>this is really interesting

Sadly this is not really interesting, it's disingenuous. He benchmarked against a ten year old (03/06/2012) server CPU. My two year old intel laptop cpu (i7-9750H) also outperforms the xeon's he's comparing against by almost 40%.

The M1 is a great chip, it's sad that this got published with a "server chip" comparison at all. A real server class CPU from the modern era, at a comparable price point, is the AMD EPYC 7443P, which is 400% faster on cpu bench.

Hello, author here! I'm aware that that the Xeon E5-2680 is ancient, which is why I also included comparisons with the Xeon W-3245 that is in the current 2019 Mac Pro, and with the Threadripper 3990X, which came out in February 2020.

Unfortunately I don't exactly have access to piles of fancy server chips sitting around, so I had to make do with just testing against what I have access to, and that's all I had access to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, but you don't need to "reach for not just high end desktop chips, but for server-class workstation hardware to really beat the M1 Max". Low-market CPU's for desktop will like the Ryzen 5 3600 (newegg for 240$) surpass it on CPU bench. Likely they also surpass it on on raytracing as well. And chips like the AMD Ryzen 7 4800H, which is a "big laptop" CPU, also beat it. The M1 Pro 10 manages to best that, but not by a huge margin on passmark.

None of them beat an actual, modern, mid-market desktop CPU. And none of those compare to the likes of the threadripper.

The test results are amazing, the exposition here is simply inaccurate. Again, you don't need a "server-class highend workstation" CPU to best the M1 in raw performance. Nothing on the planet beats the m1 in tpd/performance. That's amazing enough on its own.

He also benchmarked it against the Intel Xeon W-3245 which is what that referred to. It's not disingenuous at all: the old Xeon is explicitly called out as old, which is why he compared it to the 2019 Xeon in the Mac Pro as well.

> My two year old intel laptop cpu (i7-9750H) also outperforms the xeon's he's comparing against by almost 40%.

Yeah, but for how long? My laptop has a respectable CPU as well but any kind of sustained load would melt it down if it didn't automatically throttle itself back to 2 GHz and below after like 5 seconds.

These M1 chips somehow manage to have great performance while also keeping temperatures and power draw low. I think this will change everything forever.

> Any kind of sustained load would melt it down if it didn't automatically throttle itself back to 2 GHz and below after like 5 seconds

Bingo

It depends on how the laptop designed to cool it.

Cooling laptops just isn't going to happen. I've never had one with a thermal management system that didn't suck. My current laptop has 3 noisy ridiculously loud fans and it can't cool the processor enough to maintain a sustained load at maximum speed. All I have to do to watch it nearly melt itself down at 93 °C is run make all in some project's directory.

This comment comes off as idingenuous itself. What about the 3245 or the Threadpiper, also mentioned?

The test results are great. But you don't need a highend server CPU to best the m1 inraw performance. Most mid-level (around 300$) desktop cpus will do that just fine. The exposition here is simply... wrong.

The remarkable thing about the m1 is the tpd/performance it gets.

Imagine complaining about the content of an article you obviously didn't read.

The AMD Threadripper 3990X costs about $5,000 and I'm guessing that's cheap compared to the Xeons.

An AMD Ryzen 9 5950X cost $700 and is almost 2x faster than an m1 max in multi core.

Except in benchmarks outside GeekBench it isn't. See e.g. the last graph in

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

The 5950X is only 55% faster than the M1 Max on multi-threaded integer benchmarks. The M1 Max is even 26% faster than the 5950X on multi-threaded FP benchmarks (maybe it has two AMX units?).

The M1 Max is really in 5900X/5950X territory... in a laptop.

I agree on the pricing (I also have a 5900X and a 5950X machine). But it is fantastic that we can have that kind of performance in a mobile device and still have many hours of battery life.

We should complement both AMD and Apple and be happy that we finally have serious competitors to Intel. AMD has managed to compete with and outrun Intel from the an initial position of an also-ran underdog. I think the M1 line is more impressive technically than Ryzen, given the very low TDPs. But Apple has vastly more budget and much more opportunity for vertical integration.

Both companies have done impressive work the last few years.

> I think the M1 line is more impressive technically than Ryzen, given the very low TDPs.

I would say TSMC's 5nm process is more impressive technically than TSMC's 7nm process, which are used here respectively.

I think Apple will still win on a per Watt basis even when AMD starts using the current-generation process, but the question is: by how much?

This is the real question, my money is on 5-10%.

In Geekbench Multi-Core, the 5950X is only 33% faster (at 16.6k) than the M1 Max (which benches around 12.5k). So the difference is actually smaller than in SPEC that Anandtech uses.

For all the dissing of Geekbench, I found it to actually correlate pretty closely with supposedly more elaborate benchmarks like SPEC. (The writing was on the wall for Apple Silicon performance for many years, when the iPhone/iPad Ax CPUs where catching up and surpassing laptop CPUs in Geekbench, but lots of people dismissed it because it was just Geekbench...).

To get some context of the M1 Pro/Max perf, people should take a look at https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks, sort by Multi-Core, and slot the M1 Pro/Max in at around 12500.

> Both companies have done impressive work the last few years.

Apple bought timed-exclusive access to TSMC 5N and also now 5NP. On the same node the differences would be less.

I'm an AMD fan.

The comparison should not even be close TBH. We're talking about a laptop chip that can run on battery for an extended period of time that performs as well and sometimes better than the high end consumer AMD desktop chip. Kudos to Apple.

I'm not suprised. Apple has the lead in the fabrication process, 5nm vs 7nm. I eagerly await a true apples to apples comparison when AMD uses the same 5nm process.

I'm definitely not an Apple fan but what's available on the market at any given moment is an apple to apple comparison of what companies are able to do. I mean: any modern army (or pary of) would crush Roman legions, but they had to do it 2000 years ago.

The article ends wondering about the impact on PC OEMs. I presume they are extrapolating the performance improvement curves, talking with Microsoft about Windows on ARM and working at HW contingency plans in case they have to leave a sinking x86 ship. I don't think they are resting on promises of big improvements from AMD and Intel.

It has to be 3x faster to match M1's efficiency given the TDP is 30 vs 105.

I could care less about efficiency, it's still 2x faster for 2/3x less expensive. Isn't the m1 max tdp between 60 and 90w?

Well yes but ones a laptop chip with a 17 hour life and the other I’ve got under my desk heating my entire condo lol

If you could conceivably run a chip at a much higher TDP before hitting thermal limits you could get significantly more performance. Not that you can (probably) OC these chips at all but it suggests there may be more rabbits in the bag.

You're comparing a single CPU with a complete machine

Its 60-90w including GPU.

If you're plugged in all the time, lower TDP is nice but not critical. And if you live in a cold country, you have to heat up the house six months per year, TDP is just heating with a computing side effect.

> And if you live in a cold country, you have to heat up the house six months per year, TDP is just heating with a computing side effect.

Except it is still direct electrical heating which is atrociously inefficient.

>Except it is still direct electrical heating which is atrociously inefficient.

Electric heating converts practically all energy into heat, making it ~100% efficient. You can make statements about cost-effectiveness compared to burning things, but not all houses can.

CHP configurations are more common in colder climates with district heating, so their "waste" heat during generation often isn't wasted at all.

> Electric heating converts practically all energy into heat

No, not even close. There are huge losses in electricity production and transmission.

Which is why I covered them in my comment about CHP, which recoups a large portion of those "losses". Either way other power sources also require logistic challenges and/or big equipment installs to use, so it isn't exactly 1:1 comparison.

But a heat pump is more than 100% efficient.

I feel this is a bit disingenuous, because using the same logic burning wood is thousands of % effective, or even ∞% if the system only uses convection, making heat pumps seem like a poor choice even when they're perfectly valid.

Until the temperature drops below 4 C

Which is why you bore a hole deep enough that it isn't a problem.

I'm in Quebec (Eastern Canada). Most of the electricity is produced from hydraulic power (dams) up north, while cities are in the southern part of the province. Most houses are electrically heated (especially those built after 1970). Production from water turbines is very efficient. Transmission losses are about 30%, because of the distance (> 1500km). Heating itself is 100% efficient, no moving parts, no maintenance. In this context, heating with a baseboard or CPU makes no difference.

It's 100 efficient, and the amount of houses with a heat pump is <1%

Here in Sweden, roughly 50% of all small houses (ie one household) have a heat pump. Direct electricity heating is just somewhere around 15%.

In bigger houses direct electricity just isn't a thing, most have some sort of central heating, and lots have either some combustion or heat pump solution. The latter is gaining.

This winter I'm going to experiment with having a Raspberry Pi act as a thermostat that starts/stops containers running on a server in our basement. That, combined with the laptop we just got for gaming that has a 3070 in it, should do nicely to supplement our heating system.

Watts go in, Watts come out. So basically, find a space heater with the TDP of your server, and that’s the upper bound on what you can expect heating-wise.

I know that’s a bummer for people who want to heat their house with their computer, but Thermodynamics is always a bummer, I don’t make the Laws.

> So basically, find a space heater with the TDP of your server, and that’s the upper bound on what you can expect heating-wise.

I wonder how many CPUs I need to build a cryptocurrency miner water heater... That would be so much better than just wasting energy heating up dumb elements.

That's why I heat my house with a dell C4140! The _lowest_ power throttle it has is 1.4KW.

Modern heat pumps provide a lot more than 100% efficiency. I'd stick to the heating system unless those containers are doing something profitable (mining?)

Literally nothing provides 100% efficiency. You're conflating coefficient of performance with efficiency. They're not even close to the same thing, modern heat pumps reach their CoP because they don't actually generate heat, they simply move it around, which provides more heat indoors than if you had converted an equivalent amount of electricity directly into 100% heat.

Thermodynamics would not take kindly to you having a >99.999...% efficient anything.

> because they don't actually generate heat Heatpumps still do use electricity(or other power), and all that electricity also ends up as heat. It's why heatpumps have higher CoP than the same system as a refrigeration cycle.

> Thermodynamics would not take kindly to you having a >99.999...% efficient anything

Well the cogen gas powerplants here can produce 50kWh of electricity from burning 100kWh of natural gas. I can use 50kWh of electricity to put 200kWh of heat into my house with a heatpump.

Seems like a good deal to me, and I think carnot would be fine with that.

Nobody said "thermodynamic efficiency". You're butting in for no good reason.

Coefficient of performance is a type of efficiency.

> modern heat pumps reach their CoP because they don't actually generate heat, they simply move it around

That's not even true! What a mess of a pedantic correction.

As someone who lives in south-east Queensland, Australia, lower TDPs and thermal output is always welcome, at least for me. I adore my Ryzen 5600X/3060 Ti mini-ITX desktop, but mining on it makes my room annoyingly warm, and it's not even summer yet.

Was semi-useful in winter though, all 6 weeks of it...

>If you're plugged in all the time, lower TDP is nice but not critical.

"If you're plugged in all the time" then try the Mac Pro version when it comes out.

This is about performance in laptop models, where it IS critical.

A hot laptop can have significant impacts on fertility in men. And in the summer you have to dissipate that heat. A heat pump is more efficient for heating, to boot.

It's a temporary infertility, at least.

Ok, lets build an equivalent PC. These are prices in Germany (incl. VAT):

A 14' Macbook Pro (M1 Max with 32 GPU cores, 32 GB RAM, 512 GB storage) is 3440€.

A PC: 5950X (750€), 32GB RAM (150€), Mainboard (130€), WD SN850 500GB (90€). Now if you build from scratch you need a PSU, CPU cooler and a case (~200€ together).

That's 1320€ without a GPU. Depending on your workload the GPU performance seems to be between a desktop 3060 and 3080. So between 700€ and 1400€.

Tl;dr: A 3440€ Macbook competes with a 2000-2700€ desktop depending on your workload. The desktop has no peripherals and no USB4/TB4.

TBF GPU prices are nonsensical at this point in time. The MSRP of a 3060 Ti is $400, a 3080 should be $700.

I wonder how much a comparable desktop monitor would add to that.

On the other hand I really want to give the keyboard a shot before I pull the trigger, after 3 years of Thinkpad I think that will be the real pain point...

You'd need to add a HiDPI HDR screen too.

That’s amazing that it’s not even twice as good!

And then you have to buy the rest of the machine

With Apple they are just overcharging for solid state drives, which I’m cool with these days (because at least I’ll get them)

Intel's Alder Lake benchmarks show that their new mobile processor is faster than the M1 Max. So, this domination doesn't seem to be a long term thing.

Yes-- they show a few percent victory in absolute performance while using nearly 5x the power, for a chip that's several months away.

it's launching this week fwiw

It's crazy that I can't get a bicycle chain for the next six months, but these chipsets are shipping?

I would imagine if you were willing to buy a bicycle chain which had a several hundred dollar profit margin, then you would be able to find one rather quickly.

CPUs (and laptops) have high enough margins where it can take an airplane to wherever it needs to go.

Bicycle chains, not so much.

> I can't get a bicycle chain for the next six months

Why?

Supply chain chaos? I assume bike parts in the US come from overseas in shipping containers. One of my shifters broke in September and the local bike shop said they were out of parts and didn't expect to have any more until April 2022.

Other than the usual supply chain stuff, there was also a huge demand for bicycles and bike parts during peak COVID.

automotive sector scooping it all /s

Intel has its own fabs, right?

It is? Source please. I've heard, for availability, "before the end of the year" and "Q1 2022" for mobile Alder Lake, which is what we're talking about.

Keep your eyes peeled tomorrow, desktop skus should ship early November.

https://wccftech.com/intel-officially-launches-12th-gen-alde...

OK, so then that's not meaningful at all for the discussion which was about comparative strength of mobile SKUs.

at 95W max power, m1 max is not much of a "mobile" SKU either. Lines are blurry where these chips are positioned.

As for your power consumption figures, Apple has a supply agreement over 5nm so don't think you can compare architecture apples to apples yet.

And there are samples out in the wild being bought and sold right now, too.

But did Intel use liquid nitrogen cooling to achieve this?

I am joking but just a bit. Intel has long history of dirty tricks when it comes to benchmarks - using liquid nitrogen cooling and not mentioning it, manipulating the compiler to generate slower code on competing CPUs, terms of service forbidding publication of benchmarks, fuzzy use (or not mentioning it at all) of TWP/energy usage.

What they say can only be used as an upper bound of how it actually is. The odds are is that it's much worse and with some strings attached as well.

Not to mention disabling mitigations against Spectre, Meltdown, MDS, etc

The same Intel that faked the CPU performance in 2018 by overclocking it and using some insane cooling?

Intel is playing this PR game where they release / announce or leak info, so people might try and wait for what Intel has to offer. It's super obvious, weak, and disingenuous.

What is the memory bandwidth of that processor?

The geekbench benchmark is more CPU focused AFAIK, and the article we are discussing is talking about just how much the astonishing M1(.+) memory access bandwidth is improving their rendering time.

The only result I could find with the memory details for the 12900HK didn’t calculate out what the (overclocked) memory bandwidth was: https://gadgettendency.com/intel-core-i9-12900k-lights-up-wi...

Seems doubtful to me.

Apple doesn't have to score the absolute highest in performance. For better or worse, they need a credible high-end chip that they can marry with their proprietary OS and computer designs to win customers via a compelling package not some benchmark result.

After the M1*, intel is facing an uphill fight to keep other laptop manufacturers on x86. They may well pull together and come out stronger, but the last 10y haven't been stellar and Apple exposed that weakness.

So, will intel win back some of the performance benchmarks? Sure, no doubt. But will Dell win over Apple customers using the latest intel chips? Let's see...

Does Alder Lake require security mitigations?

Will do

Do you have a link to these benchmarks ?

Well be very interesting to see given Alder Lake is dumping AVX-512 which was one of their core performance strengths against AMD. Albeit at staggering cost in thermals and power.

Finally some objectivity to stop the M1 love fest

Yeah the 12900HK beats the Max by 3%, even though the M1 Max is way more power efficient and likely utterly smoked it on GPU. After all it’s 8% faster than a mobile 3060.

The 3060 alone is a 60W TGP.

The M1 Max running Cinebench consumes 9W while the 11980HK (previous gen) consumes 45W. Perf/W Is about 3X higher for the M1 Max on CPU alone and I suspect factoring in graphics we’ve got a breakaway here.

Intel will catch up but not today.

Just FYI because I've seent that a few times already: A 60W/70W 3060 is -very slow-. There are many laptops that supply much more power and conversely also get better results.

That's a very good point. Do you thing running a 3060 at a higher TGP gets you the same perf/W? I'm genuinely curious where they have them set along the curve.

I mean 60W is very low, probably 90-100W is the sweetspot? I have a Legion 5 Pro which supplies 130W and that's pretty much the highest you will get.

I am pretty sure perf/W for the M1 Max chips is excellent, better than the 3060. But saying it performs "on par" with a 3060 isn't really correct.

Except it ignores the fact that it requires 5 times the power to barley edge out the M1 Max. It certainly isn't going to end the M1 love fest.

So 200W for mobile processor? Are you sure? I'd say 65W tops

M1 lovefest won't end just like MacBook lovefest haven't ended all this years when Apple made stuff everyone criticizes now.

And it will probably devour a ridiculous amount of power and generate a thermos of heat to be marginally overall faster. It also won’t have a comparable GPU.

M1 Max still is the better experience and innovation.

If you don't require a laptop then an alder lake chip doesn't take anything close to a ridiculous amount of power, nor is it hard to cool.

Edit: I know this discussion is partly focused on laptops, but the overall comparison is including server chips so it's clearly not just about laptops. And 60 or 100 watts is child's play in even a tiny desktop.

When these chips hit the rackmount Mac Pro, the server competition will be very interesting. It's kind of a unique package for a server, which such a powerful GPU, but that has advantages for some compute types too of course.

The rackmount Mac Pro isn't really a server, it's just a Mac Pro in a rack mountable enclosure. It's 4U and kind of poorly laid out for a server. It helps if you need 10 or 20 or a 100 Mac Pros specifically and have to position them in an efficient manner but a proper server would be no more than 2U with a very compact layout and little wasted space inside so you can pack a rack as densely as possible.

Would be cool if they try to decouple the GPU and CPU for server units somehow.

I think they will with a new release of the “Afterburner” card, this time powered by Apple Silicon instead of FPGAs.

https://www.gettingtechnologyright.com/apples-mac-pro-wheels...

>The second bit of design is in the optional “Afterburner” video editing card. The discussion of it starts at around the 1hr. 26 min. point in the Keynote. It is described as a custom FPGA-based HW accelerator. It is claimed to be capable of processing 6 billion pixels per second. The silicon is not Apple’s but the design is.

Isn't the point of a FPGA that you can reconfigure it? It seems like a waste to expend it on another CPU.

I’ve certainly seen in low volume specialty equipment (think things like Video Routers, and surprisingly some high end audio equipment) FPGAs being used where an ASIC would be a better fit. I suspect however this comes down to a business decision, that the time and money spent getting a run of an ASIC with the same logic put together may be better spent elsewhere.

The FPGA can be deployed and designed for today, while an ASIC isn't going to ready until after a few tape outs, and it's often a race to market. While it's really cool and actually works, the reality is that reconfiguring the hardware to do something different isn't a necessary feature in just about anything. There's still a huge market for FPGAs, but its already got a lot of active competition.

From what we’ve seen, the M1 design is quite modular. I don’t see a reason why they could not use 4 or 6 high-performance CPU clusters and a low-core GPU for a server part of they wanted. No GPU at all might be impractical because a lot of things in the OS might have come to expect one.

Anyway, it’s academical because I don’t see them doing that. Expect maybe to power their own datacenters, but then we’d never hear about it.

Well, considering how well the M1 variants are performing in the performance/watt category and this is one major cost factor for data centers, I would assume Apple by all means is going to use their own chips in the future. And then there is no good reason not to sell a tons of them to anyone who is willing to pay Apple prices for server hardware. (Which aren't that bad, compared to other server hardware prices)

But this might a bit in the future as they barely can make enough of them for the MacBooks. I even would assume that the launch of the other computers in the lineup has been put to a later time to be able to keep up at least a bit with demand.

Wait max 2 years when the AWS contracts expire

Apple has many different types of data centers.

Some are actually hosted in a cloud provider like Google, Microsoft, or AWS.

But they also have a fair amount of their own physical data centers, and I would not be surprised to find that they start filling them out with Apple Silicon hardware.

And they might roll out a lot of services on AWS using Apple Silicon hardware, because AWS has recently made available actual Apple hardware in some of their regions. I think this could potentially be a precursor, but this is just my own personal hunch and I have no information outside my own brain towards this end.

and quite false. there are many laptop xeon CPUs. while costing more than the M1 Max, they beat the pants off it.

Can you name those laptop Xeon CPUs that beat the pants off the M1 Max?

[Spoiler because I don't think I'll get a response -- there are none. Even when you get into the "luggable" category of workstation that is ostensibly portable but really needs to be plugged in, there is no competition right now. The upcoming Alder Lake should significantly improve Intel's entrant in this category, and hopefully brings some real competition]

Xeon W-11855M (6 cores)

Xeon W-11955M (8 cores)

This 16 core $2000 part from the article only marginally beat the M1 Max, so seems somewhat unlikely that those smaller Xeons would do that well: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/193753/...

Those are slower than the 10 core m1 pro.

The upcoming Thinkpad X1 Extreme is going to give it some stiff competition. It's wielding the insurmountable RTX 3080, and it's priced very competitively.

But I'm just going to tell it to you now so we don't make the same mistake we have for the past 10 years of computer hardware discussions: specs don't matter. You could tell 90% of the people buying PCs with dGPUs about your 5nm GPU and next-gen power efficiency, but they won't care. They're buying them as gaming devices, general-purpose machines and game development laptops. I'd argue the market for Mac users and PC users has not radically shifted, just the hardware you're using. If we're here to talk smack about hardware superiority, this website would have been insufferable for the past decade, because there was quite literally a complete lack of professional dGPU Macs. Now that the tables have shifted slightly, I don't see why Mac users feel the need to crawl out of the woodwork and declare the game as changed, now that Prometheus gave them the gift of a laptop that doesn't throttle to hell.

People will still buy all sorts of computers. Lots of options will appeal to different people. Intel is finally being forced to actually complete. It's all good. My M1 Mac (not even M1 Pro/Max) is quite easily the best computer I've ever owned, but I have zero need to proselytize and simply do not care what you or anyone else use.

That doesn't change the fact that the above claim about "laptop Xeon chips" beating the pants off the M1 Max is delusional nonsense.

I have to comment on the RTX 3080 bit: I have used many PC laptops over my career, and currently have a Lenova with a fat, barnburner Nvidia dGPU. The GPU is literally never used, because the moment it engages my battery life falls to cartoonish levels (somewhere in the range of 40 minutes), the laptop becomes a space heater, and the fans turn into jet engines. This is the sort of "spec chasing" that the industry is addicted to, providing absurd, completely unreasonable solutions just so someone can boast. One of the things about Apple, quite contrary to your claim, is that they don't do that. When they provide something, it is meaningfully usable and useful 100% of the time.

It's using DDR4 versus DDR5 in the Mac and a fraction of the memory bandwidth so will be interesting to see its performance on heavier tasks. Also looks like it has at least half the battery life if not far less when put under heavy load.

I do love this review though:

"It is a nice laptop but extremely noisy. Even when idle the fans are on all the time."

Memory bandwidth is nothing for most workloads. Besides a scant few Geekbench figures, I have genuinely never encountered a workload that was bottlenecked by my ability to transfer assets to the GPU. Is 100gbps of PCIe bandwidth not enough for your needs?

That's not true if you're actually using the ram though.

I remember memory bandwidth being the bottleneck when running large(ish) datasets for game worlds. It was so much that we put a lot of pressure on google cloud because we worried they wouldn't be able to compete with bare metal (since it's not usually measured, reported and can be non-guaranteed when you have neighbours).

Which review are you quoting?

xeon branded workstation laptops aren't using Icelake-SP or similar server chips, they are using Tiger Lake-S or Ice Lake-S or Skylake-S client chips.

They are what would previously have been branded as "Xeon E3" series chips - on the desktop platform they used to share a socket and be drop-in upgrades with consumer desktop chips, because they're basically the same chips with "enterprise" features like ECC turned on.

An example would be Xeon E3-1285 v3 - which is basically the same thing as an i7 4770.

These products are nowhere, nowhere near the M1 Max. They are consumer laptop chips with ECC and vPro turned on.

Yes, your Xeon from 2013 example would be nowhere near the 2021 CPU from Apple. The outdated Xeon Apple had in their old laptops - a year behind everyone else, is also slower. The Xeon W-11955M however makes the M1 look like a kid's toy. In fact, if you remove 2 cores from that Xeon, you'll have my 6-core Xeon. Which also smokes that 10-core M1 in a bong.

I'm also not sure why you're sarcastic about ECC RAM. I have 128GB of RAM in my laptop. If it wasn't ECC, I'd have crashes in my VMs and errors in my calculations. When you go 32GB+ and actually use the RAM, anything that doesn't support ECC cannot be taken seriously for professional use. Like the M1 Max.

The point is that a laptop Xeon from 2021 is also going to be the same as an 1185G7 or something similar - because they’re the same silicon. It’s not like you’re getting more silicon because it’s a Xeon, it’s not a server chip, it’s just a laptop chip with the enterprise features enabled.

So, really no need to test them specifically. Go get an 1185G7 or something and you know what “Mobile Xeon” benches will look like. Anandtech already did those benches.

https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17024/117496.png

Just to humor you I looked it up - your Xeon W-11955M is the same chip as a consumer 11980HK, which is one of the processors in Anandtech’s benchmark. Same cores, same cache, same clocks, slightly lower TDP limit - the consumer one has a 65W boost configuration. It is the same TGL-H die with (very slight) variations in what feature fuses are blown.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_Lake#List_of_Tiger_Lake_...

So based on Anandtech’s benchmark you can pretty much extrapolate how that is going to go - slightly lower performance and slightly higher efficiency due to TDP limiting clocks a bit, but same cache, same core configuration, etc mean that it’ll be identical to if you went into bios on a 11980HK and set a lower power limit.

By the way the 11980HK is specifically the chip they called out the M1 Max as being a factor-of-6 more power efficient than. And in fact they said exactly what I just said - that limiting TDP will reduce performance on the 11955M and the perf/W gap will close a bit, but the performance gap will get even wider.

> In multi-threaded tests, the 11980HK is clearly allowed to go to much higher power levels than the M1 Max, reaching package power levels of 80W, for 105-110W active wall power, significantly more than what the MacBook Pro here is drawing. The performance levels of the M1 Max are significantly higher than the Intel chip here, due to the much better scalability of the cores. The perf/W differences here are 4-6x in favour of the M1 Max, all whilst posting significantly better performance, meaning the perf/W at ISO-perf would be even higher than this.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

What’s your dealie, why so toxic?

> The m1 max TDP is projected to be 90W. The Xeon is 45W.

That article says that the M1 Max CPU TDP will be ~30W. The 90W figure is for the whole chip, which includes the GPU. The Xeon is just the CPU.

> here's that Xeon beating that 11090HK.

The CPUmark figure is 24092 for the Xeon, versus 23549 for the i9. That's a difference of about 2%. I suspect it's mostly down to statistical error. (Maybe it's also true that the Xeons tend to be put in systems whose other hardware is faster; I can see that going either way.)

Looking at the data in your second link, the performances differ by less than 3%. Looks like paulmd’s assertion that both are the same cpu core is fairly well supported by the data.

Yes, it is the same cpu die with a few enterprise feature flags turned on, it’s no faster, it’s actually slower due to the lower TDP you note.

You don’t understand what you’re talking about and you’re openly hostile to the person who tried to explain it to you lol.

We've banned the other account, but you broke the site guidelines badly yourself in this thread, by feeding the flamewar and generally ignoring the rules. It's not ok to do that, regardless of how badly anyone else is behaving. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules in the future. Note this one:

"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."

a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls

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And a Porshe is the same as a Kia, just with a few racing features.

>You don’t understand what you’re talking about

So you look at the graph I linked that shows the Xeon model is faster than the consumer I9 chip. And your brain says "the Xeon is slower." Then tell me I don't know what I'm talking about.

Tell me, do you ever stand in a lake and tell people you're dry? Are you in the lake to hide the pee? Do you tell people about the wonders of horse dewormer?

See, the only way your argument works is to compare the M1 to the I9. And despite the Xeon being faster than the I9, as literally and plainly shown in the tests I linked, you keep saying it's slower. ... But then you keep saying they're the same. Reality: it's faster, literally look at the numbers. Your mental gymnastics are amazing. I am not hostile. I have been getting great laughs and relaxation out of you. Yes, that comes at your expense.

> person who tried to explain it to you

By saying wet is dry. I get your explanation. I just see what my eyes tell me. You see blue, your brain says "nah, it's orange."

We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. Please don't create accounts to do that with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> doesn't support ECC cannot be taken seriously for professional use. Like the M1 Max.

M1X is using DDR5 which does have on-die ECC.

Just being pedantic, DDR5's implementation of on-die ECC is still not equivalent to the implementation on CPUs. It doesn't account for errors that occur during processing, and there's still a pretty significant chance of corruption in L1-3 caches.

> The outdated Xeon Apple had in their old laptops

Apple has never sold a laptop with a Xeon in it.

Can you share a laptop with one of them for comparison?

One of my laptops is a Dell Precision 7760. Xeon W-11855M, NVIDIA RTX, 128GB ECC RAM. I don't need too much storage, but you can get it with 14TB if you want. Note mine is a 6-core. There is an 8-core available w/ the Xeon W-11955M, which is faster than mine.

It's only a little thicker than the macbook pro. It's keyboard doesn't break, and the product line has had a 4k screen since 5 years ago. It's 120Hz refresh rate. It has a very large power brick - 240W, it gets hot and loud with a huge fan exhaust. It's thick metal and about 7-9lb - you can run over it with a car. It only gets 9 hours battery w/ regular usage, and about 3 hours of "fan on time." Keep in mind, with the large and loud fan on, it can stay at 5GHz. This is called a pro laptop - a workstation. When I travel, I bring a 65W PSU, and it runs fine on that, just w/o turbo boost.

No, don't point to the lower "geekbench" score for this laptop - that's not a CPU test. GPU performance is a large part of that test, and they run the test on the default GPU. The M1 only has a single GPU. The Precision's default is the low power integrated graphics, not the discreet GPU. If you have a test where they assign the discreet GPU, please feel free to point it out.

As I've discussed before here, I have a shell script that runs in parallel with a bunch of VMs. My coworkers air (yes, I know it's not the max) runs it in 8-10 hours overnight. I run it over lunch. It loads, does calculations on, and creates graphs from several gig of ascii performance data.

What does compare in performance to the M1 air is my Latitude w/ the I7 in it. The M1 "max" is "max for apple" but competes with mid-tier laptops from everyone else. And that's ignoring the fact that it can't run pretty much any of the useful industry tools or games w/o recompiling x86 to arm on the fly.

Yes, I think my Dell cost the company $7-8k, without support. That's why it's called a pro laptop.

M1 max beats intels best CPU (which spoiler, is not their Xeon line) at both single threaded: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... And multithreaded: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

You go on a diatribe about how it doesn’t compete, but your only source is some proprietary workload that you claim is much faster on your laptop.

I feel like you have the setup necessary to produce an interesting, compelling argument here -- your benchmark seems, at least to some degree, less synthetic than some do, you have an uncommonly fast workstation which a lot of people doing comparison tests wouldn't be able to do...

... but the way you present it undermines your case a bit.

It seems like what you want to say is that if money is no object, weight is no object, heat is no object, battery life is no object, and portability is no object, but the comparison must absolutely be laptop to laptop, then there exists a laptop PC configuration that beats M1. If this is your point, then probably you want to compare an M1 Max to your PC, not your coworker's Macbook Air (which is a fanless laptop...)

I think this is a pretty unusual use case and there aren't too many people who are looking for this exact market segment. I definitely think it's fair to admit that Apple isn't intending to operate in this market segment, for better or worse.

You'd probably also want to drop the part about game support, since anyone who wants to play games can spend 1/4 what your workbench costs and get a shitkicking fast small form factor PC. But also, like, recompilation isn't what you should highlight -- what you should highlight is performance. If the recompilation is fast enough for users not to notice, then it doesn't matter, and if it's not, then the reason why it matters is performance, not recompilation.

Anyway, again, I don't think you're necessarily wrong or whatever here, but you're just presenting your point in a way that I think it's extremely unlikely anyone will care or be convinced.

(Also, "discrete")

“A little thicker” is a bit of an understatement. At its thickest point, it’s apparently 71% thicker than the thickest point of the 16-inch MacBook Pro (2021), and 55% thicker at its thinnest point compared to the thickest point of the Mac. That’s a huge difference for portable electronics.

It's also "sale" price of $6,700 with a 2TB HD and just a 6-core CPU. Going with the 8-core xeon bumps price to Bump it up to $6,900 and moving to 8TB of SSD goes up to $9,200 ($8,000 for the 4TB version).

The 2TB M1 macbook 16" is $4,300 and the 8TB, max-specced version is $6,100.

I know Apple has a bad rap for high prices, but that machine's prices make Apple prices look bargain basement. You could almost buy TWO M1 macs for the price of one 4TB Dell.

We all know luggables exist, they're in the laptop category in name only.

A more practical and better deal would be to get a standard laptop and a beefy workstation/grid you can ssh into.

Laptop Xeons generally won't be doing too well here; I'm fairly certain they're _all_ smaller than the Xeon in the Mac Pro mentioned in the article.

Not really, because the first Xeon CPU he compares against is ten years old. That kind of system isn't worth the cost of shipping it somewhere. A current generation desktop i3 is likely faster in almost any workload.

It's not even interesting that the M1 is "slightly" beaten by a Mac Pro's Xeon, because nobody is doing raytracing on CPUs.

A Pascal nvidia GPU will render scenes in Blender faster than a current mid-tier AMD CPU, and it's two generations old.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=blender-...

It takes an RTX 3080 card (not even the fastest consumer Ampere card) 11 seconds to render a scene that the fastest Pascal card (1080) took 94 seconds. That's nearly an order of magnitude faster.

I saw an article comparing the M1 Max to a high end AMD card, but that's also meh. AMDs's GPUs don't perform anywhere near as well as Ampere and they use far more power, so they're an easy target to compare against. AMD fakes their benchmarks by overclocking the cards depending on temperature, and the benchmarks they run to tout performance figures are just shy of where the card starts to throttle back for thermals. An AMD GPU that has been running for an hour will perform substantially worse compared to an Ampere card.

> It's not even interesting that the M1 is "slightly" beaten by a Mac Pro's Xeon, because _nobody is doing raytracing on CPUs._

This is backwards -

Nearly all major raytracing workloads today are done primarily on CPUs: vfx, animated film and tv, etc.

There are several reasons for this, including memory limits and the lack of coherence in both path tracing algorithms and common acceleration structures. GPU-based tracing is currently a small subset of rendering tasks (primarily those with real-time requirements).

As GPU memory increases, GPUs will become more attractive in this space - likely in the next few years.

Final renders may be done on CPU for maximum accuracy, but that's not what is being discussed. What's being discussed is desktop workstation rendering.

Mental Ray, heavily used in the industry for feature films: GPU accelerated since eleven years ago.

Pixar licensed a bunch of GPU rendering tech from NVIDIA in 2015, so that's six years ago.

Autodesk Arnold

After Effects

Chaos V-Ray

Weta Gazebo and Manuka

...all GPU accelerated for three years or so.

Mental ray is no longer heavily used in the industry for feature films: it hasn't been since ~2013 (when Arnold came around).

After Effects doesn't really belong on this list?

Gazebo is a preview renderer explicitly designed for GPU use, it's not designed for accurate lighting or material look.

Manuka is not GPU accelerated (it used to be when first written, but it wasn't worth it given complexity of build setup for very little benefit, it's pure CPU now and has been for > 7 years).

Until the GPU renderers can run custom shaders (rather than just the stock shaders the renderers ship with), i.e. OSL supports full GPU support, high end VFX facilities aren't really using GPU renderers that much for final lookdev and lighting.

Smaller facilities which are happy using the stock shaders are though.

> Until the GPU renderers can run custom shaders (rather than just the stock shaders the renderers ship with), i.e. OSL supports full GPU support, high end VFX facilities aren't really using GPU renderers that much for final lookdev and lighting.

Surprised no one has mentioned Redshift Renderer yet; GPU-based, supports out of core for both geo and textures, and OSL.

Nevertheless, I agree that "nobody renders on CPU" is just patently false - one need only look at the Corona Renderer numbers to instantly disprove that.

> Mental ray is no longer heavily used in the industry for feature films

You didn't say "feature films", you said "film and TV." You're goalpost-shifting / no-true-scotsman'ing.

> it hasn't been since ~2013 (when Arnold came around).

The Arnold I mentioned that is GPU accelerated? Or a different Arnold? Just checking.

> high end VFX facilities

Again with the goalpost shifting / no-true-scotsman-ing

> aren't really using GPU renderers that much for final lookdev and lighting.

They doing that rendering work on laptops?

What is the article talking about? Server farm hardware?

We're done here.

I think you're confusing me for the other poster - that was the first time I've responded to you...

I haven't moved any goalposts.

Arnold has only been GPU accelerated for a few years - not since 2013. Same with Renderman - XPU only came out this year, and still doesn't support everything on the GPU, including custom shaders (like Arnold GPU doesn't).

> Mental ray is no longer heavily used in the industry for feature films

Mental Ray really isn't used anywhere. It sort of died like more than a decade ago.

Honestly, I used it back in 2003 in the VFX industry, but not since.

You have to be mistaken here. No one uses Mental Ray that I have heard of in production in the last decade. Probably someone does, but not anyone serious.

Autodesk doesn't even sell licenses of Mental Ray and I believe you will find it hard to buy them from NVIDIA as well: https://www.autodesk.com/products/mental-ray-standalone/over...

Are you thinking iRay? Still made by NVIDIA and uses GPU acceleration.

The default renderer in Maya, 3DS Max is Arnold these days, others use V-Ray, RedShift, Octane, RenderMan, etc....

Mental Ray is used by literally nobody anymore. It was discontinued in 2017. You can't even get a license for Mental Ray anymore.

Pixar didn't license any particular special GPU rendering tech from NVIDIA in 2015; they're just using OptiX and CUDA like everyone else. Pixar released initial GPU support in RenderMan this year, but currently XPU only supports a subset of the full RenderMan functionality. Before that, the only GPU ray tracing they were using internally was on an extremely limited basis for early lookdev workflows. Final lookdev and all of lighting continues to be CPU-only. I likely know more about this particular usage than you do because... I worked on the early internal GPU ray tracing for lookdev stuff at Pixar.

Autodesk Arnold has initial GPU support, but it was only added in the past few years. Most studio usage limits Arnold GPU usage to lookdev; most desktop workflows for iterating continue to be CPU because again... not enough memory on GPUs. SPI Arnold has no GPU support at all. Yes, there are two Arnolds out there.

After Effects is not really used for high-end 3D rendering? Why is it on your list? Did you just do a Google search for "GPU renderer" and throw what you found into a list without actually understanding what each thing is?

V-Ray has had extensive GPU support for many years now, and it probably leading the pack among usage in film/vfx/etc houses. However, most film/vfx/etc places use V-Ray CPU for both iterating on the desktop and for final frames, due to GPUs not having enough memory. V-Ray GPU has seen wide adoption in the archviz world though.

Gazebo is an OpenGL viewer, used in DCC viewports. It's not even remotely close to a final frame renderer. Manuka does not have GPU support whatsoever; the Manuka development team literally published an entire ACM TOG paper on this topic which I guess you haven't checked.

I'm not entirely sure how you put your list together; everything on here is either out of date, misunderstood, or just flat out wrong, and all in ways that are immediately apparent to those of us who actually work in this industry.

> Pixar licensed a bunch of GPU rendering tech from NVIDIA in 2015, so that's six years ago.

Pixar still primarily renders on the CPU. Only within the last year have they added a hybrid GPU option to the Renderman renderer.

Only since July of this year as I recall.

Almost every Blockbuster film you watch has raytracing done on the CPU. A lot of studios have dabbled with GPU pathtracing, and indeed it works for smaller projects like commercials and TV. However big set pieces just don't jive well with GPU rendering, and most GPU path tracers are too young to feature all the bells and whistles productions want.

> because nobody is doing raytracing on CPUs.

Nobody is doing realtime raytracing on CPUs. The author is talking about production ray tracing rendering working with scenes that won't fit in most workstation GPUs.

CPU ray tracing is still widely used in the movie business. Might change eventually but most CGI scenes are ray traced on CPUs.