MP All Models is it time to ditch amd and nvidia for apple

[TSE]

I was JUST about to build a PC with AMD's latest and an nvidia RTX 3080! But now Apple's amazing performance numbers are here and they SMOKE the competition!

So now I'm not sure!!!!


Is it time to hold off and wait? I will use my computer to game, do 3D renderings on keyshot, 3D CAD with Solidworks / Fusion 360 / Rhino3D and just general computer stuff.

 

[casperes1996]

Get your PC. It’s gonna take a while yet before Apple’s chips hit the higher end of the market, and I doubt a 13” laptop or Mac Mini with the GPU it has is suitable for what you want.
Also there’s very low chance Apple‘s computers will serve any gaming wants you have. It could eventually be great for the rest, as long as they keep up-to-date Mac versions, but it’s not yet a mature product, so if you do these things professionally a known target is crucial for the stability as well.

Apple’s chips are great and will without a shadow of a doubt in my mind have a massive impact on all of computing. But we’ve only just gotten the low end of the market, and “high end gaming” isn’t in the cards; Especially not now that Bootcamp is out the window

 

[krakman]

best wait a few days for the first "hands on" reports to come through and then make a decision.

 

[bsbeamer]

Early M1 "benchmarks" show it's on par with RX 560 GPU. If that's what you're looking for, go for it. Without accepting or working with eGPU in any capacity, the (early) M1 machines will likely not even suit the needs of many on MP4,1 or MP5,1 looking to move on.

 

[TSE]

Early M1 "benchmarks" show it's on par with RX 560 GPU. If that's what you're looking for, go for it. Without accepting or working with eGPU in any capacity, the (early) M1 machines will likely not even suit the needs of many on MP4,1 or MP5,1 looking to move on.

Yea but maybe I should hold off for the new iMac which may have a significantly more powerful gpu and cpu than anything else out there?

 

[bsbeamer]

If you can afford to wait, then wait. There is a lot of uncertainty on the Apple product roadmap ahead. Could be 6-18+ months before there is an Apple ARM product that is more of what you're looking for based on Apple's own general timing/schedule for rollouts.

 

[deconstruct60]

Yea but maybe I should hold off for the new iMac which may have a significantly more powerful gpu and cpu than anything else out there?

Err, that probably isn't worth waiting for. Here is a comparison between the RX 560 and the RTX 3080

https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-RX-560-vs-Nvidia-RTX-3080/3926vs4080

There is 800+ % performance gap there.

Even if Apple GPU is 4x better in the iMac versus the entry Mini M1 ... it will still be behind the 3080. If you absolutely require a 3080 performance, Apple has nothing. Likely won't have anything any time in 2021 either.

Pretty likely Apple isn't going to play in the RTX 3080 and RX 6800 XT (and A100 and MI100 ) space any more than Apple is going to show up in the Xeon SP or EYPC space.

Some of Apple's performance boost here is coming from taking trade-offs to be small and have more tighter coupling to the main application CPU cores. At some point though for large enough VRAM and orders of magnitude more GPU cores that isn't going to hold up if willing to throw power from the wall at it.

Apple's GPUs are far more targeted at whipping out 3rd party iGPUs , not the top end of the dGPU market. Apple probably has a better GPU coming but that is wipe out the dGPUs in the MBP 16" , iMac 21.5" , and possibility the entry 27" iMac dGPU option. But the very top end of the Mac line up ... there is little evidence they are going to try to go there. Apple is probably out to buy incrementally less dGPUs. Not try to "kill" every dGPU everywhere. ( Apple isn't going to make everything for everybody ).

 

[Slash-2CPU]

Yea but maybe I should hold off for the new iMac which may have a significantly more powerful gpu and cpu than anything else out there?

Very doubtful that any Apple GPU will outclass a RTX 3080. Maybe you could find one single, obscure benchmark where the high-end "M1X" High-End-DeskTop(HEDT) or whatever is will be named will outperform a RTX 3080, but as far as flat outperform, no.

You're not going far with 64-bit wide shared memory. Even if the GPU was that powerful, it would sit idle waiting on data from RAM with only 68-70GB/s theoretical memory bandwidth. RTX 3080 is 780 GB/s. If you want high-end gaming, Windows-Intel is your only option.

If Apple opts to keep onboard video in their HEDT M-series, they have a few options, ring it with RAM chips like a GPU or something exotic like HBM2E onboard. Other options include a discrete GPU over PCIe 4 or 5 or providing 4, 6, or 8-channel with RAM slots at 32-bits each to aggregate enough bandwidth for high-end GPU functions. Going ultra-wide DDR4 will have sky-high latency compared to GDDR6 while still having relatively low bandwidth due to lower clocks, so that's not much of a solution.

I'll be shocked if Apple has developed a discrete GPU on a card. If they're still making nice with AMD, maybe they've developed AMD drivers for Apple-ARM.

Next hurdle is power. A HEDT CPU plus a high-power GPU all on one substrate(two chips on one green slab) will be very power hungry. You can't ignore physics. Powering 20-50 billion transistors of CPU+GPU even at 5nm will be a 250+ watt chip.

After that, cooling the chip with the much heat produced in a small area won't be difficult. Doing in in a way that doesn't result in jet turbine sound effects while still having a reasonable bill of materials is a challenge.

Short version, the High-End Apple chip has the real potential to be a chip-level challenge with many of the same pitfalls as Apple had with the trashcan Mac Pro, but on a microscopic level.