It's easy to outperform Apple Silicon on pure power, but what about efficiency & heat? (like FLOPS/watt or whatever). Does anything else come close yet?

That matters a lot in a laptop, but not so much in a 1U rack? Not that datacenters love heat, but the competition isn't extra hot, it's just hotter than Apple Silicon?

I guess it depends on what you're doing with them? If you're running them 24/7 to train or model something, the energy costs might add up. Even if you're not, having more efficient chips might mean more data centers don't need as complex cooling equipment.

A 1U rack is a small machine, but a few hundred of them+ in a constrained space is a different story. At larger scales, moving electricity in and heat out are usually the defining factors.

You're quite right - 6800H TDP is 45W, M1 is 30W

> IDK about ML part, but equivalent performing Ryzen mini pc cost me 3x less over m1 macbook

When running an ML workload, the Nvidea A100 has massive GPU compute resources, and a large amount of GPU local high bandwidth memory, so it's ideal, but is nowhere near low cost.

A consumer Ryzen chip is inexpensive, but lacks in both memory bandwidth and GPU resources.

The M2 Ultra has access to way more RAM than consumer GPUs, many times the memory bandwidth of a Ryzen (800GB/s vs Ryzen 7 1800X at 40 GB/s) with a large amount of local GPU resources.

Even stepping up to a Threadripper Pro would only get you a quarter of the memory bandwidth, and those aren't exactly cheap either.