Don't waste your money on the Pro, you can get an M2 Ultra in a Mac Studio for $4000. The only reason to buy the Pro is if you have a bunch of really weird PCIe cards[0].

As for the desktop use case... sure, you aren't going to care about the $200 of saved power draw, but not having a very loud and hot machine at your desk has to count for something, right?

[0] GPUs won't work, their memory access is locked out in hardware and Apple removed the MPX connectors that powered the Intel GPU modules.

It is not the dollars per watt that matters to many users.

What matters more than people may realize is battery runtime. The Apple hardware just spanks x86 hardware, unless that hardware is fitted with a big battery, and or a secondary one.

I typically run Lenovo hardware, and on my faster machine, I got a very large battery and could get 6 solid hours. And that is at a nice 3Ghz speed too.

My current machine (i5) is far slower than the M1 and that hot running Lenovo. (i7) It has two batteries that can yield 5 to 7 hours.

Those machines are heavier, slower, bigger, and just feel crappy compared to the M1 Air I have been using.

And that thing is crazy good. Battery life is longer, sometimes by a considerable amount. It is great hardware, fast, easy to use, light, you name it.

Power isn’t just the stuff coming out of the wall, it’s also the heat you have to dissipate.

can someone recommend a concrete laptop then, please? I have been putting off the buying of a new one for years now. (I have an old XPS 13 and a P50 with an M1000M, so ... yeah, old dogs!)

I want to put Linux on it. So far I have been looking at the legion 5 pro, because a friend got one recently, and seems amazing, though haven't yet got my hands on it long enough to try it with an USB stick with a recent Ubuntu (with a recent kernel) to test the power management feature support.

Intel and AMD sell laptop chips with comparable performance per watt to M2 laptops. If you're buying an M2 Ultra desktop computer, your primary concern is performance period, not performance per watt.

The chips it is being compared to are a year older. If there wasn't an advantage somewhere, it'd be an absolute failure.

Sure they do, same as mobile chipsets end up Intel NUCs. You're ignoring a whole category of devices.

With crossover and Apple's latest release of gameportingtoolkit I'm able to maintain over 120FPS on ultra settings at native resolution on Diablo 4 with my M2 Max MBP. It was fair to be skeptical before that release this week, but there's plenty of evidence out there now that Apple silicon can handle gaming just fine. Other users are reporting 50-60 FPS with ultra settings on their 6k Studio displays.

Apple consistently advertised gaming performance without any substance to it.

They announced MetalFX for their upscaling tech last year and by all accounts it works well if developers take advantage of it.

> Apple's GPU performance is what makes me sceptical about their gaming related advertising.

The issue is that people compare games running under emulated x86 and emulated graphics APIs, when making claims about what the SOC is capable of.

There's nothing wrong with knowing how well the SOC performs when emulating games, but if you claim to be talking about what the SOC can do, then include the performance of native games as well.

It is true that nobody competes in the low power high efficiency workstation market or maybe such a market does not exist yet and Apple is creating it.

But also as users, some were expecting the M series are so good that they are going to take many markets by storm. And it seems it is not happening.

If you buy anything labeled as "workstation", you're paying twice the price already.

The article describes the M2 being blown out of the water by a 4080 and a 13900KS. That's about $2000 + RAM, motherboard, and power supply. Plus you can use the built in GPU in your CPU for acceleration things like transcodes.

You can get a pre-built gaming PC with a 4090 for about $4000, that'll crush the M2 in compute if you use any kind of GPU acceleration.

Of course the M2 has some other advantages (the unified memory and macOS) and some other disadvantages (you're stuck with the amount of RAM you pick at checkout, macOS, you have to sacrifice system RAM for GPU RAM) so it all depends on your use case.

I think the M2 still reigns supreme for mobile devices, though AMD is getting closer and closer with their mobile chips, but if you've got a machine hooked into the wall you'll have to pay some pretty excessive electricity rates for the M2 to become competitive.

> It still has the advantage of a much larger memory pool.

I wonder if given roughly equal power to the GPUs in current gen consoles (PS5/XBSX), it'd yield some advantage in porting console games since those consoles also have a large shared pool of memory (16GB), and neither AMD nor Nvidia want to give up using VRAM as an upsell.

> It still has the advantage of a much larger memory pool.

Why do you think NVIDIA doesn't "just add" "more memory"? To its $40,000 H100s, which top out at "just" 80GB?

The answer isn't price segmentation.

Pedantically, sysadmins always counted the power consumption (or, compute density) when upgrading servers, and would even do early upgrades as a cost saving measure.

Power costs (in datacenters at least) were high enough that buying the €10,000 server that sucked 200w more was worth less than the €15,000 machine that didnt suck that extra 200w.

So electricity prices can be more than a negligible amount on the total.

Where that line is depends on your personal situation.

I live in southern sweden and they hide the total price of power here, but aggregated my cost per watt is 5sek/kWh (roughly €0.45).

So a worst case for me at 200w with 24hrs of usage is about €800/y

Where I live the electricity prices are about to rise by 90%. It's not the first significant price increase in recent years.

You're doing it too. You're assuming how someone would define a workstation, you're assuming that definition includes it being power hungry.

A workstation can be a single core, 256MB RAM, 1 watt SBC. It can be a 96 core, 2TB RAM, 1 kw beast. It can be anything in between or even outside of that range.

I'm not saying everyone cares about power consumption, but several people here seem to be saying that no one does, and that's simply not true.

When I hear "workstation" what comes to mind is a daily driver for business purposes, so rock-solid reliability is utmost. Redundant components, ECC ram, rated to run 24/7 with ample cooling. Performance per watt is also up there.

Whereas raw performance specs are typically high but ultimately dependent on use case.

I tested the new game porting kit on a Mac mini M2 and was surprised I was able to run Cyberpunk 2077 and it was running really well, I can imagine that more powerful M processors will be awesome, so the argument of games might go away soon

I think the exciting thing with Apple silicone and "AI" is inference, not training. Due to their unified memory, you can potentially have enormous local model inference. That's potentially much more expensive on a PC with a GPU having its own memory.

Apple have an opportunity, if they 2-4x the memory on the entry level devices (not beyond the realms of possibility), to make local inference a thing available to all.

One differentiator is the amount of memory available. Apple's shared pool of memory means the GPU has potentially up to 96gb of ram at its disposal, where discrete GPU's are often limited to 8, 12, 16, etc. They mentioned in the keynote that the M2 can handle many tasks discrete GPUs cannot simply because they run out of ram.

FLOPS are one thing, but 192 GB of unified memory that can be used as VRAM is something else. That could be a big win on the inference side of things, where even an RTX 4090 GPU is limited to only 24 GB.

Then there's the power consumption difference to consider. This seems like one of those cases where benchmarks reveal only a fraction of the larger picture.

As if that matters on a desktop?

> What would be more interesting is to see how Nvidia's laptop cards fare here though - they're constrained to much lower wattage (80-120w) and would make for a much fairer fight against the ~200w M2 Ultra.

Doesn't look like Apple offers Ultra in a laptop - just the Basic, Pro, and Max.

It's interesting. I assumed at least their power consumption should have been much better/lower than an avg orthodox desktop setup of current days.

A decent 4090 GPU alone is over $3000 in Australia - that’s half the price of a Mac Studio with Ultra - just for the GPU.

Then you’d be looking for a 24 core CPU, 64GB RAM, 1TB PCIe 5 SSD, mainboard with 6x thunderbolt ports, a silent cooling setup, high quality case that is both small and all the gear while running cool. and if you’re stuck with MS Windows - an Operating System.

Many people do care - many Americans have subsidized low power but that’s not globally true and even if your power is free a hot CPU means you’re listening to fan noise and heating up the room. In a cold winter that’s not bad but I knew people who had to do things like leave their office doors open for cooling.

Kind of. I did a quick comparison this morning between a MacPro and a similar high-end Dell workstation and the prices are similar.

https://twitter.com/0xDEADBEEFCAFE/status/166747612998729728...

I wonder how long you have to run the Apple chip to save enough on electricity to make the price difference worthwhile? Does it only drop to one human lifetime in places where energy cost is insanely high?

It's not just that it doesn't come with a discrete GPU. Apple Silicon doesn't support discrete GPUs to begin with.

As far as I understand it—and this is just from watching Apple's presentations on the architecture—the lack of a discrete GPU is a big part of how the Apple Silicon machines achieve good performance per watt.

Instead of having discrete RAM or a discrete GPU with its own VRAM, all of the RAM is accessible to the CPU and and the GPU in a unified memory architecture. On the M2 Ultra, this allows for 800 GB/s of memory bandwidth, and also eliminates a lot of the need to copy data from RAM to VRAM, as both the GPU and the CPU can access the same memory. In return, this allows the GPU to match the performance of discrete GPUs that have a lot more cores.

Of course, the big downside is that you can't expand the RAM or install a beefier GPU. It's all baked in to the logic board.

Or memory slots, or dual/quad socket capability, or compatibility with the GPU card for previous gen Mac Pro. You get one multicore ARM SoC with 192GB of on-package L4 cache and integrated graphics, and that’s it.

While 192GB of RAM is more than I would need, for people looking to use 1.5TB of RAM and a pair of NVIDIA GPU they had from previous model, they’d have to go elsewhere.

Which leaves me wondering; how much engineering at Apple are happening on Mac?

It also costs a lot more. For the money you can get a laptop with a 4080m and reduce its power limit and probably get the same or better efficiency, but with room to the top if you need it.

My audi S5 is slower than a GT3 Touring car.

It's just excuses.

First, a Mac Studio with M1 Ultra is $3999.

Second, people don't buy Macs only for performance. They also buy Macs for macOS, for integration between devices, for a system that is cool and quiet, for hardware acceleration of ProRes, for on-device privacy-preserving machine learning. Being a bit slower than competing AMD and Intel systems is acceptable, because you get so many other desirable properties in return.

I'd definitely consider a Mac Studio with an M2 Max or M2 Ultra, if I didn't want something portable. I would never buy a machine with a competing machine with an Intel or AMD machine, because I don't want to deal with Windows or desktop Linux.

Other people have another set of priorities and that is fine.

I don't know. Nowadays a top-of-the-spec Linux workstation without any cost on top (i.e. bare-components) is around ~10k. 5995WX in the graph wccf provided alone costs ~5k.

The Mac Studio doesn't throttle so there is no extra headroom for the Mac Pro.

I think he was getting the 7950X confused with the 7950X3D, the latter of which was released in late February.

> honking

May I assume that you haven't used a desktop from some year equivalent to whatever Mac you use? Because modern desktops are far from "honking."

I have a 7950x (the high core count desktop offering). AMD require (sans one brand) water-cooling for it. That means you get big quiet fans, which are far less "honking" than the tiny loud ones that are in laptops by necessity. In fact, due to the nice large radiators that liquid coolers have the fans don't spin at all the majority of the time.

When I do need power, it's on-tap.

My 6900xt is big honking during gaming, but you can get real quiet $300 GPUs. Or just use the integrated graphics and enjoy the quiet liquid cooling.

> big

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-ITX

> Desktop pcs requiring a ludicrous amount of power and cooling is absolutely problematic.

High-end PSUs now overlap with smaller space heaters on power output. My living room is usually 3-4 degrees hotter around my desk than it is by the dining table.I'm looking to upgrade my gaming PC, and getting the power budget under control is surprisingly challenging.

AMD and Intel are jacking up the default power settings to absurd levels because it gives marketing bigger numbers to to throw around.

You can drastically reduce the power you supply to desktop chips with BIOS settings. You'll generate far less heat, can use a smaller power supply and form factor, while still getting great performance.

If Intel/AMD get to a level where their chips rival M1/M2 while power throttled, things get interesting.

Is it? Why?

My machine is entirely silent on normal operations (Zen 3 5600X and RX 6700). All the fans, on both GPU and CPU are stopped in desktop usage. And it doesn't obviously eat that much power (my monitor probably eats more).

The only moment I could hear them is if I play games. And then I have headset on, so I can't hear them.

I really couldn't care less if it ate twice the amount of power when playing games.

>ludicrous amount of power and cooling

>big honking machines

Buy an all-in-one water cooler for the CPU https://pcpartpicker.com/product/2PFKHx/arctic-liquid-freeze...

It's easy to install and you have a quiet, well-cooled CPU.

[dead]

>while the fringe who need raw power at all costs can overclock to the moon if they really want to.

This is actually the case! The 7950X and 13900K come in non-X and non-K variants, which have vastly reduced power footprints and overall consumption, and you can even take your X or K variant and... Enforce that exact same power envelope in BIOS, for minimal loss in performance. But the purchasers of desktop X and K SKUs are the overclocking fringe (by and large). I will admit though, a lot of laptops are sold with with i|r7|9 +HX variants that shouldn't be purchased because big number means easier upsell.

> IMO driving down power consumption should still be a goal even for desktop machines. It means that the overwhelming majority of users get cooler, quieter, less bulky machines, while the fringe who need raw power at all costs can overclock to the moon if they really want to.

It is the goal (after all more efficiency also means fitting more powerful cores into the thermal envelope) but given the choice most desktop users would be fine with "just a bit bigger box" rather than sacrifice performance for the price.

> My Mac uses almost an order of magnitude less power than the PC and I keep the PC powered off.

Either you are not measuring power consumption correctly, or there is something very wrong with your PC.

Very likely any difference was already paid for with the Apple premium.

> Apple has a huge advantage price / performance wise

My 7950x machine cost, excluding the enthusiast GPU, $3000. That's less than half the cost of the M2 Ultra.

I bought an m series device to replace my windows desktop mostly for efficiency reasons. It saves me hundreds a year in electricity costs at the moment (quite literally, I calculated it beforehand and checked real usage afterwards). It also means my office is now silent and cool. It’s a big QoL improvement for me.

Even if your power is free, heat means a toasty office and fan noise, not to mention being careful about air flow around your furniture. Not a deal breaker but 100% of the Apple Silicon users I know have mentioned not previously having appreciated just how much noise their old systems made.

I do. I don’t like noise, or having my office heated in the summer, or the cost of hundreds of watts.

Yes. Especially in warm countries when it’ll add to your air con bill too

It’s comes on a $4000 workstation, the Studio, but point stands.

The way I framed my argument, it's a matter of trade-offs. Regarding the iPad, it's definitely possible that they might have used an A15/A16 from their iPhone line rather than the M1 and still have good performance, but the M1 was probably better for marketing and for consumer appeal hence its inclusion.

I'm pretty sure I remember discussion from Srouji and others on this specific topic at the "apple silicon" WWDC introduction. But I can't find anything useful from Apple in a web search, so it seems my statement is just a "some guy on the Internet" assertion.

It seems pretty clear and unsurprising that Apple optimises their design for their use case (e.g. major consideration of bandwidth to screen in handheld devices, reminiscent of one of the Alto's design criteria) but how that plays out doesn't support my claim either. But Apple's intended use cases aren't the same as the threadripper's.

> but there are no single threaded use cases on Apple platforms that Apple cares about

I don’t see how that could be true. A huge amount of software tasks are basically single threaded.

Remember since Apple does everything soup-to-nuts they have a ton of performance data from their computers to know what real user workloads look like so they can optimize the hardware + the software for them.

UI latency, the entire point of a device, is a single threaded use case.

Multithreaded performance is only good when you don't care about power use, but that's never true on a battery powered phone. It's actually more often the case that you optimize software by removing accidental excess concurrency than by adding it. Junior engineers love them some unstructured concurrency.

The bandwidth is fastest with one single-rank DIMM per channel, and there are four slots and two channels, so you ideally want two single-rank (chips on one side) DIMMs total. It'll get slower with 2DPC (DIMMs Per Channel), and slower still with dual-rank 2DPC. Some people are even seeing instability, with that setup at the slow DDR4 speeds.

There aren't any 32GB single-stick DDR5 DIMMs yet, let alone 32GB single-rank single-stick, so if you want 64GB then you're using four sticks of dual-rank 16GB, the worst scenario.

The Mac Pro does have a rack-mounted configuration for the non-desktop data centers case. (I have no idea whether people will actually use it that way, but it exists.)

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/rack

> professional use

I hate this terminology. How would anyone define "professional use"

I'm a professional that gets paid to do things and a MacBook Pro with M1 Max works perfectly for me. This whole 'professional' thing is absurd and full of holes.

Have you tuned your workstation for power efficiency?

Dropping cpu and GPU frequencies even a few % might have a significant impact.

OpenCL has been deprecated on macOS since the M1 was released so the M1 drivers won't optimise for OpenCL.

I know that there are chips with TDPs in this range. My point was that they aren't readily available to consumers as a component. Obviously, I wasn't talking about purchasing pre-built devices. Anyone can buy a mobile device, laptop, or Alibaba router / pc with 10-20 watt TDP chips. The context was for stand alone chip purchases.

Would you point out where it is trivial to purchase a new AMD chip under 30 watts TDP? I'd sincerely be interested and the question isn't asked rhetorically.

I consider price and TDP as the two important variables, for performance, that aren't completely reconcilable. They should be considered separately, and then together for a buying decision for example.

To illustrate and acknowledging that this calculation is more practical than satisfying to mathematicians:

I wouldn't say that a chip that takes half of the power and costs half as much, while performing three times better, than a decade old chip is twelve times better all around. Even though the gains exceed both those indicated by price and watts, taken on their own. It performs roughly six times better per dollar spent and watt consumed, respectively. These performance differences are not reconcilable into a single number that most would quickly understand, but they should be considered together. And this in fact was the specific situation for the processor that I replaced. Not accounting for processing improvements that aren't included in thread processing speed. Try playing 4k video with a decade old processor while monitoring its utilization.

Not to be argumentative as everyone is certainly entitled to their own weighting. I value TDP more than I do dollars spent. Though, both will always be unavoidably important.

Look at the i3. Though it isn't much different than last gen, and that buying decision should be mostly determined by price (for the same price, go later). Unless there are significant enough non-speed related architecture differences that I am not aware of and that are important to you (possible). Try to catch a sale. Going upline will double the TDP for little gain, especially if dollars spent is important as well. People that have a specific interest in more L2 and L3 cache may see the logic in going upline. The TDP and price equivalent Ryzen will equate to about 10% better gaming performance, and better multi-thread performance, but lesser single thread performance.

> The i9-13900T and i7-13700T come in at a max turbo power of just 106W

Now add in the GPU. Because the Apple number combined both.

> even when Intel TDP was 20x worse than today.

When has Intel's real, advertised, or specified CPU power consumption or TDP ever been 20x that of the i9-13900KS?

> "Never been a problem, even when Intel TDP was 20x worse than today."

Economically and environmentally it's absolutely a problem.

TDP reduction = heat management = reliability management but mostly noise management.

I've never tried to water cool a 125 watt processor and so I can't speak to that. But especially if one uses air cooling or ideally passive cooling, one's ability to reduce noise is proportional to the chip's TDP. Noise reduction is important to many.

Lower power consumption means less heat, which means you might see more reliable performance (less likelihood of throttling in the middle of intensive workloads)

This doesn’t matter for everyone’s use case, but it is a factor some people might consider.

Where and when electric energy is $0.51/kWh, one might care quite a bit.

I considered it an important factor even 15 years ago, long before the reality of the environmental and energy crises really dawned on us. Surely I can't be alone.

Depends on the use case. I personally undervolt my AMD 7950X in my gaming PC to use less power and thus generate less heat and fan noise. It makes a big difference.

The Intel Mac Pro supported third party GPUs and there were Thunderbolt based officially supported GPUs for later Intel Macs. Apple made a big deal about them. This was after their transition to Metal

Doesn’t Metal support multiple GPU architectures just like OpenGL?

Many need things that aren't media encoders. The 24 4K streams are impressive, but it's less impressive when you realize it comes from having overly redundant video encoders from gluing two M2 Maxes together. For raster graphics performance, BVH traversal, ray tracing and machine learning purposes, it's entirely understandable why someone might prefer an older Intel Mac for performance purposes.

You could add GPUs to it at least. For many high end workloads, you need GPU horsepower.

How is not wanting to do x86 on the high end? The article says just as much.

Are their yields actually that good, then? Are some of these chips massively underclocked? Do they add extra cores and cache for redundancy? Or maybe they have no idea, and TSMC delivers only chips that pass QA. For as big as Apple is, TSMC is in the stronger negotiating position.

> I was expecting the MacPro (M-series) to be exactly that.

MKBHD put forward an interesting hypothesis in his last podcast: this generation Mac Pro has simply to get the refresh out the door. They took their existing designs (SoC/chips, cases) and simply mashed them together. Similarly to how they simply mashed the M-chips into existing laptop case designs first, and then optimized with Gen2.

Now that they have something, they can iterate on a more harmonious solution that allows for the advantages of each.

Yeah, I did too. The use case for the Mac Pro is even more limited than what you would expect (it's not like there are a lot of supported PCI boards). It's hard to think of many users who would choose it over a Studio. I doubt Apple will make any money on the Pro.

They could use this version as a stepping stone to a future faster device. But I suspect this form factor is a dead end for the Apple customer base. Maybe it exists for bragging (i.e. marketing) rights, the same reason Honda funds a Formula 1 team.

The took the giant overkill design meant to hold a hot Intel chip and possibly multiple big GPUs, and put a M2 Ultra in it.

It’s overcooled. There is no way it’s thermally limited. It’s got to have headroom for days.

I’m very curious where this idea I keep seeing in the comments that Apple refuses to run chips at full speed for cooling reasons comes from.

I wasnt a G5 owner, waited for the Intel switch, but I gather the G5 water cooling had a very high failure rate and this was at least a large part of why Jobs dropped IBM/MOT/PPC int he end. They promised him a high clock, air cooled G5 but couldn't deliver.