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Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | Hacker News Reader

> The M1 Ultra is fabricated as a single chip.

I'm curious how much the M1 Ultra costs. It's such a massive single piece of glass I'd guess it's $1,200+. If that's the case it doesn't make sense to compare the M1 Ultra to $500 CPUs from Intel and AMD.

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Dunno, M1 Ultra includes a decent GPU, which the $500 CPUs from Intel and AMD do not. Seems relatively comparable to a $700 GPU (like a RTX 3070 if you can find one) depending on what you are using. Sadly metal native games are rare, many use some metal wrapper and/or Rosetta emulation.

Seems pretty fair to compare an Intel alder lake or higher end AMD Ryzen AND a GPU (rtx 3070 or radeon 6800) to the M1 ultra, assuming you don't care about power, heat, or space.

Has anyone managed to reach the actual advertised 21 FP32 TFLOPS? I'm curious. Even BLAS or pure custom matmul stuff? How much of that is actually available? I can almost saturate and sustain an NVIDIA A40 or A4000 to their peak perf, so, wondering whether anyone written something there?

What are you using to make the comparison to a 3070? Not close in any benchmarks I've come across.

I estimate that Apple's internal "price" for the M1 Ultra is around $2,000. Since most of the chip is GPU, it should really be compared to a combo like 5950X + 6800 XT or 12900K + 3080.

It wouldn't surprise me. M1 Ultra has 114 billion transistors and a total area of ~860 square mm. For comparison, an RTX 3090 has 28 billion transistors and a total area of 628 square mm.

Wouldn't the price be primarily based on capital investment and not so much on the unit itself? After all, it's essentially a print out on a crystal using reeeeeally expensive printers. AFAIK Apple's relationship with TSMC is more than a customer relationship.

In a parallel universe where Intel builds and sells this CPU- what's the price? Single chip, die size of 860 square mm, 114 billion transistors, on package memory.

It just got me thinking the other day since all of these benchmarks pit it against $500-$1000 CPUs and it doesn't seem to fall in that price range at all. Look at this thing:

https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/2022-03-...

That's the whole package though, together with the RAM and everything. The Actual die is about the size of the thermal paste stain on that picture.

If there's a defective M1 Ultra, they can cut it in half and say those are two low-end M1 Max.

Wouldn't they only get, at most, one low-end M1 Max if there is a defect?

They sell cheaper models with some cores disabled, that's what I meant by low-end. Ever wondered what's the deal with the cheapest "7-core GPU" M1?

If the defect is in the right place, Apple apparently sells M1 Max chips with some GPU cores disabled.

also all the other shit that’s on the chip ram etc.

It is commonly said that on the new M1 macs, that the ram is on the chip, it is not. It is on the same substrate, but its just normal (fast) dram chips soldered on nearby.

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