Performance doesn't go down linearly with power. I don't have that card to try, but maybe it would do even better at 15% of power.

There is a floor below which it will go straight to 0 (ie, nonfunctional).

The M1 Max is well below that floor at max wattage.

That floor is really, really low when you try to optimize for it. But the issue is that the M1 Max is at 5nm TSMC while the 3080 is on 8nm Samsung, so this isn't actually that impressive.

i doubt it'll even initialize.

These cards can run idle (e.g. desktop 2D mode) at about 15W, so it might run just fine.

Actual power draw depends on monitor resolution, number of attached displays, and refresh rate, though.

These cards idle at 15w while m1 max is yielding like half the performance at that wattage.

Sorry, Apple is clearly lightyears ahead. All they need to do is put out a chip with 48 of their gpu cores and they will beat the most expensive top of the line best ever performance gpu on the market… with a laptop-grade SoC.

The moment of truth will be Mac Pro. There they'll have all the freedom to spend as much electricity as possible and push computing to the bounds.

Also, the 3090 costs almost like the whole macbook

the truly amazing thing is that the M1 Max Macbook Pro will have twice the transistor count of a 3090 in its SOC (not counting memory stacks). That's a laptop CPU now.

It also has hexadecimal-channel RAM. 16 channels of DDR5. Instead of putting the SOC on GDDR6 and gimping the CPU side with higher latency, they just stacked in DDR5 channels until they had enough. Absolute meme tier design, Apple just does not give a single fuck about cost.

(note that DDR5 channels are half the width of DDR4 - you get two channels per stick. But, the burst length is longer to compensate (so you get the same amount per burst), and you get higher MT/s. But either way, it's conceptually like octochannel DDR4, "but better", it's a server-class memory configuration and then they stacked it all on the package so you could put it in a laptop.)

We don't know exactly of course, but I wouldn't be surprised, if Apple doesn't even save costs with their own chips vs. buying from Intel/AMD. In any case, they wouldn't be able to reach that compute power in a laptop of that size at all without the new chips.

Hm, as far as I can tell a M1 Max Macbook pro costs like $3k+ (the config used in the link is like $4k). how do you figure that?

Easy: you're not getting a 3090 at MSRP unless you're lucky.

Best buy has been doing physical drops on a monthly basis. I got one in the last drop @ MSRP, only waited in line for 30 minutes. It's worth checking out if you are looking for a card.

I will say though if you are in a large city this doesn't work as well, the lines are longer.

They've not done these in my area, but indeed I am in a "big city," or at least the suburbs.

Just wait until miners will start buying macbooks.

It's probably possible to build a 3090 system with a 750 watt power supply though.

A laptop?