So that's $3500 without a GPU, buy a $500 used GPU on eBay and you're beating Apple. And, nobody buys $1000 motherboards, so that takes $500 off. You don't need a $300 case. Etc. Basically the point of the exercise is that you can max everything out, and get a faster computer for less money, which is what the comment was trying to say.
Someone will reply and say that your time sourcing and assembling the components isn't free, or that it doesn't run OS X, etc. I get it, you don't have to say that. Just adding an actual computer that's expensive as possible that you could have right now to compare to.
https://www.titancomputers.com/Titan-A200-AMD-RYZEN-Professi...
According to Passmark, the 5950X is beating Intel's 12900X.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-12900K-vs-AMD-...
As a 5950X owner I thought this sounded off. Looking at the link it made a lot more sense, it only beats the 12900K in multi-core but in single core it is significantly behind. Really it's behind for the first 8 cores, until the Intel CPU starts using efficiency cores. Compared to the M1 Ultra the 5950X is behind in both metrics at nearly double the power consumption.
Not that the 5950X is a bad CPU, particularly if you need x86 support, it's just not really the topper it used to be against these 1 year newer chips. It'll be interesting if all 3 (AMD, Apple, and Intel) manage to get the next major iterations out by the end of the year and we get a fresh comparison on more even ground.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-9-5950x-5900x...
Throw in another 40W for the liquid cooler and it adds up.
I think it would be helpful for people to occasionally restate what they think the thesis is.
Single thread performance is going to be especially relevant if you are developing an older language. I'm always surprised how slow webpack is (and don't do enough frontend stuff to mandate that people switch to that Go equivalent), for example. If you have good single thread performance, you make a lot of Typescript developers happy. If you have good multi thread performance, you make a lot of C++ developers and gamers happy. So having both would be great ;)
That can definitely add up over the years as I've experienced with my 10980xe.
Also resale value is an important factor. You will struggle to sell that PC in the years ahead which will never be a problem with the Mac.
Normally I'd discount using a 28 core Intel CPU from 2019, but from what I can tell Intel hasn't improved much since then. Keep in mind that Intel has a specialized vector unit (AVX256 or AVX512 depending on the model), and the listed CPU is pretty high end (with 6 memory channels) where the normal i5/i7/i9 is only 2.
So sure it's not a video compression, gaming, or web browing benchmark, but some folks do run floating point heavy codes. Unlike CUDA, which requires a rewrite, this code wasn't specifically optimized for the M1.
I regularly downvote comments that make no points, are solely there to make a gag, and add no substance to the discussion.
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/14464705
Intel Core i9-12900K - 1991
Apple M1 Ultra - 1554
Searching on Geekbench for Apple M1 ultra single core scores returns values mostly in the 1770-1780 range. E.g. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/14597244
Most 12900K score are between 1900 and 2200 but then there is this outlier with single core score of 1252: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/14572307
Intel certainly wins on single core, but the m1 Ultra multicore scores are still impressive in comparison being generally 23-24000, while the 12900k are around 15-20000.
Disingenuous would be to focus on the outlier.
Apple on the otherhand doesn't overclock, focuses on multi-core performance, has great memory bandwidth, and all the submitted scores are within 1%.
The M1 ultra is also 1.32x faster in the multiprocessing benchmark. Looks pretty impressive to me, even ignoring the much less power the M1 ultra uses.
The computer in the OP is fully assembled and has a 128GB of memory, a nice GPU, and 8TB SSD. Why be so obtuse.
If you're just trying to compare to the entry level Mac Studio at least have the decency to throw in a full parts list, like you know, with a graphics card..
The M1 Ultra version starts at 4000$ dollars with a 1TB hard drive and 64GB memory, but I thought a 32GB option was available, so that's what I went with. By all means add another 32GB for 120$, that's why I sent a link that's fully configurable.
As for a parts list, I sent one because the request was to spec out. If you actually go look for a fully assembled machine you are likely to find one with a similar price.
If you want to add an RTX3070, 256GB of RAM, and an 8TB SSD, you can go ahead, it will still be over a thousand dollars cheaper than the corresponding Mac Studio. Again, that's why I sent the link, so you can play around with it.
Lastly, I don't see how this is any kind of loyalty to a corporation. It's simply pointing out the truth that the computer in question is just very expensive if you care about performance. As far as I'm concerned, it's trying to deny the obvious that the M1 Ultra is slower in workloads that can't use 16 cores efficiently at multiple times the price that looks like religious loyalty to a corporation to me. Especially when the corporation in question does what it can to lock you in, which just isn't the case for AMD or Intel.
If you really need 4 more cores and at the same time do not care about single core performance enough to go with a 12900k, but at the same time care about it enough not to go with a threadripper, to such a degree that you can justify spending 2000$ more, and don't care about GPU performance either, then sure the Mac Studio is for you. Otherwise, it only makes sense if you love macOS at thousands of dollars worth (or are locked into the ecosystem). There's nothing wrong about acknowledging it's an extremely niche product that is almost never justifiable on performance grounds.
> If you want to add an RTX3070, 256GB of RAM, and an 8TB SSD, you can go ahead, it will still be over a thousand dollars cheaper than the corresponding Mac Studio.
If you want something comparable to a Mac Studio you would need to add those things. I'm glad you managed to agree to that. A thousand dollar delta on a $4000 computer is nothing to sneeze at, however yours is a parts list and a Mac Studio is a complete product.
> Lastly, I don't see how this is any kind of loyalty to a corporation.
It read as if you were carrying water for Intel.
> It's simply pointing out the truth that the computer in question is just very expensive if you care about performance.
People care about all kinds of things. Obviously if you have no software to run that would benefit from the combination of hardware the Mac Studio offers you would be better off with something else. Horse for courses.
If you enjoy spending time assembling hardware that's great too.
> There's nothing wrong about acknowledging it's an extremely niche product that is almost never justifiable on performance grounds.
Sure.
There is no corresponding product at that price. The 4000$ Mac Studio 7TB less RAM, half of the memory, and a fraction of the GPU performance. The Mac you're describing costs 8000$ dollars, and were comparing it to a 2500-3000$ dollar computer.
It's not a 1000$ dollar delta on a 4000$ computer, it's a 2000+$ delta on a 4000$ computer and a 5000$ delta on an 8000$ computer.
> It read as if you were carrying water for Intel.
I honestly can't see how that came across. Someone asked for the spec out of a 12900K computer because comparing the price of a CPU to that if a full computer is unfair, so I gave it. I personally wouldn't buy a 12900K myself, it's ridiculously overkill and on everything except the highest of single core performance Intel is currently a worse proposition than AMD.
> People care about all kinds of things. Obviously if you have no software to run that would benefit from the combination of hardware the Mac Studio offers you would be better off with something else. Horse for courses.
Sure, but the point I'm trying to make is that there is a tiny, tiny, tiny amount of use-cases where there is a genuine performance advantage. The original assertion that the 12900K (or in half of the use cases, a Threadripper) is superior in performance is generally accurate for the 80% of people that run single threaded or lightly threaded workloads on the CPU, and for the 10% of people that only care about multi threaded workloads a Threadripper is better. For the 10% of people that run a particular mix of both, half of them have the GPU of the M1 Ultra as a deal-breaker. Obviously it's all dependent on the particular use case, it's just that those are much rarer than most think on the performance front. There are other valid reasons besides performance of course.
> If you enjoy spending time assembling hardware that's great too.
You don't have to - pre-assembled computers are generally cheaper than building them yourself these days. The reason I have given a parts list is because that's the fairest way to compare various configurations without listing off 20 different SKUs.
(the 12700K is much more reasonable but the 12900K and 12900KS are a "win the benchmarks" SKU and intel turned everything to 11 to get it over the top of the 5900X.)