer that is on the upper end of the computing power spectrum".
So not writing, probably not accounting. Programming, sure, if the builds being done are computationally expensive. Video editing definitely, if you are going to be doing a lot of it, you will want the most powerful workstation your budget allows for.
Generally, 1 low performance core with 256RAM is not enough for technical or scientific applications. Not many professions you could get away with those kind of specs really.
Well, this wikipedia article mentions thin clients as lower end workstations.
I would not call a computer with a single low performance core and 256 MB RAM a workstation either, but for a 4GB/8GB RPi 4, that term seems applicable.
When I hear "workstation" what comes to mind is a daily driver for business purposes, so rock-solid reliability is utmost. Redundant components, ECC ram, rated to run 24/7 with ample cooling. Performance per watt is also up there.
Whereas raw performance specs are typically high but ultimately dependent on use case.
If power utilization matters, then a more 'efficient' device, that takes longer might actually use more power overall - esp. when you factor in the lighting, Aircon etc that might be needed by the human operator who is waiting for the workstation to finish computation.
Pedantically, sysadmins always counted the power consumption (or, compute density) when upgrading servers, and would even do early upgrades as a cost saving measure.
Power costs (in datacenters at least) were high enough that buying the €10,000 server that sucked 200w more was worth less than the €15,000 machine that didnt suck that extra 200w.
So electricity prices can be more than a negligible amount on the total.
Where that line is depends on your personal situation.
I live in southern sweden and they hide the total price of power here, but aggregated my cost per watt is 5sek/kWh (roughly €0.45).
So a worst case for me at 200w with 24hrs of usage is about €800/y
Big part of me building a decent gaming PC will be buying a house and installing solar panels (and maybe a battery considering market conditions and government incentives).
At this point we are seeing the globalised fossil fuel market endgame in this country.
Task energy is a more reasonable argument than whinging about how some people care so much about power.
Everyone cares about power, at a fairly similar level - maybe 2-4x differences, but not 10x. And most of the ones who care underestimate how rarely their machine is actually fully busy.
Idle power is probably more interesting than even task power, for anything other than an unusually busy server or cloud hypervisor.
One 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!
> 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.
Yeah, 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.
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.
I wasnt a G5 owner, waited for the Intel switch, but I gather the G5 water cooling had a very high failure rate and this was at least a large part of why Jobs dropped IBM/MOT/PPC int he end. They promised him a high clock, air cooled G5 but couldn't deliver.
The bigger issue was that they couldn’t get the G5 to work in a laptop and this was killing Apple. Apple’s laptops have always been a cut above their PC counterparts in terms of design, but in those days it felt like Apple Laptops were from a different planet, except they were unreasonably slow in large part because they were stuck on the G4 processor for years. Switching to intel was a necessity for survival. IBM just couldn’t deliver or keep up with what Intel was doing.
That is kind of the thing. The whole Mac Studio only consumes ~200 watts.
It is what I find about this article to be disingenuous. Sure, by all means compare the M2 Ultra to the Intel 13900K and the Nvidia 4080, but at least mention that it is consuming a third of the power.
It’s a fair point. Especially for the new Mac Pro they could have implemented a more robust thermal solution and clock the whole thing higher. That’s one advantage of a bigger chasis, isn’t it?
The current Mac Pro is kind of pointless. Before you got a powerful workstation (power consumption was irrelevant), now you get a Studio Mac in a new package. I feel they just launched it for “compliance” not because it is a great product. They hit a wall with scaling the M chip architecture. Building an even larger chip than the Ultra would be insane and going multi socket is not possible.
They need a product for people who need expansion slots for non-GPU things, and it fits that.
I agree that it’s likely they wanted to use the quad M2 chip (jade 4 C die, if I remember the term correctly), which would have given them far more PCIE lanes and made it more desirable.
But that doesn’t seem to have worked out. And the lineup had a whole they needed to fill for some of their top end customers. So here we are.
Comparing 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.
Reasons 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.
The 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.
The 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.
With 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.
Desktop pcs requiring a ludicrous amount of power and cooling is absolutely problematic. The amount of people willing to put up with big honking machines is dwindling.
AMD and Intel are jacking up the default power settings to absurd levels because it gives marketing bigger numbers to to throw around.
You can drastically reduce the power you supply to desktop chips with BIOS settings. You'll generate far less heat, can use a smaller power supply and form factor, while still getting great performance.
If Intel/AMD get to a level where their chips rival M1/M2 while power throttled, things get interesting.
In general both on my own benchmarks and from what I've read/seen youtube videos, it's about a 5% performance loss multithreaded with full core saturation and 0-1% performance haircut on single threaded -- since on single threaded you are generating lower enough heat not to go near the high end.
For me this was going from 105W to 65W on my 7700X and my results were similar.
Not sure how it would look or work with Intel though.
Both companies are juicing up the default power limits which absolutely matters if you're concerned about total Wh for sustained loads, thermal considerations, PSU rating, noise, etc, as you mentioned, but to be fair to AMD here they've released an eco mode on the 7000 series which does lower the default power limit quite substantially. You could do this before with manual adjustments to voltage and clock speeds, but now it's a simple toggle.
Another point is that in terms of power efficiency AMD are absolutely mopping the floor with Intel, where even older high power R9s are consistently outperforming Intel's lower power i5 and i7s by a wide margin. This sort of discussion is often left out of reviews which only look at TDP or peak wall power. It's still not ARM levels of efficiency, but x86 vs ARM or even desktop vs laptop efficiency is an entirely separate conversation.
May I assume that you haven't used a desktop from some year equivalent to whatever Mac you use? Because modern desktops are far from "honking."
I have a 7950x (the high core count desktop offering). AMD require (sans one brand) water-cooling for it. That means you get big quiet fans, which are far less "honking" than the tiny loud ones that are in laptops by necessity. In fact, due to the nice large radiators that liquid coolers have the fans don't spin at all the majority of the time.
When I do need power, it's on-tap.
My 6900xt is big honking during gaming, but you can get real quiet $300 GPUs. Or just use the integrated graphics and enjoy the quiet liquid cooling.
Doing the same thing. I ended up putting a 7950x into what was intended to be my next threadripper chassis and with stock settings the fans don't turn on. The only moving part would be the water pump, which is very quiet. Once in a while I get a gurgle from a bubble.
AIOs aren't a great option for users who want to set it and forget it. Even the best ones lose fluid to sublimation and/or start leaking after a few years, which is why there's still a market for coolers like the NH-D15.
I went with the NH-D15 when I built my 5950x desktop. I've never fiddled with liquid cooling, and having to locate a radiator seemed like a pain. I very much hope not to need to touch it again for a decade. After tweaking the fan profile, it's silent most of the time. Of course, it does make it kind of a pain to remove my GPU because it's so bulky; I need to use a shim to reach the PCI-E latch.
Similar here, there's not much room left when you've got a NH-D15 and EVGA 3080 Ti FTW3 installed.
This is more of an inadequacy on the part of motherboard manufacturers, though. PCI-E latches don't have to be terrible… look at the system Apple uses in their 2019 and 2023 Mac Pro towers for example which remain accessible regardless of what you have installed.
How much did you have to crank up the voltages on the 7800X3D to get it to 120W? I can't get mine much past 85W at stock voltage and clocks, even with the memory running at DDR5-6000.
Citation needed. "The best" AIO coolers shouldn't have issues with fluid lose in a meaningful way that impacts performance.
Likewise, I'm not aware of any widescale issues with AIOs leaking. This seems like just as much of a problem as regular CPU coolers that need to have dust removed (i.e., not a problem).
My machine is entirely silent on normal operations (Zen 3 5600X and RX 6700). All the fans, on both GPU and CPU are stopped in desktop usage. And it doesn't obviously eat that much power (my monitor probably eats more).
The only moment I could hear them is if I play games. And then I have headset on, so I can't hear them.
I really couldn't care less if it ate twice the amount of power when playing games.
Because, while gaming, the vents in my case blow air at over 40 degrees Celsius, and that heat has to go somewhere. Absent a setup that can put the case several meters away from me, that "somewhere" is on top of me.
Right, and you could have afforded better/more coffee with the savings costs to consuming less power. Which is the point: energy costs are not 0. These costs vary depending on which devices you play on, regardless of games. Someone playing the same games as you on PS5 rather than a gaming PC, is going to save enough money to then buy another indie game per month or more coffees in that month than you.
Note: this isn't about debating which platform is best, rather understanding power consumption impact and the cost to your budget.
Are these costs major? Life changing? Absolutely not. But you should care about them and make decisions incorporating them, not ignoring it as if power consumption is irrelevant even if doubled!
In the end, living on northern region (Finland), my PC power costs in reality are meaningless. My gaming probably eats what.. few hundred kWh per year? Lets say 1000kWh to make something meaningful. 1000kWh is less than the yearly fluctuation of electricity consumption of the house in heating costs. It's less than my Tesla's winter consumption fluctuation depending on the amount of heating the battery / car requires for me to open the doors.
See the insanity of optimizing couple of watts from PC? I don't play 12 hours a day, I play after work in the evenings - at best few hours a day, but not every day.
My workstation's power usage does not have any impact on my life. Even if doubled, tripled, quadruppled, it would be lost in margins of everything else where I use electricity.
PS5 eats about the same amount of power to be fair (or my XSX) so there's not much to save here. Also, they're a bit slower than my desktop and do not provide the flexibility.
Proper gaming performance requires power as no one has invented any golden goose to reduce it (not AMD, not NVIDIA, not Apple) at the same performance. I'd even wonder if Apple's usage of GPU in M2 Ultra is that power efficient when looking at the real world games as the fps counters are so low.
Theoretical performance is pointless in the end if it doesn't actually crunch anything that fast in reality. Maybe the glue architecture is only nice on paper and that's why Apple after years of ignoring specs is now only advertising specs on their GPU parts, not what it could do.
> Desktop pcs requiring a ludicrous amount of power and cooling is absolutely problematic.
High-end PSUs now overlap with smaller space heaters on power output. My living room is usually 3-4 degrees hotter around my desk than it is by the dining table.I'm looking to upgrade my gaming PC, and getting the power budget under control is surprisingly challenging.
For your gaming PC you likely don't even need a current gen chip. You are probably fine with a 5600 for most games unless you NEED high FPS on certain games and have a monitor with 244hz refresh rate (or you won't even get the frames) Gaming is mostly about GPU (if you're casual gamer and want to run 1440p) but if you do need cpu and high refresh rate then you're likely hardcore FPS or RTS games and you're running at 1080P anyway and then in that situation don't need a high end GPU.
I have a AMD 7700X and I run it on Eco Mode which is approx 65W TDP instead of the 105W TDP it wants to run at.
For my general use (including cpu intensive operations) this makes absolutely no perceivable difference. I ran some benchmarks out of curiosity and I take about a 5% haircut for a massive power and heat savings.
What Intel and AMD did with the chips was essentially sell consumers a default overclocked chip that will run to the max of the thermal headroom that your fan will allow and sit there. They did this to be competitive with each other in benchmarks for marketing.
Most consumers should run these chips in some sort of eco mode since the performance per watt has severe diminishing returns and they are actually quite power efficient as long as you don't run it on the default factory overclocked settings.
> For your gaming PC you likely don't even need a current gen chip.
Many gamers, like me, probably also use their display for things aside from gaming. For non-gaming computer work I like 4K w/ a high (120hz ideally) refresh rate for well rendered text and smoother movement. But as I also then want to use this monitor for gaming, I need a gaming system that supports this.
TLDR; you might need a current gen chip for reasons other than gaming.
My 49 inch 144hz monitor ran fine for this exact use case when I had an amd 3600 and Nvidia 1660. Is your work use case somehow more demanding than gaming?
I've read that to run higher end games at 4k you need something like an Nvidia 3070 or higher. I currently have a 2060-Super and it struggles at times with 2k/1440p. Probably go AMD next upgrade as they are reviewed to be better at 4k and have much better heat/power reqs.
> High-end PSUs now overlap with smaller space heaters on power output
Technically true, but vacuously. The limit of a standard US circuit is 1500w, which is why you see all space heaters and the good PSUs hitting the figure
$2000 I could see, but I do think more people are overspending on CPU for gaming PCs by probably double. Maybe not overspending if you're getting a tangible productive value out of it, but I suppose they didn't specify gaming. For gaming specifically I'd probably try and balance the useful GPU power I need with the minimum necessary CPU to prevent bottlenecking.
Part of the reason I haven't upgraded my intel macbook pro, is just because I think the cost all-in seems outrageous, even for someone who exclusively works on mac. I can't rationalize $500/16gb of ram or w/e. I haven't upgraded my gaming PC much, because the cost of GPUs very quickly overwhelms the performance improvement I'd get value out of compared to my severely out of date gear that I found by the roadside.
IMO driving down power consumption should still be a goal even for desktop machines. It means that the overwhelming majority of users get cooler, quieter, less bulky machines, while the fringe who need raw power at all costs can overclock to the moon if they really want to.
This also pushes more "desktop like" performance to both ultraportable and reasonably portable laptops, allowing these machines to fully replace desktops for the overwhelming majority without all of the caveats that come with "desktop replacement" laptops (workstation laptops, heavy duty gaming laptops, etc). A lot of people who previously wouldn't have seen laptops as capable of being their primary machines are doing exactly that with M1/M2 Pro MBPs.
>while the fringe who need raw power at all costs can overclock to the moon if they really want to.
This is actually the case! The 7950X and 13900K come in non-X and non-K variants, which have vastly reduced power footprints and overall consumption, and you can even take your X or K variant and... Enforce that exact same power envelope in BIOS, for minimal loss in performance. But the purchasers of desktop X and K SKUs are the overclocking fringe (by and large). I will admit though, a lot of laptops are sold with with i|r7|9 +HX variants that shouldn't be purchased because big number means easier upsell.
> IMO driving down power consumption should still be a goal even for desktop machines. It means that the overwhelming majority of users get cooler, quieter, less bulky machines, while the fringe who need raw power at all costs can overclock to the moon if they really want to.
It is the goal (after all more efficiency also means fitting more powerful cores into the thermal envelope) but given the choice most desktop users would be fine with "just a bit bigger box" rather than sacrifice performance for the price.
> 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.
7950X was released September, 2022. It's quite literally last year's chip and given that AMD release cycle is typically about 2 years, we're roughly halfway between last release and 9000 series release.
You might be getting it confused with the Non-X versions that were released earlier in 2023 -- those are basically the same chip but power limited and maybe slightly worse selections of silicon. Of those Non-X versions it was 7600, 7700, 7900 but non-X of 7950 was released. [1]
From what I understand, the M2 was released due to TSMC struggling with yields on their N3 process. Apple had to do something with the N5 node to keep hardware available to consumers, and M2 was the result.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Cheaper in terms of money, but in terms of time? I have a hard time justifying anything that requires configuration and dicking around. I’m a grown-up and don’t have “free time”. I need things that just work. For me, that’s not Intel and Windows or Intel and Linux. It’s macOS, which is the only true workstation platform left.
My previous rig is approaching 6 years, and the only dead component is a cheap external USB drive. The rig was mining 24/7 when it wasn't used for development or gaming. You must be doing something very wrong.
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.
I agree with your take. My plugged into the wall machine is a 128GB 13900k 4090 system. My mobile machine is an Apple Silicon Macbook Pro. There are some tasks that are still better on the unified memory of the Macbook, but only a handful. There are many tasks that are more pleasant on the Macbook because of the absurd power efficiency (DAW, Final Cut Pro).
Both machines have a quality that I appreciate: they are never, ever slow.
> 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.
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.
> If you buy anything labeled as "workstation", you're paying twice the price already.
We are not comparing MacPros to low-end desktops.
> 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.
Yes, but the gaming PC will not as well built as the workstation-grade machine. And pretty much any GPU you can install on a gaming PC you can install on a MacPro - it's just that it won't be there out of the (Apple branded) box.
> you're stuck with the amount of RAM you pick at checkout
Sadly, this has been Apple for some time now - you buy the machine as it will be used for its whole intended lifetime. With the MacPro you can at least add internal storage and one or more GPU cards.
AFAIK the 2023 Mac Pro doesn't support PCIe GPUs for the same reason AS Macs don't support eGPUs. It has PCIe slots you can use for other things like capture cards or whatever but not GPUs.
RAM was something you could upgrade with the 2019 Mac Pro and something you could get a lot of. 1.5TB worth. The new Mac Pro caps out at 192GB which is barely better than consumer AMD/Intel systems at the moment.
I agree some MacPro users will be forced to move to workstation or server-grade PCs, but I am sure Apple knows that and they considered having integrated memory inconsequential for the majority of their users.
Also, remember, terabytes of RAM cost A LOT of money. The Dell I priced for comparison can go way higher than 192GB, but it’ll also cost you a lot more than 7K.
You’re forgetting the benefit of everything just working and never having to thinking about effing with drivers ever. To me, it’s priceless. Anything truly performance bound (CPU or GPU) is going to be done on HPC systems, not on a fake Windows “workstation”.
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.
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.
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
I thought the whole idea of M2 was “exceptional product given the power consumption”.
I don’t mind that it has nothing to show for all the talk once you throw out the need to basically sip power (like a notebook computer).
Is this something inherent with ARM though? Why can’t there be ARM based desktop and server computers that need a kilowatt of power at peak? Like how much more performance can you get for each additional watt of power? (I don’t know. I’m genuinely asking.)
I was one told that memory and bus bandwidth often creates disparity between benchmark and application performances in ARM CPUs. That was years ago and supposedly don’t apply to custom designs like M2, but maybe both Intel and AMD are still advantageous in that region?
> I thought the whole idea of M2 was “exceptional product given the power consumption”.
When running native code.
Look at the performance of Microsoft's ARM Surface Pro when running emulated code.
> My frustration with this computer wasn’t a workload thing. It didn’t start out fast and gradually slow down as I opened more things and started more processes. It was peppered with glitches and freezes from start to finish.
I’d have only Slack open, and switching between channels would still take almost three seconds (yes, I timed it on my phone). Spotify, also with nothing in the background, would take 11 seconds to open, then be frozen for another four seconds before I could finally press play. When I typed in Chrome, I often saw significant lag, which led to all kinds of typos (because my words weren’t coming out until well after I’d written them). I’d try to watch YouTube videos, and the video would freeze while the audio continued. I’d use the Surface Pen to annotate a PDF, and my strokes would either be frustratingly late or not show up at all. I’d try to open Lightroom, and it would freeze multiple times and then crash.
It quickly became clear that I should try to stick to apps that were running natively on Arm.
> Apple's GPU performance is what makes me sceptical about their gaming related advertising.
The issue is that people compare games running under emulated x86 and emulated graphics APIs, when making claims about what the SOC is capable of.
There's nothing wrong with knowing how well the SOC performs when emulating games, but if you claim to be talking about what the SOC can do, then include the performance of native games as well.
Apple's x86 emulation is otherwise very impressive, and not many games are bottlenecked on the CPU, especially at high resolutions.
Bigger overhead for AAA games is likely due to emulation of DirectX or Vulkan on Metal, but that's just Apple's stubborn choice to have it that way.
In the end, none of that matters. I won't be playing Cyberpunk at 14fps, without RTX, and comforting myself that the SoC could do maybe 28fps without emulation. Lower-tier Nvidia cards perform better, even when paired with slower CPUs.
The major platforms do use the same graphics API, Vulkan. It should be preferred due to more low-level access and wider platform support (Linux, Android, Nintendo, MacOS, Windows).
On another note, problems that keep major AAA games from running on Linux (Anti-cheat solutions for example) will block many games from running ob MacOS, too.
The CPU is rarely a bottleneck for AAA games, so unless the x86 emulation is particularly terrible (Rosetta isn't) it shouldn't be the issue.
WINE on Linux is able to match the performance of games on Windows, so the DirectX translation layer shouldn't be a problem either.
So it's not unreasonable to assume that the M2 just doesn't have a GPU capable of running these games. And it's really not that surprising that an integrated GPU doesn't match the performance of a dedicated GPU.
PC game players tend to believe you can't play a game unless you bought the latest custom hardware for all of it and put all the settings on maximum.
Game developers are much more willing to run their work on lower end machines if they'll get paid for it, or at least they're more capable of tuning for it.
> So it's not unreasonable to assume that the M2 just doesn't have a GPU capable of running these games
Without including comparison data on native games? It's entirely unreasonable.
For instance, The native version of the DirectX 12 game "The Medium" was shown running side by side with the emulated version at WWDC, and the native version had double the frame rate.
> the M2 just doesn't have a GPU capable of running these games.
As long as AAA games are published on the Xbox Series S and shipping with graphics settings they will have no problem when running natively on an M2 chip.
With crossover and Apple's latest release of gameportingtoolkit I'm able to maintain over 120FPS on ultra settings at native resolution on Diablo 4 with my M2 Max MBP. It was fair to be skeptical before that release this week, but there's plenty of evidence out there now that Apple silicon can handle gaming just fine. Other users are reporting 50-60 FPS with ultra settings on their 6k Studio displays.
$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.
>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.
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.
M2, 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.
Are 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.
I 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).
I'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.
445 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 306 ms ] threadComputation per kWh (or rate of computation per kW) is the right efficiency metric, not TDP (thermal design power).
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/resrep27829.23.pdf
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://wccftech.com/m2-ultra-only-10-percent-slower-than-rt...
It's just excuses.
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)
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.
A 4080 is best of class?
And second of all, for the price it should be compared to the 4090, which absolutely demolishes it.
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.
It doesn’t matter if the cooling solution gets the chops’s surface temperature lower if it’s heating the room twice as fast.
Chip surface temperature is not a useful metric for this purpose.
If Apple clocked their GPU to match the performance of a comparable dedicated chip, it would be just as inefficient, noisy and hot. Except they can not do even do that. They turned a limitation of the design into a supposed feature.
Source?
https://twitter.com/0xDEADBEEFCAFE/status/166747612998729728...
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.
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.
If once a minute you miss 4 frames in a row that’s noticeable even if everything else is rock solid. The thing is people adjust their resolution/settings to reach acceptable FPS, thus it’s fairly GPU independent. What matters is rendering volatility as assets are loaded etc.
All adaptive refresh rates do is avoiding unwanted delays after the frame finishes.
Adaptive refresh rate means that only frame rate matters. You can't miss a frame, you can only have a frame take longer, and that's measured perfectly well by 1% or 0.1% low frame rates.
Also I don't see why an M series CPU is going to be any better at feeding the (asynchrous, multiple frames in flight) GPU rendering pipeline than a modern x86 CPU, when both are just as fast. macOS is also pretty bad at realtime scheduling for heavy workloads compared to modern Linux and Windows.
A 10 minute test at 120 FPS is 10 * 60 * 120 ~= 72,000 frames. Your 1% lows is an average of ~720 frames but so what if of 300 them are at 60 FPS you’re going to have trouble noticing.
While if you’re almost rock solid at 120FPS a dozen 70ms stalls it’s really obvious that something is wrong but the calculated 1% low’s may actually look better. This is especially true as those stalls generally correlate with interning things happening.
The M series CPU comparison people are talking about isn’t average FPS or even 1% lows where dedicated graphics cars have an advantage, the comparison is what happens when things go very wrong. And it’s in that very specific case when they may have an advantage.
I think this is an instance of the coordinated omission problem: you cannot simply measure the latency of the frames that were completed, but instead have to consider the frames that should have been delivered during a stall. Looking at frame time percentiles means a stall only penalizes your metric with one bad frame, when it should be penalized for missing several frames and showing the user an increasingly stale image for several average-frametimes.
Think of it like Little's law in queing theory , it's better to simply just look at different percentiles, like 99 or 99.9th. The average framerate correctly indicates the average staleness.
It's not clear to me: are you saying those two scenarios should be quantified as equally bad? Because it seems pretty obvious to me that the 5x outlier is qualitatively much worse.
Benchmarking sites use 1% or 0.1% because they better highlight the commodity PC hardware rather than the games bugs and architecture.
These benchmarks are controlled for game bugs and architecture by simply averaging over ~40-50 games, on repeatable loops.
The only advantage is that the transfer from GPU to CPU is faster in terms of latency. This doesn't cause pipeline stalls, because as I've explained above, frames are kept in flight, so latency is not critical. At the same time, modern CPU-GPU interconnects have similar bandwidth to RAM.
Additionally, you're not the first person to have thought about frame pacing. Dozens of reviewers have full frame pacing graphs with the frame times of every frame, as well as 0.1% lows, and we simply don't see what you're describing. 100ms+ frames are not a problem on modern games and modern hardware, and when they are, it's because of some blocking read to storage or to some scheduling issue, not because of CPU/GPU speed.
The impact of link speed on 0.1% low framerates has already been investigated, and it's minimal, and there isn't even an advantage here.
There’s a multitude of such bugs which ship with modern titles. Benchmarking sites don’t use the release day build of 2077 for very good reasons.
It enables software to be designed differently ie by not having to ever copy things to VRAM.
While 192GB of RAM is more than I would need, for people looking to use 1.5TB of RAM and a pair of NVIDIA GPU they had from previous model, they’d have to go elsewhere.
Which leaves me wondering; how much engineering at Apple are happening on Mac?
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.
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.
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.
I have seen the demos, but I am skeptical of the actual practicality or value proposition until a 3rd party publishes some frametime benchmarks, and games out in the wild get battle tested.
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.
(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.
Although quantisation has now lowered the required memory, I wouldn’t be surprised if it comes in handy again in the near future.
But today that’s quite a niche use case.
Then there's the power consumption difference to consider. This seems like one of those cases where benchmarks reveal only a fraction of the larger picture.
Apple have an opportunity, if they 2-4x the memory on the entry level devices (not beyond the realms of possibility), to make local inference a thing available to all.
A lot of work is going on in 8-bit inference and even 4 bit inference. So, models that need 64 GB in FP32 can do with 16GB VRAM in FP8 or INT8, which is well within the realm of consumer NVIDIA cards. And the latest NVIDIA tensor cores will absolutely destroy Apple Silicon GPUs or the Neural Engine in 8 bit.
So, I don’t think it’s really a strong argument. And as someone who is a Mac user and a ML practitioner, I’d be very happy if they started supporting eGPUs again.
Apple Silicon has many strengths and the GPU core are fine for many ends, from games to graphics apps.
But let’s not pretend that Apple is beating NVIDIA at their own game (yet). That day might come, but currently it only leads to disappointed users in ML forums who were hyped into thinking that their vanilla M2 MacBook Airs can almost compete with a 4090 in training a deep transformer model. (Yes, that happens.)
Regardless, wccftech is far from reliable. IIRC, /r/amd blocks links to the site.
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.
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.
This doesn’t matter for everyone’s use case, but it is a factor some people might consider.
I've never tried to water cool a 125 watt processor and so I can't speak to that. But especially if one uses air cooling or ideally passive cooling, one's ability to reduce noise is proportional to the chip's TDP. Noise reduction is important to many.
Never been a problem, even when Intel TDP was 20x worse than today.
EDIT: the author forgot that the tested system is an M2 Ultra a desktop class system with a TDP of 90 watts
The i9-13900T and i7-13700T come in at a max turbo power of just 106W
which is just 1.2x
When has Intel's real, advertised, or specified CPU power consumption or TDP ever been 20x that of the i9-13900KS?
so an average of 6.25 watts per core
which is less than a Pentium 90, a 1994 CPU running at 90Mhz
in absolute is not a 20x worse TDP, but it is relatively to the gain in frequency and performances (more than 20x actually)
No, the 13900KS has a nominal "TDP" of 150W. That's a marketing number, not a measurement and not even a control target parameter for the default boost management settings. Out of the box, a 13900KS in a typical desktop motherboard will happily draw more than twice that, indefinitely, if you can cool it and have a workload that can actually keep all of those cores busy: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/18728/13900KS%20Power%20Gr...
If you want to compare per-core power, you either have to use a power number for a workload that's actually loading all the cores, or divide the measured power by the number of cores actually in use.
Economically and environmentally it's absolutely a problem.
[citation needed]
Economically the Intel CPU of the 90s that had a very bad perf/watt compared to today's standards have been awesomely worth it
Environmentally, CPU have been getting better and better, the difference of a few 10s of watts doesn't really make any difference, unless you have numbers to back up your very strong claim.
> "... the difference of a few 10s of watts doesn't really make any difference, unless you have numbers to back up your very strong claim."
We have a billion power-hungry PCs running on the planet. Power-efficiency matters for economy and for environment, because power isn't free and only a tiny speck of the world runs on clean energy. It always mattered.
It matters... but not a lot.
[1] Which is a truly awesome comparison of value generated. Cryptocurrencies use as much as half as much energy as THE ENTIRE GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS INFRASTRUCTURE, but only generates about 0.00000001% of meaningful value in comparison (it almost doesn't matter how you define meaningful value for this to hold).
https://www.iea.org/reports/data-centres-and-data-transmissi...
but yea it makes difference if the difference is
0.001% 0.01% 0.1% 1% 10% 1000%
AMD will add a bunch more watts to the idle number as their multi CCX CPUs just eat more power at idle. You'll be closer to 30-45 W idle. This is a guess, it's widely acknowledged but not really quantified that I've found.
AMD monolithic dies are more in line with Intel. IE the laptop/mini PC line will be nice and low.
The difference is vastly diminished when you add the display that's using 80 Ws. So that's 85 vs 100 W total system power? 15% difference that gets bigger when you peg your processor.
Apple numbers are better in pretty much every way on power. But we're talking a handful of watts. Even at really high power rates it isn't going to add to up much.
Sources: I have a Mac mini and an Intel raptor lake desktop. I take measurements. And I have read various sources. This is my best information.
Let's do some math.
According to [1] Human production of energy is even lower at an estimated 160,000 TW-hr for all of year 2019 (a COVID year)
Let's hypothesize the difference is on average 10watt/hour (rather large for the average device), the difference for a billion devices would be 10GW/hour.
Which is exactly 1/16,000,000th of the total.
Assuming every Apple computer consumes 100watts less than the equivalent non Apple, assuming there are 20 million new low power Apple computers (probably there are much less), assuming the CPU are 100% of the time in sustained mode (of course on average CPU do not run at 100% of the power all the time continuously, but let's assume they all do in this example) it would mean 2GW/hour saved, which corresponds to a 1/80,000,000th of the total.
It would allow, maybe, to shutdown an average power plant (the largest one produces 23GW/hour)
Unfortunately there are over 65,000 power plants in the World, 2,500 of which run on coal.
Unfortunately the energy saved could come from renewables, so the difference on emissions would be even less relevant than it already is.
Economically those 2GW even at the Denmark prices ($0.50/KW) would cost one million dollars (2GW = 2,000,000KW). AKA nothing.
As you can see the difference must be quite large to make a real measurable difference.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget
Now add in the GPU. Because the Apple number combined both.
The Mac Pro makes sense for only a few true professionals who need those PCI slots for non-GPU things. But those people are have BIG budgets to spend and are good customers.
Maybe the future Pros will improve, this one is a bit odd. But it has a purpose for those who truly need it.
They already had the Mac Studio, they could have kept the Mac Pro on Intel.
How is not wanting to do x86 on the high end? The article says just as much.
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.
Dropping cpu and GPU frequencies even a few % might have a significant impact.
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).
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/rack
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
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
I hate this terminology. How would anyone define "professional use"
Let's say I'm a professional researcher for some oil company. My job will primarily consist of browsing the web and writing stuff up, does that make that job not fit into the 'professional' category? You're being paid to browse the web and just report on what you found....
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.
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.
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.
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.
So in that spirit I will point out that Apple's support code / framworks etc do a bunch of multithreaded UI and network stuff even when and app's code is putatively single threaded.
Now that stuff IMHO is pretty high latency (e.g. waiting on user action) so as a developer I still think my statement, and your impression, are correct. But I'd like to see something from Apple on the topic.
Multithreaded performance is only good when you don't care about power use, but that's never true on a battery powered phone. It's actually more often the case that you optimize software by removing accidental excess concurrency than by adding it. Junior engineers love them some unstructured concurrency.
Hint: M2 destroys the competition
They also posted this.
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.
Have you ever upgraded any components of your Windows desktop (RAM, GPU, CPU, motherboard) or did you discard the entire thing?
$1200 PC vs $1500-$2000 MacBook is really only 300-800 difference, and MacBooks hold their value on the second hand market EXPONENTIALLY better than windows.
So 3-8 years at 100$ a year, but also it’s worth 3x as much as the comparable PC in 5 years
Realistically, you don't need to replace the entire thing. Replace mobo+CPU, GPU, PSU, RAM, case as necessary.
Laptop is a different story. Replacing a desktop with a laptop and then comparing them is not a fair comparison.
I don't think it's misleading anyone to say they're faster, when their on SoC graphics are 4060 level, they definitely are overall.
But I agree, tdp should really be kept in consideration.
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.
Considered certainly, adjust less so.
If you want to adjust for something price makes more sense than TDP
To illustrate and acknowledging that this calculation is more practical than satisfying to mathematicians:
I wouldn't say that a chip that takes half of the power and costs half as much, while performing three times better, than a decade old chip is twelve times better all around. Even though the gains exceed both those indicated by price and watts, taken on their own. It performs roughly six times better per dollar spent and watt consumed, respectively. These performance differences are not reconcilable into a single number that most would quickly understand, but they should be considered together. And this in fact was the specific situation for the processor that I replaced. Not accounting for processing improvements that aren't included in thread processing speed. Try playing 4k video with a decade old processor while monitoring its utilization.
Not to be argumentative as everyone is certainly entitled to their own weighting. I value TDP more than I do dollars spent. Though, both will always be unavoidably important.
I think power efficiency by itself is a laudable goal, but the idea that other chipmakers don't optimize this doesn't make sense...you have to if you are building a laptop. A lot of the desktop chips are ludicrously overtuned, even AMD's chips, but the laptop chips have to be power-efficient due to the limitations on cooling.
I would look in particular at the AMD APUs that are being used in handheld devices. Unlike Mac's chips, which promised much but delivered little, they are actually delivering desktop GPU-tier (in the range of 1050/1060) performance in a 20W package and under.
Would you point out where it is trivial to purchase a new AMD chip under 30 watts TDP? I'd sincerely be interested and the question isn't asked rhetorically.
https://youtu.be/u7ocWDNrfRs
Or, of course, there's the classic Twain / Disraeli quote ... take your pick.
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.
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.
No. Words have meanings. Workstation does not mean that.
Accounting? Writing? Programming? Video editing?
That's a relative thing, so "workstation" has continued to mean "computer that is on the upper end of the computing power spectrum".
So not writing, probably not accounting. Programming, sure, if the builds being done are computationally expensive. Video editing definitely, if you are going to be doing a lot of it, you will want the most powerful workstation your budget allows for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workstation
Generally, 1 low performance core with 256RAM is not enough for technical or scientific applications. Not many professions you could get away with those kind of specs really.
I would not call a computer with a single low performance core and 256 MB RAM a workstation either, but for a 4GB/8GB RPi 4, that term seems applicable.
Whereas raw performance specs are typically high but ultimately dependent on use case.
I can show you a company of 10,000+ people using Chromebooks and Macbooks for 'business purposes' with little regard for performance per watt.
Power costs (in datacenters at least) were high enough that buying the €10,000 server that sucked 200w more was worth less than the €15,000 machine that didnt suck that extra 200w.
So electricity prices can be more than a negligible amount on the total.
Where that line is depends on your personal situation.
I live in southern sweden and they hide the total price of power here, but aggregated my cost per watt is 5sek/kWh (roughly €0.45).
So a worst case for me at 200w with 24hrs of usage is about €800/y
At this point we are seeing the globalised fossil fuel market endgame in this country.
Everyone cares about power, at a fairly similar level - maybe 2-4x differences, but not 10x. And most of the ones who care underestimate how rarely their machine is actually fully busy.
Idle power is probably more interesting than even task power, for anything other than an unusually busy server or cloud hypervisor.
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!
A high wattage, highly cooled proc.
But nope, they did what you described.
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.
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.
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.
Then how were IBM processors cooled ? IBM used also PowerPC
It is what I find about this article to be disingenuous. Sure, by all means compare the M2 Ultra to the Intel 13900K and the Nvidia 4080, but at least mention that it is consuming a third of the power.
It’s overcooled. There is no way it’s thermally limited. It’s got to have headroom for days.
I’m very curious where this idea I keep seeing in the comments that Apple refuses to run chips at full speed for cooling reasons comes from.
I agree that it’s likely they wanted to use the quad M2 chip (jade 4 C die, if I remember the term correctly), which would have given them far more PCIE lanes and made it more desirable.
But that doesn’t seem to have worked out. And the lineup had a whole they needed to fill for some of their top end customers. So here we are.
* 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.
Should be available soon.
https://www.techpowerup.com/306005/asus-teases-192-gb-ddr5-m...
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.
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.
Either you are not measuring power consumption correctly, or there is something very wrong with your PC.
And it's an entirely believable statement. A Mac Mini uses between 5w - 20w. Many PCs idle at >50W, and under use hit 500W+.
You can drastically reduce the power you supply to desktop chips with BIOS settings. You'll generate far less heat, can use a smaller power supply and form factor, while still getting great performance.
If Intel/AMD get to a level where their chips rival M1/M2 while power throttled, things get interesting.
For me this was going from 105W to 65W on my 7700X and my results were similar.
Not sure how it would look or work with Intel though.
Another point is that in terms of power efficiency AMD are absolutely mopping the floor with Intel, where even older high power R9s are consistently outperforming Intel's lower power i5 and i7s by a wide margin. This sort of discussion is often left out of reviews which only look at TDP or peak wall power. It's still not ARM levels of efficiency, but x86 vs ARM or even desktop vs laptop efficiency is an entirely separate conversation.
> If Intel/AMD get to a level where their chips rival M1/M2 while power throttled, things get interesting.
For laptop users, maybe. For desktop extra 40W literally doesn't matter.
May I assume that you haven't used a desktop from some year equivalent to whatever Mac you use? Because modern desktops are far from "honking."
I have a 7950x (the high core count desktop offering). AMD require (sans one brand) water-cooling for it. That means you get big quiet fans, which are far less "honking" than the tiny loud ones that are in laptops by necessity. In fact, due to the nice large radiators that liquid coolers have the fans don't spin at all the majority of the time.
When I do need power, it's on-tap.
My 6900xt is big honking during gaming, but you can get real quiet $300 GPUs. Or just use the integrated graphics and enjoy the quiet liquid cooling.
> big
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-ITX
>big honking machines
Buy an all-in-one water cooler for the CPU https://pcpartpicker.com/product/2PFKHx/arctic-liquid-freeze...
It's easy to install and you have a quiet, well-cooled CPU.
Similar here, there's not much room left when you've got a NH-D15 and EVGA 3080 Ti FTW3 installed.
This is more of an inadequacy on the part of motherboard manufacturers, though. PCI-E latches don't have to be terrible… look at the system Apple uses in their 2019 and 2023 Mac Pro towers for example which remain accessible regardless of what you have installed.
I saw that during shaders compile in RPCX3, pretty hard to see it otherwise.
Likewise, I'm not aware of any widescale issues with AIOs leaking. This seems like just as much of a problem as regular CPU coolers that need to have dust removed (i.e., not a problem).
My machine is entirely silent on normal operations (Zen 3 5600X and RX 6700). All the fans, on both GPU and CPU are stopped in desktop usage. And it doesn't obviously eat that much power (my monitor probably eats more).
The only moment I could hear them is if I play games. And then I have headset on, so I can't hear them.
I really couldn't care less if it ate twice the amount of power when playing games.
Because, while gaming, the vents in my case blow air at over 40 degrees Celsius, and that heat has to go somewhere. Absent a setup that can put the case several meters away from me, that "somewhere" is on top of me.
Note: this isn't about debating which platform is best, rather understanding power consumption impact and the cost to your budget.
Are these costs major? Life changing? Absolutely not. But you should care about them and make decisions incorporating them, not ignoring it as if power consumption is irrelevant even if doubled!
Can additional performance allow me to do more while e.g gaming?
Like doing some stuff in the background, having VMs, IDEs, Dockers running?
See the insanity of optimizing couple of watts from PC? I don't play 12 hours a day, I play after work in the evenings - at best few hours a day, but not every day.
My workstation's power usage does not have any impact on my life. Even if doubled, tripled, quadruppled, it would be lost in margins of everything else where I use electricity.
PS5 eats about the same amount of power to be fair (or my XSX) so there's not much to save here. Also, they're a bit slower than my desktop and do not provide the flexibility.
Proper gaming performance requires power as no one has invented any golden goose to reduce it (not AMD, not NVIDIA, not Apple) at the same performance. I'd even wonder if Apple's usage of GPU in M2 Ultra is that power efficient when looking at the real world games as the fps counters are so low.
Theoretical performance is pointless in the end if it doesn't actually crunch anything that fast in reality. Maybe the glue architecture is only nice on paper and that's why Apple after years of ignoring specs is now only advertising specs on their GPU parts, not what it could do.
High-end PSUs now overlap with smaller space heaters on power output. My living room is usually 3-4 degrees hotter around my desk than it is by the dining table.I'm looking to upgrade my gaming PC, and getting the power budget under control is surprisingly challenging.
I have a AMD 7700X and I run it on Eco Mode which is approx 65W TDP instead of the 105W TDP it wants to run at.
For my general use (including cpu intensive operations) this makes absolutely no perceivable difference. I ran some benchmarks out of curiosity and I take about a 5% haircut for a massive power and heat savings.
What Intel and AMD did with the chips was essentially sell consumers a default overclocked chip that will run to the max of the thermal headroom that your fan will allow and sit there. They did this to be competitive with each other in benchmarks for marketing.
Most consumers should run these chips in some sort of eco mode since the performance per watt has severe diminishing returns and they are actually quite power efficient as long as you don't run it on the default factory overclocked settings.
Many gamers, like me, probably also use their display for things aside from gaming. For non-gaming computer work I like 4K w/ a high (120hz ideally) refresh rate for well rendered text and smoother movement. But as I also then want to use this monitor for gaming, I need a gaming system that supports this.
TLDR; you might need a current gen chip for reasons other than gaming.
Technically true, but vacuously. The limit of a standard US circuit is 1500w, which is why you see all space heaters and the good PSUs hitting the figure
It's a no brainer anyway to get more performance from desktop and non apple much cheaper due to apples pricing.
Apple has a huge advantage price / performance wise with the cheap m based Mac book air.
The comparison with a Mac book pro which costs 2-3k is slightly less so.
My 7950x machine cost, excluding the enthusiast GPU, $3000. That's less than half the cost of the M2 Ultra.
You could easily add another $1K by going crazy with RAM and NVME storage.
Part of the reason I haven't upgraded my intel macbook pro, is just because I think the cost all-in seems outrageous, even for someone who exclusively works on mac. I can't rationalize $500/16gb of ram or w/e. I haven't upgraded my gaming PC much, because the cost of GPUs very quickly overwhelms the performance improvement I'd get value out of compared to my severely out of date gear that I found by the roadside.
> Apple has a huge advantage price / performance wise with the cheap m based Mac book air.
The MBA is in the US $999 with M1 and $1099 with M2. (You can get them even at about $800 in sales.) This is an entirely different segment.
I think you're confusing Mac14,14 which is the internal designation for the Mac Studio with a MacBook Pro 14". The leak if anyone's interested: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/21305974?baseli...
This also pushes more "desktop like" performance to both ultraportable and reasonably portable laptops, allowing these machines to fully replace desktops for the overwhelming majority without all of the caveats that come with "desktop replacement" laptops (workstation laptops, heavy duty gaming laptops, etc). A lot of people who previously wouldn't have seen laptops as capable of being their primary machines are doing exactly that with M1/M2 Pro MBPs.
This is actually the case! The 7950X and 13900K come in non-X and non-K variants, which have vastly reduced power footprints and overall consumption, and you can even take your X or K variant and... Enforce that exact same power envelope in BIOS, for minimal loss in performance. But the purchasers of desktop X and K SKUs are the overclocking fringe (by and large). I will admit though, a lot of laptops are sold with with i|r7|9 +HX variants that shouldn't be purchased because big number means easier upsell.
It is the goal (after all more efficiency also means fitting more powerful cores into the thermal envelope) but given the choice most desktop users would be fine with "just a bit bigger box" rather than sacrifice performance for the price.
7950X was released September, 2022. It's quite literally last year's chip and given that AMD release cycle is typically about 2 years, we're roughly halfway between last release and 9000 series release.
You might be getting it confused with the Non-X versions that were released earlier in 2023 -- those are basically the same chip but power limited and maybe slightly worse selections of silicon. Of those Non-X versions it was 7600, 7700, 7900 but non-X of 7950 was released. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Ryzen_processors
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.
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/166747612998729728...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Both machines have a quality that I appreciate: they are never, ever slow.
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.
FRU: 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.
We are not comparing MacPros to low-end desktops.
> 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.
Yes, but the gaming PC will not as well built as the workstation-grade machine. And pretty much any GPU you can install on a gaming PC you can install on a MacPro - it's just that it won't be there out of the (Apple branded) box.
> you're stuck with the amount of RAM you pick at checkout
Sadly, this has been Apple for some time now - you buy the machine as it will be used for its whole intended lifetime. With the MacPro you can at least add internal storage and one or more GPU cards.
RAM was something you could upgrade with the 2019 Mac Pro and something you could get a lot of. 1.5TB worth. The new Mac Pro caps out at 192GB which is barely better than consumer AMD/Intel systems at the moment.
Also, remember, terabytes of RAM cost A LOT of money. The Dell I priced for comparison can go way higher than 192GB, but it’ll also cost you a lot more than 7K.
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.
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
Here's a video comparing DLSS and MetalFX upscaling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iXx9lfe62w
I don’t mind that it has nothing to show for all the talk once you throw out the need to basically sip power (like a notebook computer).
Is this something inherent with ARM though? Why can’t there be ARM based desktop and server computers that need a kilowatt of power at peak? Like how much more performance can you get for each additional watt of power? (I don’t know. I’m genuinely asking.)
When running native code.
Look at the performance of Microsoft's ARM Surface Pro when running emulated code.
> My frustration with this computer wasn’t a workload thing. It didn’t start out fast and gradually slow down as I opened more things and started more processes. It was peppered with glitches and freezes from start to finish.
I’d have only Slack open, and switching between channels would still take almost three seconds (yes, I timed it on my phone). Spotify, also with nothing in the background, would take 11 seconds to open, then be frozen for another four seconds before I could finally press play. When I typed in Chrome, I often saw significant lag, which led to all kinds of typos (because my words weren’t coming out until well after I’d written them). I’d try to watch YouTube videos, and the video would freeze while the audio continued. I’d use the Surface Pen to annotate a PDF, and my strokes would either be frustratingly late or not show up at all. I’d try to open Lightroom, and it would freeze multiple times and then crash.
It quickly became clear that I should try to stick to apps that were running natively on Arm.
https://www.theverge.com/23421326/microsoft-surface-pro-9-ar...
> Why are you bringing up Microsoft’s translator here? I don’t see why it is relevant?
It should be pretty obvious that emulating x86 slows performance, regardless of whose ARM OS we're discussing.
The issue is that people compare games running under emulated x86 and emulated graphics APIs, when making claims about what the SOC is capable of.
There's nothing wrong with knowing how well the SOC performs when emulating games, but if you claim to be talking about what the SOC can do, then include the performance of native games as well.
Bigger overhead for AAA games is likely due to emulation of DirectX or Vulkan on Metal, but that's just Apple's stubborn choice to have it that way.
In the end, none of that matters. I won't be playing Cyberpunk at 14fps, without RTX, and comforting myself that the SoC could do maybe 28fps without emulation. Lower-tier Nvidia cards perform better, even when paired with slower CPUs.
This is a weird take. None of he major gaming platforms use the same graphics API.
Microsoft has DirectX on Windows and XBox, Apple has Metal on iOS and Macs, Sony has Gnmx on Playstation.
It's like saying Android gaming is terrible because they didn't use DirectX.
On another note, problems that keep major AAA games from running on Linux (Anti-cheat solutions for example) will block many games from running ob MacOS, too.
By all means, share a list of XBox games that only use Vulkan.
WINE on Linux is able to match the performance of games on Windows, so the DirectX translation layer shouldn't be a problem either.
So it's not unreasonable to assume that the M2 just doesn't have a GPU capable of running these games. And it's really not that surprising that an integrated GPU doesn't match the performance of a dedicated GPU.
I mean… No?
CPU bottleneck is super common, especially on slightly older engine bases like source or unreal.
I think you are assuming big AAA games at 4k, which puts an especially big strain on the GPU.
Maybe I’ve been developing games too long, but we are constantly fighting CPU bottlenecks.
Game developers are much more willing to run their work on lower end machines if they'll get paid for it, or at least they're more capable of tuning for it.
Without including comparison data on native games? It's entirely unreasonable.
For instance, The native version of the DirectX 12 game "The Medium" was shown running side by side with the emulated version at WWDC, and the native version had double the frame rate.
As long as AAA games are published on the Xbox Series S and shipping with graphics settings they will have no problem when running natively on an M2 chip.
$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.
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.
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.
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).