thadec

Claiming that the Core i9-13900H gets only a 1600 in Geekbench is just flat out false. A 2Q 2021 x86 laptop like the Razer Blade 15 with a Core i9-11900H (from the 11th gen line that Intel just recently declared end-of-life) benchmarked better than that:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/20452232 ;

How's about showing an ACTUAL benchmark for the Core i9-13900H which shows single core score of more than 2000?

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/20561297

Also, on the GPU score, claiming that "In raw numbers, the M2 Max is just ahead of the NVIDIA chips that are discrete GPUs" is - again - false. Instead, the M2 Max is 35% worse than the laptop version of the RTX 4070. 

https://wccftech.com/m2-max-gpu-loses-to-laptop-rtx-4070-opencl-benchmark/

I agree that the maximum of 96 GB RAM gives the MacBook Pro an advantage, but the claim that 32 GB RAM is insufficient for "developers, photographers, musicians, and others" wasn't Apple Insider's position just yesterday with the Mac Mini whose performance, according to you, " threatens its larger stablemate, the Mac Studio."

https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/02/13/m2-pro-mac-mini-review-best-price-to-performance-apple-silicon-yet

Now please note that the maximum configuration Mac Mini costs $4500. According to your own argument, it is only good for "web surfing and general productivity" because of the 32 GB RAM limit. Incidentally, this would also apply to the 32 GB Mac Studio version that begins at $2000.

 But storage? Nope. The Galaxy Book Ultra has an expansion slot, as does pretty much every x86 device over $500. This means getting to 8 TB storage on this Samsung laptop only costs $600, not $2400 (which would be the cost of another Galaxy Book 3 Ultra). 

That being said, the Samsung Galaxy Book Ultra is way too light and thin for a device with a Core i7 - let alone Core i9 - CPU and a discrete GPU. Throttling will be the inevitable result, and that will keep it from reaching anywhere near peak performance. Devices that will actually let you fully enjoy the performance of the CPU and the GPU would be Razer and MSI laptops that are thicker and weigh more. 

rob53 said:

pulseimages said:

So why release the Mac Studio in the first then? 

To try and pacify Mac Pro users. If I remember correctly, the Mac Studio outperformed the current Intel Mac Pro for much less money. You could build a faster Mac Pro but by the time you did, you could have purchased 2-3 Studios. Apple engineers couldn't come through with a chip(s) that would justify the Mac Pro product line--and still haven't. Mac Studio introduced in March 2022 (thought it was older than this) and now it appears the Mac Pro might be released in Spring, which would put it a year after the Studio. From other reports, the Mac Pro will use the same, oversized box as the Intel Mac Pro, which I hope isn't the final Mac Pro product. Stack two Studios on top of each other and that should be enough room for a Mac Pro with 2-4x the power of the Studio. 

Geekbench scores still put the Studio above the fastest Intel Mac Pro in single and multi-core benchmarks. Metal benchmark still gives the Ultra a score just under 100K with several faster AMD Radeon graphics cards, mainly used in the Mac Pro. 

The problem is that the current Intel Mac Pro performs about at what an AMD Ryzen 7 7700X currently does and what an Intel Core i7-14700K (coming 4Q this year) soon will. And that doesn't even get into what current Ryzen 9 and Threadripper chips (and their Intel counterparts) do. Or what they will in 2024 when AMD hits TSMC 3nm and Intel hits what is equivalent to TSMC 5nm. 

See, that is the thing. In 2020 you were comparing Apple Silicon to chips in $799 and $999 devices that had been released a year or two prior. So folks were impressed. Nobody is going to be impressed that a $6000 machine released in 2023 has a CPU that beats the Xeon W-3235 from 2Q 2019. By comparison, 2019 is when the A13 for the iPhone 11 came out. You all know what iPhone 15 and its A17 is going to do to the iPhone 11. To put it another way, beating the Xeon W-3235 is not going to prove that Apple is capable of making a competitive workstation with their own chips. You will be able to get Xeon W-3235 (and similar AMD Threadripper 3960X) workstations on eBay from people who will want to get the AMD Threadripper 7000 in a few months. I am going to restate this: nobody cares that there are not a few AMD and Intel chips that outperform the M2 (including the Pro and Max) because the Mac Mini starts at $599. That is why DigitalTrends is able to call the Mac Mini "the best mini-computer ever" in an article that acknowledges that there are faster machines available https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/apple-mac-mini-review/
 (and only gives as an example an Intel-based mini PC, knowing full well that the 6nm AMD Ryzen R9 6900HX mini PCs crushes the 10nm Intel Core i9-12900K in performance, graphics and power per watt). But for a machine that will cost 10 times as much as the Mac Mini, the fact that there are a number of faster options available that cost way less won't be nearly as easy to brush aside.

It is going to be interesting to see how Apple deals with this issue. Maybe they will be able to get away with a first gen Mac Pro that isn't competitive - and yes they do need to get it out the door this year in order to finally declare the transition from Intel "done" as they are already behind schedule and, as mentioned earlier, AMD and especially Intel workstation (and upper echelon desktop) chips are going to make huge leaps in performance between now and 2025 - but 2nd gen and going forward is going to have to be. And as I said in the comment directly preceding this one, no, the Mac Pro isn't primarily for Hollywood people who don't care about having the very best performance. Hollywood shifted to Linux server farms for rendering, 3D animation etc. ages ago. Anything that Hollywood would do on a Mac Pro today would make more sense to shift to the cloud. Instead, Mac Pros are used mainly by the workstation crowd who prefers macOS to Linux and Windows workstations. But if the Apple Silicon Mac Pros aren't competitive, then those folks are going to be forced to ditch their preferences, and the only ones left will be those who simply can't migrate their workloads from macOS to Linux or Windows (or the cloud).  

dennyc69 said:

I don’t buy it, Hollywood types use Mac Pro, the  Mac Studio fills the gap for lower prices groups of people who still want pro power. This a click bait article? Don’t make stuff up 

This is 15 year old stuff. "Hollywood types" switched to Linux ages ago. As dinosaurs are no longer roaming the earth, Mac Pro is most often used as a general purpose workstation that happens to run macOS. Such people have no use for a Mac Studio, which is engineered for audio, video and photo professionals and actually performs worse than similarly priced hardware for anything and everything else. If Apple is going to retain the general purpose workstation crowd, they are going to need to put out a competitive product for engineers, architects, simulators, medical etc. Or else all of those people are going to migrate to Linux workstations running AMD Threadripper and Xeon W. 

All right folks. Time to get out of the kiddie pool delusions and join the adults in reality.
1. Intel's decline in 2022 are due to the recession and the stuff going on with China, Russia and Ukraine. We know this because it impacted iPhone sales too, as their sales were down 15% year-over-year.

2. Even with one of the worst years in history, 286 million PCs sold in 2022. Even with one of their best years in history, Apple accounted for only 23 to 28 million of those depending on who you believe. OF the remaining 260 million or so PCs that did sell, Intel had 70% of those to AMD's 30%. Intel projects that this is going to rebound to 300 million next year. Analysts are railing (from their MacBooks and iPhones) that Intel is crazy to project this, but the 3 year replacement cycle for devices that were bought at the start of the pandemic will end in 2Q 2023. The enterprise "refresh the hardware we bought during the pandemic" will last through 2024.

3. Intel did take a big hit in servers ... but from AMD, not ARM. Despite all the hype that you have heard - 99% of it typed on MacBooks and iPad Pros since November 2020 - ARM has only 3% of the server business. Marvell left the ARM server business because they weren't making any money, leaving Ampere as the last major player there. (And Ampere's "major" is "fewer than 1000 global employees.") Granted, Nvidia will join Ampere in a few months. But, AMD released their response to ARM servers in 2022. Intel's response won't come until 2024 but it will be mighty substantial: Sierra Forest, a Xeon with 334 efficiency cores on a 6nm process. It removes the sole advantage that ARM servers have over x86, which is better power efficiency per thread. 

4. Apple Silicon fans do their best to evade this, but even Apple acknowledges that Intel has superior single core performance. The M1 Ultra scored 1780. The M2 Pro? 1952. Fine but the last gen Intel Core i9-12900K (1986) as well as the current gen Core i9-13900KS (2286), Core i7-13700K (2107), and Core i5-13600KF (2011) all clearly beat it. You should know that the latter is in a budget gaming desktop (16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060) that costs $1200. Yes, the 3nm M3 will come out this year. No, it will not beat the 10nm Core i9-13900KS. It won't beat the 14th gen Core i7 will be out by the end of the year either.

5. This makes the "Combined they are aiming for 1.8x improvement in performance-per-watt. That only brings them to where Apple is now if they deliver" wishful thinking. Intel's 14nm chips were already beating the M2 Pro. This means that when Intel reaches 3nm, they will be able to make 28W chips (the M2 Pro Mac Mini's TDP is around 26.5 W) that have the same performance as what Apple offers as well as 75W-125W chips that will crush it. How? Simple: where Apple currently has only 1 performance core design (used for smartphones/tablets, laptops and PCs) Intel has 5: Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, Core i9/Xeon. (This is down from 7, as Intel ditched Celeron and Pentium.) Core i7 and Core i9 are bigger, meaning better performance but worse efficiency. Core i5 and Core i3? Smaller cores for better efficiency but worse performance. As Intel shrinks the die from 10nm to 3nm, they will keep the 125W base for Core i9 and Core i7 ... but reduce it for Core i5 and especially Core i3. The Intel core i3-13100F, for example, has unofficial single core scores of about 1700, or 95% of the M1 Ultra. They only need to maintain that while significantly decreasing the TDP for certain Core i3 and Core i5 versions. Granted, this will occur in the laptop versions of the chips - for desktops their competition will be AMD's Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7, not Apple - but that doesn't matter because mini-PCs like the Intel NUC Extreme that are going to compete with the Mac Mini and Mac Studio will use laptop chips anyway. Wherever Apple is going to be in 2025 with 2nd gen TSMC N3E, Intel will be able to come up with a (likely) Core i5 to match it in 2026.  

So long as Intel is inside 200 million Windows and Linux PCs sold each year, they aren't going anywhere. 

I have a family of geeks so we all need (way) more than 8 GB RAM. I typically buy an 8 GB RAM machine intending to upgrade it to 32 GB, which costs about $80 if you do DDR4 and $120 if you go DDR5. But I do say that for "most people" $599 for such performance and the benefits of macOS - especially for iPhone and iPad users - is the best deal in ages.