I think there's a contingency in place as no one on MR has reported a catastrophic failure like that as of yet.
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M2 Ultra Chip Benchmark Results Reveal Impressive Performance Gains
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My ‘21 16” base MBP handles my simple YT needs “okay.” I am getting tired of the 45min export times, though.
Mac Pro with M2 Ultra is very sad.
Workstations are intended to squeeze the time as much as possible, and having a quiet workstation is just irrelevant. Of course you would save 50USD in electricity per year (if just any workstation user cares about that moreover when you spend +7000USD in the device...)
I'm working with M1 Ultra and in real world is not always double faster than M1 Max not even with the "optimized" Apple Apps.
I bet X86 would be king for a while in many jobs and for many people (more than ever)
Of course Mac laptops are insane, but the performance/battery is not enough to penetrate in the general public mind, and PCs are doing some tricks to get there somehow. as CPU is not the only battery eater, 18h vs 15h is not enough to switch OS, though performance is quite better in M2, who cares when you dont know nothing about chips, and Excell performance is even better in Windows no matter the chip.
A common Windows user is not going to switch to mac just to gain some extra battery time. The hassle to learn a new OS is a big lap to regular humans.
Apple needs a good ARM competitor in order to make Windows push harder the transition and then, force market to get better tech and better ARM advances.
And GPU limitations....
They are too confortable and with little alternatives in with the "kings of performance per watt" tittle. And X86 ecosystem is still the Hulk in computing
Workstations are intended to squeeze the time as much as possible, and having a quiet workstation is just irrelevant. Of course you would save 50USD in electricity per year (if just any workstation user cares about that moreover when you spend +7000USD in the device...)
I'm working with M1 Ultra and in real world is not always double faster than M1 Max not even with the "optimized" Apple Apps.
I bet X86 would be king for a while in many jobs and for many people (more than ever)
Of course Mac laptops are insane, but the performance/battery is not enough to penetrate in the general public mind, and PCs are doing some tricks to get there somehow. as CPU is not the only battery eater, 18h vs 15h is not enough to switch OS, though performance is quite better in M2, who cares when you dont know nothing about chips, and Excell performance is even better in Windows no matter the chip.
A common Windows user is not going to switch to mac just to gain some extra battery time. The hassle to learn a new OS is a big lap to regular humans.
Apple needs a good ARM competitor in order to make Windows push harder the transition and then, force market to get better tech and better ARM advances.
And GPU limitations....
They are too confortable and with little alternatives in with the "kings of performance per watt" tittle. And X86 ecosystem is still the Hulk in computing
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This feels like any doomsaying about the Mac since the late 80s.
It is possible enough people keep buy Macs... just because they like them
Are they?
The first three are Macs. The fourth is a Qualcomm Snapdragon. Battery life is good on those, but performance is awful. Even the original 12-inch MacBook beats it at single-core.
Only at spots 5, 7, and 10 do x86 CPUs appear. So that's a very weird list. A MediaTek laptop? Really?
This feels like any doomsaying about the Mac since the late 80s.
It is possible enough people keep buy Macs... just because they like them
Well, I do think it's fair to say that the current Mac Pro is going to cede ground for some workflows. High-end graphics? No option on the Mac. High amounts of RAM? No option on the Mac.
No doubt, Apple is ceding some of the "pro" market. Hopefully some future M* Quadra will claw a little of it back.
Time is money. It also assumes that the 20% performance increase scales linearly. You might not see a 20% reduction in time.
Who replaces their computer in 15-19.5 months?
Typical replacement cycle's 4-6 years if the use case hardly changes.
Yes.
Apple has a set of patents relating to scalability of the SoC generally. My guess is these have not yet been implemented.
There is also a second set of patents specifically related to GPU scalability and how work is distributed across multiple GPU cores. There are various pieces to this including
- affinity (try to schedule work on cores that were doing earlier related to work so hopefully get some cache reuse)
- work stealing (essentially the old way was to send work items to a queue on each core, and even if one core finishes earlier, work on a different core is stuck till that core finishes; the new way uses "virtual" queues, and if one core finishes early, work can be moved from a more busy core's queue to the non-busy core)
My guess is at least some of these GPU scalability ideas have been implemented. As you say, things are still not perfect (I suspect the ideas were implemented in a hurry, without time for full simulation and optimization, but better than nothing.)
4k HDR 30 source, exported at 1080 HDR 30. Generally 14-minutes to to 27mins in length.
Right, I wasn't even aware of many of those until I read your research on github. Thanks for that, BTW - very enlightening!
My take was a little different. If you look at GPU perf M1->M2 it seems to be barely different isoclock. I think the drastic falloff in performance scaling on the Ultra is due to implementation issues with the ultrafusion interconnect - all the speed in the world (which 20tbps is a good first approximation of!) won't help you if (to pull a random example out of my ass) you have to frequently resend packets on the NoC because you miscalculated propagation delays on your worst-case transit across the interconnect. If that's the case then the GPU improvement on the M2 Ultra is more likely due to fixing the easiest of the glitches in the interconnect.
On the bright side they've had a lot more time now to simulate and optimize
so hopefully the M3 Ultra (and larger?) will kill it. I'm sorta clinging to the hope that they really got shafted by the process delay and that the misfires of the M2 generation (most obviously in the pathetic Pro workstation) will all be remedied with the M3, and are not a true indication that Apple has decided to write off the high end of the market.Of course I've been wrong about the M3 already - I thought they'd at least announce it for the Pro by WWDC. :-(
That's been true up until recently for Intel chips, which were generally getting single-digit percentage bumps each generation. It hasn't been true for Apple's A-series chips, with many (though definitely not all, or even most) generations seeing 20%+ bumps. This is obscured largely because performance hasn't been an issue for most iphone users for many years. Of course with the M series, we only have two generations so far, and the M2 is known to be highly un-representative because it's not the "real" M2 design, due to last minute pullbacks because of the delayed N3 process. (Notably, they still got 15-20%, mostly due to clocks.)
Where you notice performance changes is entirely dependent on your workload. If you're using a word processor, chances are your 2012 MBP will work as well as your 2023 MBP for nearly everything you do. If you're importing, converting, and exporting media all day long, you're going to notice that single-generation delta immediately because you'll have an extra hour+ free every single day. Trust me, that's something you notice. Most real workloads fall somewhere in between, and I'd avoid generalizing about that.
My workload is photo/video/graphic creation. So I do push my hardware a bit.
My sense after plowing through all these comments is that the M2 level SOCs are not something to wet your pants over. Apple has an opportunity to realize big tech/market share advances in M3 and I hope so. Good news is that my M1 mini will be useful longer because the state of the M2s and legacy compatibility demands will mean the M1s won't age out so quickly.
I hope you are right with that one about the M1 not aging out so quickly. Apple needs to slow down on the kicking perfectly good machines to the curb.
Apple is pruning machines quickly right now because it wants to stop shipping intel OS and get its customers on ARM. The M1 will have a perfectly reasonable life span because it is part of "the future" still.
yep absolutely not thought out. seems like they are reverting to the idea of the trash can mac pro and not thinking of the actual pros. if they were serious about it they would tick every box off.
I would also bet the same for the clock speed, it is a mobile chip and was designed for the macbook pro and it's just doubled-up.
And it's taking 45 min to export? Wow that's bad. My xps and my dell notebook both export 4k at better than 1/1 ratio. for an average 30 min video it takes my notebook about 24 ish minutes and my workstation is less than 15.
Agreed, when it comes to the mac pro, give up with proprietary crap like ram and ssd, and give the pros upgradability. I watched a youtube video this morning about an ARM workstation, it has ram/ssd/video card and expansion slots. It's a BEAST. It was the fastest computer they have ran on any bench mark.
Apple needs to follow this lead for their PRO series systems. Both laptops and workstations. Upgradability. Keep the air/mini as is with their non upgradable money making design, but give pros what they need.