M1 Max Chip May Have More Raw GPU Performance Than a PlayStation 5

[Skolvikings]

And practically impossible to buy one at the moment!

I've had the opportunity to purchase five PS5s but only have one, because at $500 it's hard to justify multiple consoles (even though I'd really love to have one upstairs). The key is there are Twitter accounts who post as soon as the console becomes available for sale somewhere. Follow them, setup notification alerts on your phone, as soon as they post that the PS5 is available somewhere like Target.com, immediately go there and add to cart and purchase. It's still somewhat hit & miss but your odds of getting one should go up tremendously.

 

[windowsblowsass]

Great, lets all pray for a similar-specs in next Mac Mini. Sorry, but I can't buy machines with serious/ridiculous design flows. I proved so right with touchbar macbooks which never bought, I believe I'm right again.

Put a Touch Bar on the Mac mini cowards.

 

[Serban55]

14" Mbp vs 13" M1 Macbook pro ​

 

[Falhófnir]

14" Mbp vs 13" M1 Macbook proView attachment 1871168​

This gives me hope the new ones will look nicer IRL than the renders give them credit for...

 

[Serban55]

GDDR6 only uses around 20W and the consoles have a bandwidth of 448-560GB/s worth of memory bandwidth.

"- Apple does not have to rely on power-hungry RAM to feed their GPU (they use a high-tech multichannel low-power RAM that is much more expensive but uses somewhere around 10x less power than GDDR6 for comparable bandwidth)

- Apple GPUs are very streamlined devices, their SIMD processors are likely simpler than what Nvidia or AMD uses and hence more energy-efficient. They lack many tricks that other GPUs have, like the dual FP16 rate, their support of control flow divergence is very simple and efficient, their scheduling hardware is likely simpler too since they don't have to invoke very small shading kernels etc.

- Apple GPUs have their roots in the mobile phones, they have been developed to consume as little power as possible (while still being full-featured GPUs), so they probably use every trick in the book to lower their power consumption. Nvidia and AMD have neither Apple's expertise nor are their architectures focused on lowest possible power consumption. Their primary market is still desktop GPUs, and their design choices reflect that

- Apple has a process advantage that gives them that extra bit of power efficiency (but this is by far not enough to explain their lead)

Basically, this is what I have been repeating for the last two years — Apple currently has the most power-efficient GPU IP in the industry. We have had their entry-level hardware for a while now, we have benchmarks, it was actually very clear what G13 can do. I think it's quite funny that some people are surprised."

 

[Bull 07]

how only Apple knows how to do it.

 

[StuBeck]

I still think Apple is going to make a console for gaming. They make everything in house, make the money back on games.

They already did with the Apple TV and it went basically no where, and they are trying with a Gamepass equivalent with their own subscription service too. They tried making an Xbox Live equivalent that no one really cared about too. They're not going to push it because it is a high risk option. We've already seen that services that only work on Apple devices don't do great, but once they're expanded out to other devices they get some traction (Appletv+, apple music). They'd also have to use other payment platforms there which they've already stated is a security risk.

 

[qube_TA]

I think they've properly nailed these new machines, I'm not a gamer but that GPU power comes in handy for video and audio rendering. I have to admit that when they said they were moving back to RISC I was a bit skeptical about the upheaval it would cause and whether it would deliver any real benefit but with the speed I've seen vendors port their software to run natively and the insane speed they're running at it's going to be hard to imagine what a future version of MacOS or Logic will look like where I'll be thinking 'this old M1 Max is a bit long in the tooth now, I need to upgrade to an M4 (or what ever it's called)'.

 

[cardfan]

Dongle-Life, lol

Which helps you not at all if you are away from home and want to game (you may as well tell folks to give Microsoft money for xCloud).

But for all kinds of reasons this isn’t want you want if gaming is a consideration. May as well get the razor laptop apple keeps comparing to.

For what little gaming I do an m1 does trick. This obviously would do better. But couldn’t use this for work. It’d be a personal laptop and I know I don’t need this horse power. Use windows at work and have a work laptop.

Maybe this changes game. But apple isn’t going to push for it unless they can get a slice of it. IMO.

 

[Colpeas]

Such an illiterate logic 🤣.
Apple’s marketing and their fanbase never fails to impress me, especially on MacRumors…

10.4TF doesn’t mean that it can actually use 10.4TF if it’s power limited to +-60W and probably even bandwidth starved, (lack superior L1 and L2 caches, don’t use unified L3 chance, lacks a geometry engine, doesn’t support techniques such as VRS and storage APIs…)

The AMD Radeon V is actually 14.9 TF and the AMD VEGA 64 is 13.4 TF, and both are slower than the PS5 and Series X, significantly slower in fact!

Don’t fall for the fake marketing people. By no mean these MacBooks are slow or anything, but if you actually believe that it’s faster than a PS5 you have to seek help…

For consoles to consistently hit their maximum TFlops performance they actually uses these kind of heatsink.

View attachment 1871105

Well the chips in consoles have much higher TDP, thus the need for a massive heatsink to dissipate the extra heat. M1 hits the performace with much lower TDP.

but i still think that the 16-inch will run HOT.

 

[star-affinity]

based on their specs...the HDMI supports up to 4k@60hz so its HDMI 2.0

Yes. And that's what I think is a bit sad. PS5 has HDMI 2.1. Many TV's don't have DisplayPort and it would be nice to have the features of HDMI 2.1 on the new MacBook Pro's since Apple decided to bring back the HDMI port.

 

[JamieLannister]

You people fall for the dumbest marketing hype ever.
Gaming is for everyone. You can game on a pc with minimal specs and still enjoy the game. Apple is straight up not for everyone due to price. Please GTFOH with that nonsense if apple were to get into the gaming industry nonsense. They would price everyone out immediately.

Gaming consoles are designed to play video games. These new macs are designed for proRes content creation. They can also game with iOS games but we all know those games belong in the category of meh.

 

[star-affinity]

You have 3 TB4 slots.

That support DisplayPort 1.4 which most TV's don't have.

 

[ErikLee]

I will admit that you still don’t understand how GPU floating point operations work at what power consumption levels.

Instead of challenging, you could rather spend some time and understand how power limitation work work in GPUs.

I really don’t understand how floating point operations work, but i understand this chart by Apple. So, you are telling Apple don’t know how GPU performance vs. power works or they are lying?

 

[till]

Basically, this is what I have been repeating for the last two years — Apple currently has the most power-efficient GPU IP in the industry. We have had their entry-level hardware for a while now, we have benchmarks, it was actually very clear what G13 can do. I think it's quite funny that some people are surprised.

Right, the M1 has been out there, and its GPU performance is very good for what it is. The M1 Pro/Max is just a scaled up version of that with predictable performance.

There's no BS here, the M1 Max really is going to compete with the top-end discrete laptop GPUs at a fraction of the power.

 

[magbarn]

Chicken and the egg situation. Hardware had to exist first, before games would be made.

We’ve already had the hardware for awhile in M1 chip found in the MM/iMac and MBA/MBP 13 and no AAA has yet to step on the plate. We’ve got the power of a PS5 to play crappy F2P games.

 

[cgsnipinva]

You people fall for the dumbest marketing hype ever.
Gaming is for everyone. You can game on a pc with minimal specs and still enjoy the game. Apple is straight up not for everyone due to price. Please GTFOH with that nonsense if apple were to get into the gaming industry nonsense. They would price everyone out immediately.

Gaming consoles are designed to play video games. These new macs are designed for proRes content creation. They can also game with iOS games but we all know those games belong in the category of meh.

I read this article and I don't get the notion - they are saying they can compete with gaming consoles - for gaming. I think they are using the gaming processing power for GPUs as a baseline to prove the capabilities of these processors for the stated use case - laptops, desktops, etc.

Now having said that - looking at the future - if Apple had a streaming service for games - then these chips could power hardware to support that. Will they do it ? I don't know. Could they do it with the chips they have on deck? yes.

 

[NBAasDOGG]

- Apple does not have to rely on power-hungry RAM to feed their GPU (they use a high-tech multichannel low-power RAM that is much more expensive but uses somewhere around 10x less power than GDDR6 for comparable bandwidth)

- Apple GPUs are very streamlined devices, their SIMD processors are likely simpler than what Nvidia or AMD uses and hence more energy-efficient. They lack many tricks that other GPUs have, like the dual FP16 rate, their support of control flow divergence is very simple and efficient, their scheduling hardware is likely simpler too since they don't have to invoke very small shading kernels etc.

- Apple GPUs have their roots in the mobile phones, they have been developed to consume as little power as possible (while still being full-featured GPUs), so they probably use every trick in the book to lower their power consumption. Nvidia and AMD have neither Apple's expertise nor are their architectures focused on lowest possible power consumption. Their primary market is still desktop GPUs, and their design choices reflect that

- Apple has a process advantage that gives them that extra bit of power efficiency (but this is by far not enough to explain their lead)

Basically, this is what I have been repeating for the last two years — Apple currently has the most power-efficient GPU IP in the industry. We have had their entry-level hardware for a while now, we have benchmarks, it was actually very clear what G13 can do. I think it's quite funny that some people are surprised.

Basic physics… You switch more transistors in your GPU you pull more wattages and can hit higher TF numbers for both FP16/FP32. This is independent from memory power consumption (which is already very low for GDDR6) or SIMD arch.

- What do you mean with "Apple has a process advantage" and about which processes are you talking about exactly?

- Both AMD and NVIDIA have more experience than Apple when it comes to developing high performance GPU architectures and their power consumptions are tied to their maximum performance and node sizes. They are designed to deliver maximum FP32 performance in the industry, including superior ray-tracing performance (which Apple lacks) and GPU accelerate Tensor cores for ML applications (DLSS for example), INT4/8 operation and Mesh Shading. And all these features are actually accessible to developers, while Apple is not capable in any of these techniques, yet…

 

[rp2011]

A laptop can now decently run taxing software that we once needed a beefy desktop for.
And this is all thanks to Intel turning down Apple for the iPhone chips. Apple bet the farm on the iPhone and it has payed off handsomely

 

[magbarn]

I'm seeing a lot of posts about the lack of MacOS games to take advantage of the new GPUs. Sure, I agree. But you're overlooking the other major benefit of the GPU - acceleration for content-creation tasks. Those represent some of the most computation-intensive tasks for common workloads and the M1 Max will elevate portable performance to obscene levels for those roles.

I think we’re comparing them because of the presentation yesterday. Apple was comparing the new mbps to serious gaming laptops. But where’s the games?

 

[toobravetosave]

People have been deluding themselves that mac gaming would become a thing for decades.

The only brief moment in time where it was indeed a thing was because you could run windows and arm windows has abysmal compatibility

Give it up guys

 

[baryon]

Too bad there are roughly zero high end games to run on it and now you can't even run Windows on it.

Not saying I really cared about Mac gaming but I'm not the one making the comparison to a gaming console!

 

[NBAasDOGG]

I really don’t understand how floating point operations work, but i understand this chart by Apple. So, you are telling Apple don’t know how GPU performance vs. power works or they are lying?

View attachment 1871174

If you actually believe Apple charts you might as well believe marketing charts from all the other companies…

Good luck beleving a 60W laptop can actually do sustained 10.4TF.

 

[BornAgainMac]

and the ps5 doesnt have display...so it is really around 2x the price

PS5 is probably selling for the same price on eBay. Normal people can't even buy a PS5 in 2021 and most of 2022.

 

[jefhai]

Even if it could run on the MacBooks, it’s won’t run well, because that 10.4TF at 60W is probably equal to 4-5TF.

10.4TF is the case you can actually use all the transistors, but that would be around 200W range.

Not how that works. Apple Silicon chips are a lot more efficient. So they are getting 10.4TF at the power draw they advertise 60W. It’s not directly comparable numbers to Nvidia / Sony because Apples chips are a lot more efficient.