Maybe... wait for it... they're not for gaming ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Apple M1 Pro and M1 Max
- Thread starter HACO
- Start date
Maybe... wait for it... they're not for gaming ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anandtech review is out:
CPU:
Single threaded unchanged from M1 (as expected).
Multithreaded scaled as per extra cores, except for FP which went insane with M1 Max.
The 8P alone is roughly equal to the desktop 5800X in SPECint, beats it in SPECfp, basically core for core compared to Zen 3 (which again is what we expected). The full 10-core beats 5800X in almost every SPEC test. In fact M1 Max is basically at the same level as 5950X in SPECfp, despite having half the cores. This is because of the huge memory bandwidth.
This is insane, insane performance levels.
The GPU is also interesting:
Premier Pro results are scaled to desktop RTX 3080, i.e. an RTX 3080 will get a score of 1000. M1 Max gets 85-95% of the way there. CPU plays a role here too, but the baseline 1000 score is with an AMD 5800X anyway.
Davici Resolve is more GPU-bound. This is roughly on par with desktop AMD RX 6700XT.
Gaming performance, as expected, isn't as good and doesn't compare as well to higher end AMD/NVIDIA GPUs after emulation and trickery to run them, but it was never the point of this machine anyway.
CPU:
Single threaded unchanged from M1 (as expected).
Multithreaded scaled as per extra cores, except for FP which went insane with M1 Max.
The 8P alone is roughly equal to the desktop 5800X in SPECint, beats it in SPECfp, basically core for core compared to Zen 3 (which again is what we expected). The full 10-core beats 5800X in almost every SPEC test. In fact M1 Max is basically at the same level as 5950X in SPECfp, despite having half the cores. This is because of the huge memory bandwidth.
This is insane, insane performance levels.
The GPU is also interesting:
Premier Pro results are scaled to desktop RTX 3080, i.e. an RTX 3080 will get a score of 1000. M1 Max gets 85-95% of the way there. CPU plays a role here too, but the baseline 1000 score is with an AMD 5800X anyway.
Davici Resolve is more GPU-bound. This is roughly on par with desktop AMD RX 6700XT.
Gaming performance, as expected, isn't as good and doesn't compare as well to higher end AMD/NVIDIA GPUs after emulation and trickery to run them, but it was never the point of this machine anyway.
What are you talking about? I posted the average multithreaded SPEC benchmarks, by definition, the average is not a cherry picked. I also posted 100% of the compute benchmarks that Anandtech did. Again, posting 100% of the benchmarks is not cherry picked.
It's actually more powerful than people were expecting, because multithreaded FP scaling was significantly better than expected. You're claiming literally the opposite of what Anandtech concluded in the review you linked:
>> The M1 Pro and M1 Max change the narrative completely – these designs feel like truly SoCs that have been made with power users in mind, with Apple increasing the performance metrics in all vectors. We expected large performance jumps, but we didn’t expect the some of the monstrous increases that the new chips are able to achieve.
>> On the CPU side, doubling up on the performance cores is an evident way to increase performance – the competition also does so with some of their designs. How Apple does it differently, is that it not only scaled the CPU cores, but everything surrounding them. It’s not just 4 additional performance cores, it’s a whole new performance cluster with its own L2. On the memory side, Apple has scaled its memory subsystem to never before seen dimensions, and this allows the M1 Pro & Max to achieve performance figures that simply weren’t even considered possible in a laptop chip. The chips here aren’t only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you’d have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max – it’s just generally absurd.
>> On the CPU side, doubling up on the performance cores is an evident way to increase performance – the competition also does so with some of their designs. How Apple does it differently, is that it not only scaled the CPU cores, but everything surrounding them. It’s not just 4 additional performance cores, it’s a whole new performance cluster with its own L2. On the memory side, Apple has scaled its memory subsystem to never before seen dimensions, and this allows the M1 Pro & Max to achieve performance figures that simply weren’t even considered possible in a laptop chip. The chips here aren’t only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you’d have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max – it’s just generally absurd.
^^^ That is what Anandtech says.
You seem to have not read the article.
AT answers the gaming question - its not quite there yet even in the best case scenario. Realise also AT is not testing a lot of Zen3 based laptops either - you can get 8C Zen3 based laptops with an RTX3060 for as low as £900 if you look on HUKD.
https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17024/126685.png
https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17024/126683.png
[IMG]https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17024/126681.png
[IMG]https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17024/126682.png
Also,some tests in a YT video today:
[URL]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhqCC70ZfDM[/URL]
[URL]https://imgur.com/a/YdErGtK[/URL]
[IMG]https://i.imgur.com/kqKBEjl.png
Its solid,but as usual PCMR has gotten way too overhyped on these things and people have to realise the media gets in on the hype too. The Asus G15 has a Ryzen 9 5900HS,which is made on an old 7NM process and AMD is already moving over to newer designs over the next 12 months.
So as usual the Macs work well if you are already in that ecosystem and TBH,you would be already using a Mac irrespective of what CPU/GPU would be in there.
Honestly people who expected these to be gaming machines are going to be disappointed, for good reason. We spent a week telling people that these aren't gaming machines, and they didn't listen
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There really isn't much they can do, they've pushed as far as they've been able to within power and thermal constraints. Adding more cores on a laptop means running them at lower clocks to keep within power and thermal limits, which diminishes returns while the chip gets bigger and more expensive, there always is a viability range and for Zen 3 the higher end chips are already at the top end of that.
8-channel DDR5 really isn't something we're going to see on PC anytime soon. That bandwidth only exists on server-grade products but those lack the single-threaded performance.
It's generally expected that cache is going to increase in future CPUs, that's quite uncontroversial and has been the trend for decades. If a computation task is memory-intensive or requires core-to-core communication, it could benefit from more and/or faster cache. If it's not, there's no difference.
It will be quite a while before we see many GBs of cache though, that requires a huge amount of space and will be incredibly expensive. The highest end EPYC has 256MB of cache, to put it in context. We're a very long time off before we see the likes of 1GB in cache for a low-end CPU, likely decades away.
No we won't see that because it makes no sense, and it won't make any difference anyway. Putting DRAM on the same package as a SoC just adds to manufacturing complexity and takes away flexibility from OEMs. Intel and AMD don't make DRAMs. Some laptops have soldered ram as well as SO-DIMM slots, but those are not on the same package as the SoC itself. Being there makes no difference to performance or software though.
The only reason Apple does this is because it's space efficient and reduces complexity of the boards, as they make both the CPU and the end-product, something Intel/AMD don't do. There are no performance benefits to this approach for Intel/AMD. But for Apple, it makes perfect sense.
M1's DRAMs are not on the die and make no difference to die size.
It really can't scale much above what we've seen with M1 Max, they have to split them up when they go larger. I can see them doing a CPU-DRAM-GPU all on one package.
But Jigger has told us that the M1X is going to dominated the gaming laptop market
He deleted his account
Certain idiots blew the expectations for these chips way out of proportion, specifically for gaming, despite as you say Apple made no claims about gaming. There are some people whose understanding of GPU is "game game game" so when they heard powerful GPU their minds automatically went to "must be awesome for gaming". Then there's a user here who made asinine claims about how these are the best gaming laptops and has been quiet ever since the reviews came out
There's also another crew who basically hate everything Apple does or makes, so they got their bone and can't stop talking about how uncompetitive these are at gaming, literally running Windows through Parallels, without any GPU drivers, then using Windows' emulation to run some x86 Windows games, again without drivers, to show that these chips can't get good fps even at 720p gaming, so they can come and say they suck at gaming and this GPU sucks or is the same as 2050 Ti or something.
Now both sides blame the other idiots for their own stupidity and claim all they're doing is to refute the other side, they got their excuses to keep going.
Apple for some reason really brings the worst out of people, fans or haters alike. It brings the idiot inside all of us to the surface
It was always obvious that these chips won't be any good for gaming for anyone who uses macs, for the simple reason that there are no AAA games to even play on them, no matter the hardware! It doesn't get simpler than that. Apple has not taken mac gaming seriously in any way for a very long time, and made no mention of it anyway during the launch.
Hopefully this gaming meme will die off as every reviewer has been clear about it now, that nobody should get these chips for gaming, as if it wasn't obvious to begin with. You can spend half the price, get 2x gaming performance, and access to hundreds of titles that you can't even play on the Macbooks regardless of performance.
Lol at this point I think you're trolling. GPU, games availability, emulation, etc aside, the screen on these Macbooks have awful response times and ~4-5 trailing frames, as mentioned by Anandtech's reviewer on Twitter. Very similar to previous Apple IPS screens, they heavily prioritised accuracy over speed, for good reason given their use-case.
I can see the potential, I'm just not delusional about it lol.
I don't know why I'm bothering, maybe for the benefit of someone who's reading. But here it is:
First, it takes several years for this user-base to be meaningful in numbers. It's not a large user base now and won't be in a couple of years. Apple is still selling high-end Intel macs with AMD GPUs and will continue to do it into 2022. What you describe (large Apple silicon user base with powerful GPUs) is several years away. These current products will be 3-5 years old, and quite likely obsolete.
Second, Apple will need to develop the software side of things to allow this to happen. So far, they haven't done so and they've shown no indication that they're even interested. What they've done for gaming so far in Metal has been heavily focused on iOS gaming rather than desktop AAA games for macs. Maybe this changes in the future, but it won't change overnight. It will take years, and again, by then current generation of products are old and obsolete.
Third, the rest of the hardware is just not gaming optimised, e.g. the screens have very high response times, because Apple cares about colour accuracy and sharpness, rather than speed. So to compete with gaming laptops, Apple needs new hardware too, by then there will be new chips.
Fourth, assuming we get feature parity between Metal and Vulcan/DX12, these GPUs in their microarchitecture are heavily optimised for compute. There's a reason AMD can match Nvidia in gaming but not in compute, and there's a reason Apple is easily catching up to AMD in compute, but not in gaming. The microarchitecture priorities are different. That means even if all the above happens, Apple will still need to prioritise gaming in their future GPUs microarchitectures, i.e. products that haven't been released yet and won't be for a few years.
So to make it clear, these current products, and the M1 Pro/Max, won't make a difference to the gaming industry and won't be gaming laptops. Whether things will change in the future is irrelevant, these products won't be part of that future even if Apple becomes king of gaming.
Assuming M2 uses A15's uarch and node, we should expect ~10% faster and 20% better power efficiency for CPU, and ~25% faster GPU.
Well, Cyberpunk isn't even released for macOS anyway, if they released a sueprcomputer GPU it would be no different. AMD's FidelityFX works on M1 GPUs. As for ray tracing, there is no hardware support, only software ray tracing on Metal.
Maybe Apple is doing stuff behind the scenes, who knows. There's potential here, but that's all there is for now.
These chips are already a winner for Apple in wearables, just look at how successful Apple Watch has been compared to the competition and the chip is a big part of it. For AR wearables, it will be even more so. There's a reason Apple is focusing so much on the efficiency cores of their silicon which has gone under the radar, this year they made them 25% faster, and A15E cores are now 3.5x faster compared to ARM's A55 efficiency cores. This performance-per-watt advantage in both CPU and GPU is critical for AR devices which have to be lightweight and battery operated to become mainstream products.
So no doubt their AR chips will have dedicated silicon in there to boost some AR-specific features, e.g. greater spatial awareness. The ML cores are effectively TPUs, so any tensor computations can be offloaded there which again is helpful for AR.
Always more exciting to see it in action every year than jump 10 years and see the result
Yeah, they're going to put multiple M1/M2 Max into the same machine for iMac Pro/Mac Pro.
Let's see if jigger will ever return to this topic
That's what I used to do before I got my first Mac. Then decided to just have a separate gaming PC.