Apple M1 Pro and M1 Max

[HACO]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHUF8A2vpos&t=1s

M1 Max getting stomped here by alder lake, at least on raw CPU power based on the vastly superior benchmark (cinebench R23). Skip to about 1 minute for exact numbers

Im just talking about raw power not about power consumption.

Also this chip is for sure faster than most people's desktops, obviously not all

Single threaded performance is roughly the same (within 10% of Apple and AMD), even then at vastly more power consumption due to Intel's insane clocks. There's nothing impressive here, it's just a matter of packing 120w worth of silicon into a laptop, and it lasts just 5 hours for simple web browsing. It needs a 330w charger! Plug that off and see how it performs. And it doesn't even have a competitive integrated GPU compared to Apple or AMD.

AMD and Apple could have easily put 2-3x cores into their laptops and destroyed this if they wanted a 120w laptop CPU that sounds like a Boeing 747 and always needs to be plugged in to maintain performance, and lasts 5 hours on a 100wh battery. That'd be a poor product.

 

[HACO]

Single threaded is a moot metric, multithreaded is what matters in 2022.

Single threaded matters for more or less every single thing you actually do, outside of benchmarks specifically designed to maximise multithreaded performance. This is why your CPU isn't 2000 tiny cores which on paper can actually outperform even a 5950X in multithreaded benchmarks in both power and performance.

Depending on what percentage of a task is parallelisable, there's a maximum theoretical benefit you get from multithreading, and eventually your speed is always limited by your single-threaded performance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law



E.g. even if a task is 90% parallelisable, maximum theoretical benefit you get from 8 to 16 is only ~30%. And this assumes 100% hardware multicore efficiency and 100% perfect coding, none of which are ever the case in practice. Most typical workloads people do on their computers are never even 25% parallelised. Let alone 99.9% like Cinebench.

In a multicore architecture, your performance is always limited by the portion you can't parallelise, and performance of that is limited by your single-threaded performance. The "single-threaded is pointless" comment typically indicates that the person saying it has no clue about computer architecture. There's a reason Intel, AMD, Apple and ARM often use node shrinks to improve IPC on existing cores (by making them bigger), instead of just adding more and more of the old cores. That's why we see new microarchitectures every year. AMD can put 128 Bulldozer cores inside a 5950X die, it wouldn't be a good product, they use 16 Zen 3 cores and it's an awesome one, even though a Zen 3 core isn't 8 times faster than a Bulldozer one.

Also I doubt both AMD and Apple could have put in more cores into their laptops without it exploding. Apple especially, the M1 Max is probs the furthest they can take that chip in a laptop form factor

AMD can literally put 5950X inside a laptop and it will consume less power than i9 1200HK, so less chance of exploding Lmao.

People just trying to find any reason to bash on intel now, alder lake has done fairly well compared with their previous garbage generations

Nobody hates Intel. I'm sure most of us have had Intel CPUs (I'm typing this on a computer with an Intel CPU, lol). It's just not as great of a product as some people make it out to be. Sure, much better than their previous generations, but pretending like Intel has now surpassed AMD and Apple isn't remotely true, all three are roughly at the same level when you take into account everything with Apple having a big edge in efficiency, Intel having a slight edge in performance and AMD being very close to Intel in performance, and halfway in between Intel and Apple in efficiency. And Intel's 5-10% performance advantage comes at the price of orders of magnitude worse efficiency.

 

[HACO]

Dont get me wrong, not saying Apple are "bad" here, they made an excellent chip. But why on earth do people care about battery life on a laptop when they buying it for gaming? Its just common knowledge that the battery is going to be poor and the whole point is to game where you take your laptop, and it'll be somewhere that has access to a charger

Nobody is buying Macbooks for gaming. You brought the discussion about a gaming laptop into this topic about M1 Pro/Max, then complain why people are concerned about efficiency, which is the selling point of these chips?

Irony is dead.

 

[HACO]

What does that even mean???

I would assume the vast majority buying a gaming machine are going to do some gaming.

Apple Macbooks with M1 Pro/Max are not gaming machines. Notice what this topic is about ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Nobody is saying the MSI's Raider GE76 with 12900HK and 3080 Ti is a bad gaming laptop. If you want a gaming laptop then that's probably a good buy. It's just fundamentally a different product compared to M1 Max Macbooks made with entirely different priorities for a different market.

 

[HACO]

Seems a bit hypocritical to criticize a product (a gaming laptop) for not being something it isn't. Then turn around and defend another product (the M1Pro/Max) using the the same argument.

Yeah, if someone went to the MSI laptop's topic and said "but MacBooks have better battery life" that would too be absurd and irrelevant. If people bring up a different laptop in a topic about M1 then they shouldn't be surprised that their chosen laptop would be looked at by MacBook standards, not as a pure gaming one which isn't relevant to MacBooks or this topic.

 

[HACO]

This isn't a thread about MacBooks. It's a thread about the M1 Max/Pro CPU in a CPU forum.

Why are we not allowed to talk about CPUs in the CPU forum?

You're obviously allowed to talk about whatever you want. If you want to compare the MSI laptop to a $8000 EPYC server chip or a $4000 Threadripper and show it's better for gaming, you can (and yes, it is better for gaming). But I'm sure you'd agree that's a useless comparison.

M1 Pro/Max chips are designed for and only used in MacBook Pros. If Apple made gaming laptops with M1 Pro/Max that promised best performance but 4 hours of web browsing, that discussion would have been valid. But these chips are made for entirely different products.

MacBook Pros with M1 Pro/Max offer very good productivity performance (which obviously isn't the absolute best, but near the top) at exceptional efficiency, that allows laptops to give you a solid day's worth of actual work on battery and then some, and performance that doesn't drop when used on battery, all in a portable form factor that can run quietly. This is why they've been selling like crazy and even after 3 months you can't go into a store and buy one.

Raw performance in a one dimensional benchmark isn't what you compare these on, you gotta look at the whole picture, i.e. if you built comparable laptops in size, weight and battery life, what performance would you get? Those products will come, as I'm sure MacBook competitors like Dell XPS series (which is a laptop designed with similar goals for a similar target ad MacBook Pros) will eventually use 12th gen Intel soon. So when they come we'll see if 12th gen Intel can offer the same or better experience, i.e. a laptop that performs as good on battery as it does on power, gives you a solid 10 hours of typical work or 20 hours of web browsing, in a comparable form factor, at performance levels comparable or better than M1 Pro/Max.

Can't wait to see what they do with the M2...

Rumours are they will be based on the upcoming A16 microarchitecture, and I'm expecting similar core configs but with maybe 20-25% IPC improvement and maybe slightly higher clocks.

 

[HACO]

You're still banging on about laptops.

They could stick Max/Pro in the Mac mini which would nullify the laptop argument.

Everyone knows about the low energy consumption. But it's not the only discussion people are interested in having. This is OcUK after all.

Yeah and I think they will put them in Mac Mini, and that Mac Mini would be a different product, still wouldn't compare to a gaming PC though as people don't buy Mac Minis for gaming. However, it would be fair to compare it to Intel NUCs as that'd be the competitor. You wouldn't compare a Mac Mini to a workstation with a Threadripper either.

And I agree, despite being obvious that this isn't for gaming, if you go back to the first page people have been wondering about gaming. But since it can't even run most AAA games, it's lost that fight before performance can even be considered. An Intel ultrabook with integrated graphics from 5 years ago is better than these for gaming, let alone the MSI 12900HK with 3080 Ti.

 

[HACO]

I can use a gaming computer for a non gaming task and compare it with a non gaming computer doing the same task.

I think that's valid.

Obviously you do if that's you're seriously deciding between M1 macs and gaming computers, that's just not usually what most people end up doing when they're choosing what to buy given that they're designed for entirely different people with different priorities.

It's interesting because you do find people comparing Threadripper, with M1 Mac's and even Max/Pros for heavy tasks. Which machine and cpu was right for each person isn't always the same.

Some decided the expensive machine was completely overkill when considered holistically.

Yeah you always find the odd person that ends up choosing between wildly different product categories (e.g, a hatchback and a pick up truck) and that's all fine, but the majority of the time when you see people comparing laptops to desktop workstations it's usually within the context of "how slower is this fanless 20h battery life M1 MacBook Air (or other laptop) compared to a huge Threadripper PC or Mac Pro I have at home/office" to get a feeling of the on-the-go performance that they can get for their work. That's generally fine, but it's not like people are choosing to buy and a M1 Mac and a Threadripper PC end up being the contenders. Obviously if that's the case for you go ahead, but these are odd scenarios like the hatchback and pick up truck.

People who usually want the absolute best performance at all costs (within any category) are not and haven't historically been interested in macs (laptop or desktop), as macs simply don't offer it. The M1 series have certainly slightly changed that (e.g. M1 MacBook Air is the fastest fanless laptop out there), but only at the lower end. It doesn't make performance-only high-end comparisons invalid, just simply out-of-context and useless as the answer was obvious anyway. Offering the absolute best performance is not the point of these chips and products.

 

[HACO]

I'm curious. What common tasks in your opinion, do you think the MAJORITY of people do, that requires the performance of a M1 Max/Pro or Threadripper. That the top end performance is critical in their buying decision.

Maybe apart from the base config 14-inch MBP, people shouldn't really be buying these (or a Threadripper) if you're not making money using them.

Compute heavy tasks exist everywhere. Software engineers (code compiling and testing), photo/video editors, audio engineers, CAD, financial analysts, scientists, etc... Now these days a lot of the heavy duty compute workloads are being moved to the cloud so people prepare their work on their machine and then send it over to a server to run. This trend has made Mac Pro/Threadripper like products a little less popular and products like M1 Pro/Max laptops (or Dell XPS) more appealing, because they offer top-notch performance for quick workloads and testing locally while also being great portable quiet machines with great screens, battery life and it wouldn't harm their productivity.

2nd question, what in your opinion what tasks are the MAJORITY of people doing that require this performance "on the go".

Personally, I'm a software engineer and I do most of my work on a laptop which is very common in the industry as people go in and out of meeting rooms, work from home, on-the-go, in different buildings, etc. So what I care most about is compiling and testing performance, which is often computationally challenging in major projects, e.g. a major project that I'm currently doing used to take 20 minutes to compile/test on a 16-inch Intel MBP, and now it takes ~11 minutes on a 16-inch M1 Max MBP, if I do 15 builds a day that gives me 135 minutes back. Given how expensive staff costs are, it pays back for the cost of the £3500 cost of the laptop in a couple of months, if not weeks.

Now a Threadripper 3990X or a Ryzen 5950X would actually do that in about 8 minutes but it takes away flexibility, as I can only work from one desk, so the 45 mins a day it would save me is probably not worth it because I also need portability and performance on battery as I tend to move around during the building and offices day or work from home.

This is why the 64GB M1 Max MBP has been selling like crazy in the tech industry. You can see from these tweets from Uber, Twitter or Reddit why they're upgrading all their iOS/Android developers to M1 series macs. It cuts their development time so it pays back for itself very quickly.

It been interesting seeing people trying to justify something like the older Mac Pro for their work. One example was people in music production who have a ton of specialized add in cards, and need a tone of RAM for their music projects. But then others moving from the Mac Pro to M1 macs for video editing. After they realise that time isn't that critical and the cost of some of these top end Mac Pro machines, was a poor return on investment, for their business. Some switching to M1 macs as a result.

Almost all are specialist workload, most people won't be doing anything like that.

But Mac Pro is a specialist product. You can only justify the cost if you're making money using it. And even then, most people can't justify the cost. Nobody is buying a Mac Pro just to browse the web and do typical consumer stuff, it'd be madness given the price. A consumer-grade PC would be as good, if not better, and significantly cheaper.

Also because of the specialised accelerators and encoders in M1 Pro/Max, it has made Mac Pros somewhat outdated for audio/photo/video editing as it outperforms them. This is a big market for Apple so they try to corner it. The £2000 Afterburner card for processing ProRes that you can buy for Mac Pro is actually slower than the accelerator they built into a M1 Max. So yeah, if you've been using a Mac Pro with the Afterburner card it's now difficult to justify that £8000 Mac Pro compared to a £3500 M1 Max MBP! But I'm sure when Apple releases an Apple Silicone Mac Pro, that would outperform M1 Max for processing ProRes, otherwise it has no reason to exist.

I think a lot of YouTube review suffer from this being heavily focused on themselves.

100% true, they assume everyone is a video editor I'm not a fan of YouTube reviews at all.

I love geeking out on these cpu's. I'm almost trying to dream up tasks to test them. I think the M1 is ground breaking.

I think it is. The M1 series allowed Apple to offer a few things that didn't really exist before, especially laptops with close to top-level performance while also being excellent laptops from portability, battery life and weight perspective. We've always had high-performance laptops (e.g. 17-inch desktop replacements), but while they were fast, they weren't great laptops because they were heavy, noisy, usually ugly, didn't have good battery life, and their performance while on battery suffered significantly.

But if you look at the M1 Mac Mini, it's nowhere near as appealing, because it loses all of those laptop advantages, and then has to compete on performance against Intel/AMD, where they have the lead. It's still a nice small computer, but for the same money you can get better performance elsewhere.

 

[HACO]

The (Current) reason for the Mac Pro is expansion cards and I/O also RAM capacity. Some people need a lot of RAM.

For point, but that need is getting smaller and smaller, because you can spin up compute machines in the cloud with more or less infinite scalability in RAM/Compute and then shut them down when you're done. I need 512GB of RAM at times, but I don't need a dedicated machine for that, I spin up EC2 boxes when I need them and shut them down after and I can optimise for what I need at the time (more cores, more RAM, faster SSDs, faster cores, etc). This is a trend and is becoming the preferred setup in tech/fintech industry.

I want a big screen and full-sized tactile keyboard and mouse.

Brought my MX Blue keyboard to the office once, let's just say I wouldn't be working there if I ever did that again

I never want to work on a small screen, I want a big screen and full-sized tactile keyboard and mouse. I also want lots of ports. My work laptop currently has every USB port in use and I've also had to use a USB hub. My gaming laptop has 6 USB 3.0 or 3.1 ports. In work one of the problems we have with Laptops with everyone working from home. Is they use them plugged in 100% of the time. Its playing havoc with the batteries and we are seeing swelling batteries more often then previously. A mini size PC would be far more suitable for most people (in our office) at home.

At home or in the office I have a thunderbolt dock for the laptop, I have dual LG 5K monitors (one at home). The dock also gives me all the ports I'd ever need, and I connect proper keyboard, mouse, etc to it. I can also pick it up and go anywhere and my setup is always with me. This flexibility is super helpful for productivity.