The other thing is price, the m1 max cost $5k here. You know what kind of PC you can get for that price? A 3080 MSRP is $700 and beat any mac GPU right ( and that's a GPU from last year ). 5900x cost $480.
do we know for a fact that a 90w Apple GPU would
perform 4x faster if it was running at 500w
I would certainly like to see Apple go nuts and make a true, cost-and-power-consumption-are-no-object world destroying GPU. If only as a halo product. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
The only reason I care about performance/watt is because I actually care about noise, heat and battery life. I'm not running a data center off a laptop so the cost benefits of performance/watt are not even a concern.
Its a nice chip but we shouldn't confuse the marketing for the actual benefits.
If a higher performance/watt but much lower absolute performance chip was released, I wouldn't be interested.
Performance/watt it not everything. It's not really even something.
It's a derivative concern.
The only reason I care about performance/watt is because I actually
care about noise, heat and battery life.
Presumably, all you really care about is raw performance then?
Well, OK, fair enough. We can all care about different things. But even though, performance/watt still rules: for all practical purposes the watts part constrains the performance part.
For a given power supply and cooling system, you can only draw and dissipate X number of watts. So you are back to the question of how much performance the system can provide given X watts.
Even no-compromises cooling solutions most would consider highly impractical (involving liquid nitrogen etc) run into this issue at some point. So yeah, you actually do care about performance/watt?
Yeah, all pretty major concerns?
I admit it's a pedantic comment but I was pulled in by use of "literally everything".
The point is at best I care about perf/watt
indirectly and the things I do care about can
be improved in other ways
You fairly quickly learn that dissipating kilowatts of watts of heat from something as tiny as a CPU die (or, more accurately, one particular subset of functional units from in a CPU core) is awfully difficult.
At some point, the CPU/GPU/etc need to be kept under a certain temp, which sets an upper bound on watts. So, no escaping watts/performance....
Okay, noise, _maybe_, but how are you proposing to improve heat and battery life without improving perf/watt? Your options for battery life are either to reduce performance, or to increase battery size (but, well, good luck with that; the 16" MBP is already as big as a laptop battery can practically be, as if it was any bigger you wouldn't be allowed take it on a plane). Your only option to reduce heat without improving perf/watt would be to reduce performance.
At some point you are adding 90% more power use for 3% more performance.
On GPUs, pretty much. It’s even called embarrassingly parallel for this reason.
Yes, with HBM3 you could go up to 5TB/s and in the future 6.4TB/s. To give a comparison a 3980 RTX Ti has ~900 GB/s with GDDR6x.
But just with everything we hit TDP or cost ceiling well before any technical barriers.
The answer is yes. Scaling with more cores running at the same frequency giving unlimited bandwidth. Yes it is pretty much linear for GPU.
I guess that is why most of the discussions is so tiring. Because this fact is not known.