M1 Ultra CPU is 60% Faster Than 28-core Mac Pro, GPU is 80% Faster Than Highest-End Radeon Pro W6900X Graphics Card

[friedmud]

These things will definitely end up in racks in a few places.

Already are!

We just put eight M1 Mac Minis in our racks… and we’re looking at purchasing several of these to go with them. They are joining racks of “trash can” mac pros and some of the current gen rack mountable Mac Pros (which are insane… they are huge and heavy and their compute density is HORRIBLE).

The density of the Minis is pretty damn good!

These are all used for testing (continuous integration) of our scientific applications. In our test farm we have a few hundred cores of Apple gear to go along with ~3000 cores in Linux boxes. This all sits next to our 100,000 core supercomputer.

Yes. I enjoy my job ?.

 

[cmaier]

Already are!

We just put eight M1 Mac Minis in our racks… and we’re looking at purchasing several of these to go with them. They are joining racks of “trash can” mac pros and some of the current gen rack mountable Mac Pros (which are insane… they are huge and heavy and their compute density is HORRIBLE).

The density of the Minis is pretty damn good!

These are all used for testing (continuous integration) of our scientific applications. In our test farm we have a few hundred cores of Apple gear to go along with ~3000 cores in Linux boxes. This all sits next to our 100,000 core supercomputer.

Yes. I enjoy my job ?.

Exactly. Unlike that civil engineer dude, you have chosen wisely

 

[Ray_zayas]

Max vs ultra lightroom performance thoughts?

Adobe needs to optimize the app. It’s so clunky and slow.

 

[bsimpsen]

Well if you need PCI slots, it is still the only choice.

My MacBook Pro happily talks to PCI cards in a Thunderbolt expansion chassis. The Mac Studio can, too.

 

[Shirasaki]

Ok, competing with a 2 year old hardware. Seems legit.

Of course there will be cherry-picking. Typical Apple fashion. M1 is powerful but it isn’t “be all end all” either. M1 Ultra is just buffed up specialised chip with ability to do general computing at pretty fast speed. Anything outside of optimised workload is going to look underwhelming as usual.

 

[cmaier]

Ok, competing with a 2 year old hardware. Seems legit.

Of course there will be cherry-picking. Typical Apple fashion. M1 is powerful but it isn’t “be all end all” either. M1 Ultra is just buffed up specialised chip with ability to do general computing at pretty fast speed. Anything outside of optimised workload is going to look underwhelming as usual.

Huh? It’s faster single thread than threadripper, and essentially the same speed multi thread, at a third the power, using a third the number of cores?

 

[Shirasaki]

Huh? It’s faster single thread than threadripper, and essentially the same speed multi thread, at a third the power, using a third the number of cores?

Sure, but my experience of M1 tells me this M1 Ultra still will shine on optimised workload, such as video editing, machine learning and advanced programming, while being a decent but not groundbreaking generaliser. Benchmark becomes less and less of a consideration for me as time goes on, and those big numbers are only good for marketing and synthetic/scientific comparison for the most part.

Does my M1 MacBook Pro runs faster than 2014 MacBook Air? Absolutely. Way faster. Does M1 perform that amazing and that fast as YouTube video tends to showcase? Not really.

 

[avkills]

My MacBook Pro happily talks to PCI cards in a Thunderbolt expansion chassis. The Mac Studio can, too.

Yes but not at the speed they would in the MacPro. Thunderbolt 4 is fast but not as fast a dedicated PCI slots.

 

[anticipate]

The reviews are out now. M1 ultra does NOT scale linearly. It’s GPU us about 25% faster than a Max.

Or just about a desktop 3070 (if that). It’s certainly not worth an extra 2,000 bucks.

(The Max based unit remains a superb chip for a laptop, and a decent deal for a desktop IMHO if you are video editing, audio editing. But for 3D rendering etc? No way)

EDIT: however. For CPU it’s much faster in benchmarks - about 2x faster. Even than 32 core threadrippers. But practical scores are still only a bit faster.

 

[jflemay]

Looking at the benchmarks on Geekbench:

The Mac Studio M1 Ultra CPU (score 23322) is only 16% faster than the Mac Pro Intel Xeon 28-core (score 20019) in multi-core:

Mac Benchmarks - Geekbench

The Mac Studio M1 Ultra GPU (score 94583) is 43% slower than the Mac Pro with AMD Radeon Pro W6900X (score 166946) in Metal:

Metal Benchmarks - Geekbench

Looking at the benchmarks on Vray:

The Mac Studio M1 Ultra CPU (score 14861) is 38% slower than the Mac Pro Intel Xeon 28-core (score 24133). I think the first is running Rosetta and the second is on Boot Camp Windows, and now an ARM version of Vray for Mac is available with about 15% speed gain. But still:

V-Ray 5 Benchmark | Chaos

benchmark.chaos.com

Please correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't checked these scores as I own neither of these machines.