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tht said:

blastdoor said:

DuhSesame said:

Marvin said:

blastdoor said:

9secondkox2 said:

A quad m1 Max based on current architecture would terminate the discussion. 

A Mac Pro with that or more would be legendary. 

Key word is “would.”

if the quad max takes until the end of 2022 then add “have.”

AMD is supposed to have 5nm zen 4 out later this year. For high end systems, at least 64 cores. 

Apple will have the advantage of unified memory, and maybe that will give them an edge for some workloads. But I really hope they pick up the pace of apple silicon rollout + update on the Mac. 

A quad M1 Max would be expected to be close to a Threadripper 3995WX:

https://www.newegg.com/amd-ryzen-threadripper-pro-3995wx/p/N82E16819113675
https://www.amazon.com/AMD-Ryzen-Threadripper-PRO-3995WX/dp/B08V5HPXVY/

That's $7-8k just for the CPU. The GPU performance would be about 30% higher than a $3k Nvidia 3090, e.g an Nvidia 3090ti:

https://www.amazon.com/NVIDIA-RTX-3090-Founders-Graphics/dp/B08HR6ZBYJ/

In late 2022, AMD is saying they can double the performance with Zen 4 on 5nm and Nvidia will likely have a 1.5-2x 4090. But, it will still cost around $10k for those parts. Apple can sell a quad M1 Max for $3k. Even if Zen 4 and 4090 is 1.5-2x the performance due to higher power usage, an M1 Max Quad would be really competitive.

Apple currently sells Mac Pro hardware that is way behind Threadripper chips, they don't need to compete with them on raw performance but the special hardware they have can offer huge improvements. Someone here compared their PC with 3090 against M1 Max and the Max chip beat it for render/export times in some cases:



Multiply that by 4 and for people in those workflows, a 2x improvement on the PC side is still half.

Something I just realized recently.  Intel has been testing their 56-core Xeon Ws for quite a while, I don’t see the M1 Max will ever match that.  If there’s a Mac Pro based on the M1, it’ll likely to be a lower-end to an Intel Mac Pro, at least until M3 released.

Well.... if you mean Ice Lake, then I think it's conceivable that a 40 core M1-based system could beat it (maybe). 

But Intel doesn't represent the best of what x86 has to offer. AMD's Threadripper is the current x86 king of the workstation market. If Intel is ever able to get Sapphire Rapids out the door, then maybe Intel can recapture the x86 lead, but that's both a big 'if' and a big 'maybe.' 

I'd love it if Apple kicked x86 to the curb completely, but only if they realize the full potential of Apple Silicon. 

But if Apple decides it's not worth it to completely replace x86 and wants to retain an x86 Mac Pro for the tippy top of the lineup, then I hope they move to use the best x86 solution available, rather than relying exclusively on Intel. 

The rumormongers are currently saying there will be an Ice Lake W update (38c) for the 2019 Mac Pro and a new SFF Mac Pro M1 Max Duo/Quad, at the same time. If true, that's a big commitment to Intel still. Ice Lake W is a new socket and that should represent rather serious work as a new motherboard has to be developed and test.

The SFF Apple Mac Pro (G4 Cube sized) with M1 Mac Duo/Quad will be competitive to 64 core Threadrippers, imo. It will be the usual, it wins some, it loses some benchmarks. Intel and AMD have SMT, so any massively parallel apps that have low CPU loads per thread will be dominated by AMD. Cinebench really shows this behavior. For apps that high CPU loads per thread, I wouldn't be surprised if Apples 32 p-cores outperform a 64c TR, especially Apple feeds their cores with memory bandwidth. A M1 Max Quad could have over 1 TB/s of memory bandwidth.

Apple is going to rerun their playbook here though. The x86 workstations are going to be designed for 300 W CPUs and multiple 400 W GPUs. Apple's Mac Pro is going to be around 120 W for CPU and 240 W for GPU. They are going to say look at how small and efficient their workstation is compared to the big x86 workstations. Hard to believe that the 3rd time is going to be the charm here.