JustSomeGuy1

mcdave said:

Desperate! M1 series must be a real threat.

lkrupp said:

So Microsoft and Google are researching and reporting macOS and iOS flaws. Fine and good. Does Apple itself have a security research team looking for flaws in macOS, Windows, Android, iOS?

Marvin said:

hexclock said:

JustSomeGuy1 said:

docno42 said:

GG1 said:

On some other AI thread, a poster mentioned how expensive these M1 Pro/Max SoCs were to make, especially with the variable RAM amounts. So I'm wondering if the forthcoming MacPro may just use two or more M1 Max's on a single motherboard, similar to very high end dual Xeon boards.

Better hope they never go dual socket. The compromises you have to make to have two sockets are numerous and what held back the cheese grater and trash can Mac Pro's.  Heck there are performance penalties for "chiplet" packaging like AMD is using with Ryzen and Threadripper.  I get why they are doing it - it's WAY more cost effective for a bunch of reasons.  But if Apple can stomach the production for massive SOC - if you care about performance that's the real ticket and what I hope they stay focused on.  

mjtomlin said:

I doubt they'll double up on SoC's. More than likely they'll go with much bigger SoCs variants, "M# Ultra" or "M# Extreme". They would be so far ahead in performance that they'll only need to update them half as often as the rest of the M1 family (basically the same as they did with the "X" variant in the A-series).

Doubling up SoCs simply won't work (at least, well enough to be worth doing, and assuming you're talking about the existing SoCs). There are all sorts of "gated by physics" issues there. But a single large SoC also seems impossible (at least if they stick with their current memory architecture). Whatever they do, it's going to be a lot more interesting. I wrote a bit more about this in comments here: https://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/224623/compared-new-14-inch-macbook-pro-versus-13-inch-m1-macbook-pro-versus-intel-13-inch-macbo/p2? ; - see comments 31, 32, 35, 36.

This is a monumental engineering challenge! If it weren't, we'd already be seeing the new Mac Pros. I fully expect to see a new Pro next year, and that it will be amazing. Don't imagine for a second that these things are easy.

It’s fun to imagine a Mac Pro with 2 or 4 M1 Max chips, but I remember my G5 1.8 dual getting so hot you could fry an egg on the case, and that thing had 9 fans!

4x M1 Max would only be in the region of 300W fully maxed out with both CPU and GPU. The 2019 Mac Pro is over 900W. The 2013 cylinder Mac Pro was able to handle over 300W with a whisper quiet single fan and minimal heat. Fully maxed CPUs alone would be under 100W, fully maxed GPUs would be around 240W.

Not many processes will max out a 40TFLOP GPU except for raw compute tasks, this is like 1.5x an Nvidia 3090. Real-time rendering wouldn't come close most of the time.

If someone took the same workload from a pre-2019 Mac Pro onto M1 Max, just one of the 4 chips would handle it. If they took the same workload from the 2019 Pro, it would handle it with < 1/3 the power usage.

They could fit 12x M1 Max chips into a 2019 Mac Pro enclosure with > 0.5 trillion transistors. This kind of thing is being done for special use cases with shared memory across all the chips:

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-11-trillion-transistor-chip.html

"The chip is composed of 84 virtual chips along a single silicon wafer and 4,539 computing cores, which means there are effectively 381,276 computing cores to tackle mathematical processes in parallel. Packed with 18 GB RAM, the cores are connected with a communications fabric called Swarm that runs at 100 petabits per second.

"This work opens the door for major breakthroughs in scientific computing performance," Cerebras researchers wrote in a blog post. "The CS-1 is the first ever system to demonstrate sufficient performance to simulate over a million fluid cells faster than real-time. This means that when the CS-1 is used to simulate a power plant based on data about its present operating conditions, it can tell you what is going to happen in the future faster than the laws of physics produce that same result."

"We can solve this problem in an amount of time that no number of GPUs or CPUs can achieve," said Cerebras's CEO, Andrew Feldman. "This means the CS-1 for this work is the fastest machine ever built, and it's faster than any combination of clustering of other processors."

In a paper distributed at the conference Tuesday, titled "Fast Stencil-Code Computation on a Wafer-Scale Processor," Cerebras and Department of Energy researchers explained that shared memory is the critical difference between the CS-1 and Joule machines."

docno42 said:

GG1 said:

On some other AI thread, a poster mentioned how expensive these M1 Pro/Max SoCs were to make, especially with the variable RAM amounts. So I'm wondering if the forthcoming MacPro may just use two or more M1 Max's on a single motherboard, similar to very high end dual Xeon boards.

Better hope they never go dual socket. The compromises you have to make to have two sockets are numerous and what held back the cheese grater and trash can Mac Pro's.  Heck there are performance penalties for "chiplet" packaging like AMD is using with Ryzen and Threadripper.  I get why they are doing it - it's WAY more cost effective for a bunch of reasons.  But if Apple can stomach the production for massive SOC - if you care about performance that's the real ticket and what I hope they stay focused on.  

mjtomlin said:

I doubt they'll double up on SoC's. More than likely they'll go with much bigger SoCs variants, "M# Ultra" or "M# Extreme". They would be so far ahead in performance that they'll only need to update them half as often as the rest of the M1 family (basically the same as they did with the "X" variant in the A-series).