Apple’s M1 Ultra tapes two M1 Max chips together

Post content hidden for low score. Show…
D

Deleted member 491671

Guest
It really seems like Apple's naming schemes have really declined. MacBook Air was super clever, Retina was great, and they played on the specific strengths that Apple wanted to highlight. Now they just strap on new superlatives like Super Retina and M1 Max or Ultra (how is something more than maximum?), it's so boring.
 
Upvote
132 (158 / -26)
It really seems like Apple's naming schemes have really declined. MacBook Air was super clever, Retina was great, and they played on the specific strengths that Apple wanted to highlight. Now they just strap on new superlatives like Super Retina and M1 Max or Ultra (how is something more than maximum?), it's so boring.
At least they don't use "Fury", "Rage" or "X". Yet.
 
Upvote
157 (163 / -6)
D

Deleted member 491671

Guest
It really seems like Apple's naming schemes have really declined. MacBook Air was super clever, Retina was great, and they played on the specific strengths that Apple wanted to highlight. Now they just strap on new superlatives like Super Retina and M1 Max or Ultra (how is something more than maximum?), it's so boring.
At least they don't use "Fury", "Rage" or "X". Yet.

Yeah the Fury X was a bit much.
 
Upvote
24 (27 / -3)

jamesb2147

Ars Tribunus Militum
1,640
It really seems like Apple's naming schemes have really declined. MacBook Air was super clever, Retina was great, and they played on the specific strengths that Apple wanted to highlight. Now they just strap on new superlatives like Super Retina and M1 Max or Ultra (how is something more than maximum?), it's so boring.
Not that Ultra should surpass Max, but at least it could make some sense in that the M1 Max is as big of a chiplet as they could produce.

Any word on whether this is going to further constrain MBP with M1 Max supplies? They've been hard to come by, IME.
 
Upvote
21 (23 / -2)

lessthanjoey

Ars Praefectus
3,022
Subscriptor++
They said that the graphics core is faster than "one of the most popular discrete GPUs".

Did they inadvertently admit it's not all that great? Cos the three most popular discrete GPUs are:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

(Steam Hardware survey. In fact, none of the top ten there are anything special)

They were claiming 80% faster than an RX6800XT...
 
Upvote
92 (96 / -4)
Post content hidden for low score. Show…
Post content hidden for low score. Show…

faustshausuk

Ars Scholae Palatinae
1,446
As someone old enough to remember 10 yrs ago when computers were kinda slow and macs even slower, Apple's newfound enthusiasm for performance is kinda dissonant. A case of "whatever we offer is the most important thing EVER!" ?

I'm on a gen4 Core i5 and happy with it, much more interested in upgrading SSD and vidcard (which I've done 2x each) than CPU speed, so not very into Apple's target ?

While their raw performance numbers are the thing that gets the most attention, it's that they are able to achieve them while using significantly less power and generating less heat than the competition. In a laptop, especially, that's the real selling point. I have an Intel-based MacBook Pro for work, and an M1 Pro-based MacBook Pro for personal use, and the latter is infinitely more pleasant to use. Cooler on my lap, never has any kind of freezing or lag, and can go longer on a single charge doing equivalent things.

If you're a desktop user, obviously none of that will super benefit you, but I was impressed by those quality of life things more than raw performance.
 
Upvote
174 (177 / -3)

jdale

Ars Legatus Legionis
18,435
Subscriptor
It really seems like Apple's naming schemes have really declined. MacBook Air was super clever, Retina was great, and they played on the specific strengths that Apple wanted to highlight. Now they just strap on new superlatives like Super Retina and M1 Max or Ultra (how is something more than maximum?), it's so boring.

M1 Ultra just makes me think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra

Possibly not the association they should be aiming for. But memorable.
 
Upvote
60 (64 / -4)

Got Nate?

Ars Scholae Palatinae
1,445
It really seems like Apple's naming schemes have really declined. MacBook Air was super clever, Retina was great, and they played on the specific strengths that Apple wanted to highlight. Now they just strap on new superlatives like Super Retina and M1 Max or Ultra (how is something more than maximum?), it's so boring.

This is no different from Quartz Extreme or QuickDraw GX. Apple always invents funky names that don't mean anything.
 
Upvote
7 (12 / -5)

lister4269

Smack-Fu Master, in training
90
It really seems like Apple's naming schemes have really declined. MacBook Air was super clever, Retina was great, and they played on the specific strengths that Apple wanted to highlight. Now they just strap on new superlatives like Super Retina and M1 Max or Ultra (how is something more than maximum?), it's so boring.
At least they don't use "Fury", "Rage" or "X". Yet.

XTree Pro Turbo Gold Plus, anyone?
 
Upvote
15 (16 / -1)
They said that the graphics core is faster than "one of the most popular discrete GPUs".

Did they inadvertently admit it's not all that great? Cos the three most popular discrete GPUs are:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

(Steam Hardware survey. In fact, none of the top ten there are anything special)

No, this was a completely meaningless marketing statement.

The memory bandwidth, at least, seems to be in the ballpark of the nicer NVIDIA 30XX cards.

Buying one of these things for gaming would be pretty dumb. But, that's not the only application. And anyway, the tight coupling has fundamental performance advantages, and probably these things are targeted at a market segment that doesn't want to mess around with installation issues.
 
Upvote
3 (33 / -30)

ArcSyn

Smack-Fu Master, in training
52
Maybe it's just the press that surrounds everything Apple, but it feels like they're the only one actually attempting to make new strides in processor technology?

Am I wrong? I'd love to be wrong, but I just don't see the results in the performance from Intel or Qualcomm when benchmarks show them lagging behind Apple's mobile and now M1 processors. I'm likely never going to buy an Apple, but I'd love if these processors put a fire under the R&D developments of those companies so we can get some good competition.
 
Upvote
18 (42 / -24)
Post content hidden for low score. Show…

ant1pathy

Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
7,000
If you're a desktop user, obviously none of that will super benefit you, but I was impressed by those quality of life things more than raw performance.

Noise, of course, but also heat. In a small office with the door closed, the amount of heat dumped into the room on a beefy desktop can be considerable. I have this when I'm on my gaming tower, it's not far off from having a blow dryer running in the room.
 
Upvote
63 (64 / -1)
The M1 Ultra looks to be ahead of an RTX 3090 at computational tasks, judging from Geekbench OpenCL scores for the M1 Max and the RTX 3090. Not to mention the 64/128GB unified memory. Impressive, especially for such a small, efficient and quiet workstation.

Judging based on the downvotes in this thread, there are some people who are not comfortable with the reality of Apple's recent performance gains.
 
Upvote
111 (139 / -28)

Kjella

Ars Tribunus Militum
2,081
It really seems like Apple's naming schemes have really declined. MacBook Air was super clever, Retina was great, and they played on the specific strengths that Apple wanted to highlight. Now they just strap on new superlatives like Super Retina and M1 Max or Ultra (how is something more than maximum?), it's so boring.
At least they don't use "Fury", "Rage" or "X". Yet.

Yet, but the rumors of the CPU bridge also had some leaks indicating that they'd use them in a 4x setup with some glue and they said at the end of the presentation the transition is almost complete but Mac Pro is for another day. So expect pretty much everything to go x2 again like 40 core CPU, 256GB RAM etc.
 
Upvote
22 (23 / -1)
Post content hidden for low score. Show…

Spiderman10

Ars Scholae Palatinae
981
Subscriptor++
They said that the graphics core is faster than "one of the most popular discrete GPUs".

Did they inadvertently admit it's not all that great? Cos the three most popular discrete GPUs are:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

(Steam Hardware survey. In fact, none of the top ten there are anything special)

No, this was a completely meaningless marketing statement.

The memory bandwidth, at least, seems to be in the ballpark of the nicer NVIDIA 30XX cards.

Buying one of these things for gaming would be pretty dumb. But, that's not the only application. And anyway, the tight coupling has fundamental performance advantages, and probably these things are targeted at a market segment that doesn't want to mess around with installation issues.

Indeed. These machines are targeted at people who make money from them in a professional capacity. Any time spent on configuring drivers/ini files/etc etc, is money out of their pockets. They're not hobbyist gamers with tons of time to kill.
 
Upvote
89 (92 / -3)

paradox00

Ars Scholae Palatinae
775
Subscriptor
They said that the graphics core is faster than "one of the most popular discrete GPUs".

Did they inadvertently admit it's not all that great? Cos the three most popular discrete GPUs are:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

(Steam Hardware survey. In fact, none of the top ten there are anything special)

The slides list the cards they are comparing to in the bottom right corner, so you can just look up that slide instead of speculating. I missed this one, but I’m confident they weren’t using those since another slide compared the Ultra to a RTX 3090. There are many things to be said about Apples lightly labeled performance slides, but they do list what they are benchmarking against now (in tiny, light grey font).
 
Upvote
71 (71 / 0)
They said that the graphics core is faster than "one of the most popular discrete GPUs".

Did they inadvertently admit it's not all that great? Cos the three most popular discrete GPUs are:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

(Steam Hardware survey. In fact, none of the top ten there are anything special)

No, this was a completely meaningless marketing statement.

The memory bandwidth, at least, seems to be in the ballpark of the nicer NVIDIA 30XX cards.

Buying one of these things for gaming would be pretty dumb. But, that's not the only application. And anyway, the tight coupling has fundamental performance advantages, and probably these things are targeted at a market segment that doesn't want to mess around with installation issues.

Indeed. These machines are targeted at people who make money from them in a professional capacity. Any time spent on configuring drivers/ini files/etc etc, is money out of their pockets. They're not hobbyist gamers with tons of time to kill.

Yeah -- I'd be really interested to see how they do in some engineering/science workloads. I bet they'd do pretty well in some sparse linear algebra stuff given the memory bandwidth, and with the CPU, GPU, and memory right there next to each other I bet some pretty novel algorithms are possible.
 
Upvote
17 (17 / 0)

NickN

Ars Tribunus Militum
2,776
Yeah -- I'd be really interested to see how they do in some engineering/science workloads. I bet they'd do pretty well in some sparse linear algebra stuff given the memory bandwidth, and with the CPU, GPU, and memory right there next to each other I bet some pretty novel algorithms are possible.
Twenty cores suggests its strength is churning through highly parallelizable work, so it will be much better in some domains than others. Of course that's life these days.
 
Upvote
18 (19 / -1)
They said that the graphics core is faster than "one of the most popular discrete GPUs".

Did they inadvertently admit it's not all that great? Cos the three most popular discrete GPUs are:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

(Steam Hardware survey. In fact, none of the top ten there are anything special)

No, this was a completely meaningless marketing statement.

The memory bandwidth, at least, seems to be in the ballpark of the nicer NVIDIA 30XX cards.

Buying one of these things for gaming would be pretty dumb. But, that's not the only application. And anyway, the tight coupling has fundamental performance advantages, and probably these things are targeted at a market segment that doesn't want to mess around with installation issues.

At this point, after all the scalpers that horde graphics cards are selling them for about as much as the base Mac Studio. 3090s are going for well over $2k, 3080s are going for around $1700-$1800K. 3060s are even as much as $1k, but if you hunt around you can get them down to $700ish. You can find cheaper ones, but even then you may as well get an Xbox or Playstation 5.

But anyway, when did the world switch to it only being games that determines a computers worth?
 
Upvote
57 (61 / -4)

quamquam quid loquor

Ars Praefectus
3,009
Subscriptor++
I can't wait to see optimized Windows 11 for ARM performance on these chips when Microsoft finally releases it. Even as a VM (considering Apple's VM-specific taps in their chips I mean) it should fly compared to an equivalent X86.

If they get Windows working on these things I will instantly buy.
 
Upvote
11 (24 / -13)
They said that the graphics core is faster than "one of the most popular discrete GPUs".

Did they inadvertently admit it's not all that great? Cos the three most popular discrete GPUs are:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

(Steam Hardware survey. In fact, none of the top ten there are anything special)

This is what they said about the M1 Ultra:
Apple":1ujrmm32 said:
the M1 Ultra delivers faster performance than the highest end GPU available while using 200W less power

And at the bottom of the slide they list that this was compared to a system with a "Core i9-12900K with DDR5 and a GeForce RTX 3090"

@ 33:12

https://youtu.be/CUwg_JoNHpo?t=1992
 
Upvote
85 (87 / -2)