Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs
wccftech.com
wccftech.com
We cannot speak of performance without the per-watt quotient. Battery life is a real concern, and current Wintel laptops just don't compete.
Energy concerns are real (as depicted in the George Miller-directed films mentioned above), and it may be the case that the premium paid for Apple Silicon-based devices is actually a bargain.
I own a Mac Studio and PC 10980xe with 4090 and the latter has to live in a separate room because of the noise.
With a PC you still have case fans running because even with modern motherboards they don't support switching them off at low temperature. You need to be running special Windows software.
And to cool the CPU you really need to be running AIO or dedicated water coolers which themselves will have 3 fans almost always running.
There is no shortage of silent air coolers, such as the NH-D15, that are 20-30 dBA and undetectable unless the only noise in the room. It's usually stock case fans that are the culprit.
3 for the GPU and 3 for the case. The latter are pretty noisy and constantly run.
What do you mean? Most motherboards support sending 0W to fans at given temps. You just install the motherboard software.
I have a ASUS TUF GAMING B550M-PLUS WIFI II motherboard in my desktop set to do exactly that, under I think 48 °C it stops the case fans. No Windows software required, it’s all in the MB’s BIOS.
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/05/09/mysterious-noise-sparks...
Hopefully, Apple has solved this issue with the second iteration.
I built a fairly stock PC, it is not silent and needs BIOS undervolting and custom fan curves to get there, and most recently I found updating the BIOS erases all of that.
Also built a NAS (which is too loud so I'd like to rebuild it) and the one time I reported a bug to FreeNAS a graybeard yelled at me on Bugzilla for not building a 1U server with fans that sound like an airplane taking off.
I have a m2 Max, the battery life is awe inspiring. M2 ultra doesn’t best the competition for its use case.
What matters more than people may realize is battery runtime. The Apple hardware just spanks x86 hardware, unless that hardware is fitted with a big battery, and or a secondary one.
I typically run Lenovo hardware, and on my faster machine, I got a very large battery and could get 6 solid hours. And that is at a nice 3Ghz speed too.
My current machine (i5) is far slower than the M1 and that hot running Lenovo. (i7) It has two batteries that can yield 5 to 7 hours.
Those machines are heavier, slower, bigger, and just feel crappy compared to the M1 Air I have been using.
And that thing is crazy good. Battery life is longer, sometimes by a considerable amount. It is great hardware, fast, easy to use, light, you name it.
Mac servers are pretty much required for any kind of CICD for Apple development.
Just about any company with an iOS or Mac app will have or rent a Mac server.
Most people in 2nd and 3rd tier countries don't have the necessary means to buy those equipments, and additionally they aren't a presence on servers and embedded markets.
So in those markets it doesn't matter if M2 Ultra smashes AMD and Intel, no one will ever use one.
> And don’t forget cooling! All that extra power draw generates heat.
As for the desktop use case... sure, you aren't going to care about the $200 of saved power draw, but not having a very loud and hot machine at your desk has to count for something, right?
[0] GPUs won't work, their memory access is locked out in hardware and Apple removed the MPX connectors that powered the Intel GPU modules.
I wonder if that's a small hint or giveaway of something coming in the future that will make use of it.... One can hope.
And those really weird PCI cards are what underpins many industries for which the Mac Pro is designed for e.g. video and audio production.
Provided Apple signs 'em :p
And users can still use unsigned drivers provided they disable the option.
Microsoft on the other hand, is run by adults.
They’re telegraphing the use case for future SOCs.
Can someone explain what that means?
While the M2 doesn’t include external GPU support, I think the M3 Mac Pro will in order to continue justifying the astronomical price.
Otherwise, Apple would have gone through an awful lot of trouble to design a new motherboard with PCIe slots for an otherwise limited-use case.
In releasing an M2 Mac Pro, Apple is trying to balance a consistent message regarding the ARM transition and customer expectations, but also the hiccups and limited experience of developing desktop CPUs. There may be some silicon bug or silicon-level design oversight in the M2 preventing use of an external GPU.
Discrete GPU support is supposed to be there, but not quite ready.
And as far as heating the room, okay that's an extra $50 of air conditioning to remove the $200 of heat.
Apple should assume that desktop machines have an unlimited power source, and that users want a maximum speed. That the users time is more expensive than the electricity being fed into the computer.
Laptops, sure, sacrifice power to extend the battery. Apple does an excellent job here.
The only reason you would buy one of these desktop machines is because you want to be in the Apple ecosystem.
I don't get it.
The M2 is 15W. There are mobile Ryzen APUs with the same TDP. They're about the same speed; maybe the M2 is a little faster for single thread and the PC is a little faster for multi-thread, it's not that different. You can get a PC laptop which is under 3 lbs and has 14+ hours of battery life.
You can also get a PC laptop which is heavier and has a shorter battery life because they have no qualms about selling you what amounts to a desktop CPU which is then something like 30% faster for multi-thread. But nobody forces you to buy that one.
I want to put Linux on it. So far I have been looking at the legion 5 pro, because a friend got one recently, and seems amazing, though haven't yet got my hands on it long enough to try it with an USB stick with a recent Ubuntu (with a recent kernel) to test the power management feature support.
Before that I had a Dell XPS, which lasted about 7 hours IIRC, which was pretty good for the time.
My Acer could pull about 15 hours when new, but it is a fairly underwhelming Celeron CPU so that probably helps.
Maybe other systems are worse; I don't know, but overall things always seem to work well for me.
I guess I don't understand why you would want the ultra if you still prioritize TDP over performance.
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.
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.
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.
Computation per kWh (or rate of computation per kW) is the right efficiency metric, not TDP (thermal design power).
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...
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.
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
>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
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.
You can play that in the other way too. Use multiple 13700Ts at 35W each.
This is a lazy argument. Why did they make the M1 faster than other CPUs? I would argue that most people don’t need even that performance. Why do they put M chips in iPads - they can’t even use it optimally.
As you said though, it's a very niche thing, so even without beating Intel at the top end they're not going to be losing much. It's just a bit of a shame. The i9-13900K is only $500, it's not like it's some wildly out-of-reach thing.
But of course, combining any number of M2’s won’t increase their single core scores. Intel’s desktop chips are there for people who want high clock speeds and are happy to pay in power for that (and the power cost is super linearly related to clock frequency). The Intel chips are just designed for different use-cases, it doesn’t make sense to assume either company could just linearly scale things to reproduce each other’s products.
The relevance of multi-core scores depends on how parallel the workload is. If we all had perfectly parallel workloads I guess Xeon Phi’s would have sold better.
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.
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).
* 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.
They also posted this.
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).
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 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.
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.
I also remember my macbook unibody 2008 and mbp 2012, with them I could do a lot with 4gb ram, even on hdd, nowadays 8gb is kinda too small for most of programming jobs, it look like macs keep getting better hardware every year and macOS using it more and more aggressively
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder if they'll give up on going past 2 dies and leave their high-end eternally lacking or if there is something else coming down the pipe.
Hint: M2 destroys the competition
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.
Or, of course, there's the classic Twain / Disraeli quote ... take your pick.
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.