Based on a
series of benchmarks I did comparing the M1 Max 32-core to a Dell workstation laptop with an NVIDIA RTX A2000 in it, this is not the least bit surprising.
The performance-per-watt is
very impressive, and put up against dedicated laptop GPUs the raw performance is also
very impressive for nearly every reasonably optimized task (in some 3D gaming-type benchmarks the M1 Max's 32 cores were over three times as fast), but there was no way doubling the GPU cores was going to hold up in absolute terms against a multi-hundred-watt desktop GPU, much less the two double-GPU cards you can order a Mac Pro with today (heck, each of the Radon Pro W6800X Duos has 64GB of GDDR6, so just the GPUs alone have as much memory as a fully-loaded M1 Ultra has shared between GPUs and CPUs).
Which is quite reasonably why Apple is still selling the Mac Pro with its monstrous dedicated $12,000 GPUs. Some people have an actual real-world use for that, just like they have an actual real-world use for 1.5TB of RAM, and are quite willing to have their GPUs alone draw 800W to get there. If you need it, at least for the time being, you can most certainly buy it from Apple.
What's disappointing to me is that, at least in Geekbench, the Ultra does not appear to scale linearly from the Max; it has double the GPU cores but not even close to double the performance. Not sure what the cause is, since the CPU seems to scale pretty linearly.
That said, Apple has already managed to equal the best workstation-grade CPUs from Intel, so the fact that in the first generation their GPUs are already on the map and they have all the thermal overhead in the world available certainly makes for some interesting speculation about what might be yet to come at the extreme high end.
Just playing with back-of-envelope numbers,
if Apple was able to linearly scale GPU performance (which, again, this test indicates isn't the case with the Ultra), a hypothetical M1 Trio (or whatever) with 96 GPU cores would match the RTX 3090, with the GPU drawing under 200W versus the dedicated card's 350W. It still wouldn't compete directly with dual Radeon Pro W6900X or Radeon Pro W6800X Duos, but even more extreme GPUs theoretically could.