I'm surprised the MacBook holds its own against the Hetzner AX101's AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-core CPU! The multi-core SQLite performance surprises me, I would think the M1 Max's NVMe is faster than my server's SAMSUNG MZQL23T8HCLS-00A07.
That floor is really, really low when you try to optimize for it. But the issue is that the M1 Max is at 5nm TSMC while the 3080 is on 8nm Samsung, so this isn't actually that impressive.
These cards idle at 15w while m1 max is yielding like half the performance at that wattage.
Sorry, Apple is clearly lightyears ahead. All they need to do is put out a chip with 48 of their gpu cores and they will beat the most expensive top of the line best ever performance gpu on the market… with a laptop-grade SoC.
the truly amazing thing is that the M1 Max Macbook Pro will have twice the transistor count of a 3090 in its SOC (not counting memory stacks). That's a laptop CPU now.
It also has hexadecimal-channel RAM. 16 channels of DDR5. Instead of putting the SOC on GDDR6 and gimping the CPU side with higher latency, they just stacked in DDR5 channels until they had enough. Absolute meme tier design, Apple just does not give a single fuck about cost.
(note that DDR5 channels are half the width of DDR4 - you get two channels per stick. But, the burst length is longer to compensate (so you get the same amount per burst), and you get higher MT/s. But either way, it's conceptually like octochannel DDR4, "but better", it's a server-class memory configuration and then they stacked it all on the package so you could put it in a laptop.)
We don't know exactly of course, but I wouldn't be surprised, if Apple doesn't even save costs with their own chips vs. buying from Intel/AMD. In any case, they wouldn't be able to reach that compute power in a laptop of that size at all without the new chips.
Best buy has been doing physical drops on a monthly basis. I got one in the last drop @ MSRP, only waited in line for 30 minutes. It's worth checking out if you are looking for a card.
I will say though if you are in a large city this doesn't work as well, the lines are longer.
The M1 Max still wins by a large margin, but there's a slightly smaller gap. The CPU difference is negligible but the upgraded Radeon Pro 5600M graphics card narrows the gap a bit more. It's comparable to a Radeon RX 580. The default 5500M is pretty only about 60% as powerful and surprisingly runs hotter despite being slower. (TDP 85W vs 60W it seems)
Apple never claimed the M1 Max was faster than the 3080, they claimed the M1 Max was almost as fast while using 100W less power and while being dramaticly faster on battery.
I wonder what they were comparing. The Geekbench result is for an OpenCL benchmark, if they were using Metal Compute on the M1 that may explain the different results
The MacBook Pro M1 Max can be ordered with either 32 GB or 64 GB of unified memory. The geekbench report shows 64 GB of memory (maxed), not sure why only 42.7 GB is usable by OpenCL--so I guess we have to assume that's the max, unless there's some software fix to get it up to 64 GB.
> unless there's some software fix to get it up to 64 GB.
I very much doubt that this would even be possible. The OS and other on-chip devices require dedicated memory as well and need to reserve address space.
You simply cannot max out physical RAM with a single device in a UMA configuration.
* M1 Max OpenCL https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/3551790 [60,167 OpenCL Score]
Comparing to my current MacBook Pro (16-inch Late 2019) & my Hetzner AX101 server:
* MacBook Pro (16-inch Late 2019) vs M1 Max - CPU https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10496766?baseli... [single 163.6%, multi 188.8%]
* MacBook Pro (16-inch Late 2019) vs M1 Max - OpenCL https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/3551790?bas... [180.8%]
* Hetzner AX101 vs M1 Max - CPU https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10496766?baseli... [single 105.0%, multi 86.4%]
* NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 vs M1 Max - OpenCL https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/3551790?bas... [80.7%]
* NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 vs M1 Max - OpenCL https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/3551790?bas... [29.0%, boo]
I'm surprised the MacBook holds its own against the Hetzner AX101's AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-core CPU! The multi-core SQLite performance surprises me, I would think the M1 Max's NVMe is faster than my server's SAMSUNG MZQL23T8HCLS-00A07.