MP All Models Apple M2 Ultra Benchmarks Show Cupertino Didn’t Beat Intel, AMD, Or NVIDIA

[Jethro!]

As suspected, Apple Hubris > reality. If only Apple had given us an upgradeable MP with the latest Intel tech we'd be happy.

Apple M2 Ultra Benchmarks Show Cupertino Didn’t Beat Intel, AMD, Or NVIDIA

Apple's bombastic claims aside, the M2 Ultra offers solid performance—just not world-beating.

hothardware.com

 

[DarkPremiumCho]

Good to see the competitors are kicking…

Apple’s departure from Intel’s ecosystem dates back to the introduction of the T2 chip, perhaps earlier. I don’t think Apple is going back.

 

[MisterAndrew]

AMD's new chips with PCIe 5.0 support are almost here too. It will be interesting to see how the Threadripper & Threadripper Pro 7000 series compare.

https://www.thefastcode.com/news/amd-ryzen-threadripper-pro-7900wx-workstation-7900x-hedt-cpus-leaked

 

[avro707]

Not just Apple hubris but the armies on the forums as well, like what we’ve seen for the last week or more - just endless non stop.

Apple seems to be the master of benchmarketing, hopefully more media calls them out.

Let’s see what other machines come along for less money and more performance.

 

[GMShadow]

As suspected, Apple Hubris > reality. If only Apple had given us an upgradeable MP with the latest Intel tech we'd be happy.

Maybe, but you'd need to have an electrician install a three-phase outlet to run it.

 

[Po Dameron]

I still think they intended to have an impressive M3 Mac Pro ready, but when those plans fell apart, quickly slapped the existing M2 Ultra into the Mac Pro 2019 case and said voila, transition complete!

 

[SDAVE]

I still think they intended to have an impressive M3 Mac Pro ready, but when those plans fell apart, quickly slapped the existing M2 Ultra into the Mac Pro 2019 case and said voila, transition complete!

I agree I think the M3 is going to be what the Mac Pro was intended for.

M1 > M2 is not a giant leap. M3 will be 3nm.

I wouldn't be surprised if they have a giant leap in M3 and maybe add PCie support in the future and more RAM. And perhaps do a M3 Extreme.

 

[avro707]

Maybe, but you'd need to have an electrician install a three-phase outlet to run it.

7,1 is no more difficult than any of the other computers I use, running from the same power outlet as other things on my desk.

Too much trolling of recent.

 

[GMShadow]

7,1 is no more difficult than any of the other computers I use, running from the same power outlet as other things on my desk.

I believe you missed the joke there.

 

[GFLPraxis]

I think this isn't Apple failing to keep up; the M2 Ultra is clearly a desktop chip, drawing way less power than those other competitors.

It's that Apple didn't even try to compete in the workstation arena. They weren't benchmarking Xeons or Threadrippers here. Apple should have put out a 4x M2 Max chip (double the Ultra) to be in that category.

 

[GMShadow]

I think this isn't Apple failing to keep up; the M2 Ultra is clearly a desktop chip, drawing way less power than those other competitors.

It's that Apple didn't even try to compete in the workstation arena. They weren't benchmarking Xeons or Threadrippers here. Apple should have put out a 4x M2 Max chip (double the Ultra) to be in that category.

It was reported they decided that wouldn't sell in enough volume to even earn out the engineering cost.

 

[Analog Kid]

I still think they intended to have an impressive M3 Mac Pro ready, but when those plans fell apart, quickly slapped the existing M2 Ultra into the Mac Pro 2019 case and said voila, transition complete!

There's no evidence of that. I think there's been an internal debate of the value of Mac Pro. Mac Studio probably convinced them that a large fraction of Pro users are served just fine by the Studio, and enough of the rest just need PCIe for the use cases they called out in the Gruber interview.

They aren't trying to get machismo points in the HPC world or fight their way into those markets. I was kind of hoping they would show what you can do when make a processor more efficient by putting more processors in that box, but I don't think they'd win much more than bragging rights with it...

 

[GMShadow]

There's no evidence of that. I think there's been an internal debate of the value of Mac Pro. Mac Studio probably convinced them that a large fraction of Pro users are served just fine by the Studio, and enough of the rest just need PCIe for the use cases they called out in the Gruber interview.

They aren't trying to get machismo points in the HPC world or fight their way into those markets. I was kind of hoping they would show what you can do when make a processor more efficient by putting more processors in that box, but I don't think they'd win much more than bragging rights with it...

Yeah. They tried to get into that market in the G5/Xserve/cMP era, but they'd clearly given up by 2009-2010, and most of those markets that *might* have tried a Mac were burned by Apple from 2010-2020, and were unlikely to come back even if the new machine had been crazy good.

 

[rpmurray]

Guess it's time for me to start building a Hackintosh.

 

[avro707]

Guess it's time for me to start building a Hackintosh.

I don't think it's worth going down that path. You may as well just get a Lenovo PX (P10) and then do upgrades however you want. It looks to be well designed.

Windows 11 is a nice OS - I use it on my 7,1, it is way better than Windows 10.

 

[blackquartz]

Its very sad apple told its Pro users basically to f### off, pulling **** like this.

 

[novagamer]

I don't think it's worth going down that path. You may as well just get a Lenovo PX (P10) and then do upgrades however you want. It looks to be well designed.

Windows 11 is a nice OS - I use it on my 7,1, it is way better than Windows 10.

In what ways specifically is Win 11 better than 10? Asking seriously, not as a troll. I can (and have) debloated Win10 and manually turned off literally dozens of services beyond that and my PC went from feeling "ok" to VERY fast. What are you finding is better with 11, which makes this a lot more difficult?

 

[avro707]

It is cleaner looking to my eyes.

It is also faster running on my 7,1.

 

[saudor]

Guess it's time for me to start building a Hackintosh.

Not really worth it at this point as it's pretty much stuck on 2020 era hardware. Also intel macOS support will drop off in a couple years at most.

macOS Sonoma also dropped support for basically every wifi card that was natively supported

 

[Yebubbleman]

M1 > M2 is not a giant leap.

While this is absolutely true of the comparison between the base M1 and base M2, and likely mostly true of the comparison between M1 Pro and M2 Pro (though, I'd argue that standardizing the number of efficiency cores between the base SoC and the Pro/Max versions DID help); it's not as true for M2 Max and M2 Ultra which are both dramatically better than their respective predecessors. Apple's scaling from the base M1 to the higher end SoCs wasn't great. They seemed to fix that with M2's higher-end SoCs.

Guess it's time for me to start building a Hackintosh.

With what? Unless you've got 9th or 10th generation Intel parts lying around, it's going to be an uphill battle just to make it work and, even then, your days of support are clearly numbered. Apple is on the march to drop Intel support now that (a) they no longer sell Intel Macs and (b) now that, barring the iMac Pro, you only have 2018, 2019, and 2020 Intel Macs even supported for Sonoma (and I'll bet we'll see them drop even more Intel Macs next year).

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

It's worse than those benchmarks suggest. Real world scores on 7,1 with 6900xt and others benching the 6800XT show they outperform the M2ultra, and thats just on GPU. An i9 (what we used to have in our intel MacBooks level of processor) spanked the M2 ultra as well.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/m2-ultra-geekbench-scores.2392428/post-32264024

 

[TzunamiOSX]

No GPU support is a big manko for me.

 

[bubub309]

I don't think it's worth going down that path. You may as well just get a Lenovo PX (P10) and then do upgrades however you want. It looks to be well designed.

Windows 11 is a nice OS - I use it on my 7,1, it is way better than Windows 10.

It's extremely worth going down that path doing 6 builds right now for clients using 13th gen intel with nvme 7000 mps so cheap and 6800xt cheap it's extremely worth is thunderbolt 3 works too 😎😎

 

[bubub309]

While this is absolutely true of the comparison between the base M1 and base M2, and likely mostly true of the comparison between M1 Pro and M2 Pro (though, I'd argue that standardizing the number of efficiency cores between the base SoC and the Pro/Max versions DID help); it's not as true for M2 Max and M2 Ultra which are both dramatically better than their respective predecessors. Apple's scaling from the base M1 to the higher end SoCs wasn't great. They seemed to fix that with M2's higher-end SoCs.



With what? Unless you've got 9th or 10th generation Intel parts lying around, it's going to be an uphill battle just to make it work and, even then, your days of support are clearly numbered. Apple is on the march to drop Intel support now that (a) they no longer sell Intel Macs and (b) now that, barring the iMac Pro, you only have 2018, 2019, and 2020 Intel Macs even supported for Sonoma (and I'll bet we'll see them drop even more Intel Macs next year).

12th n 13th gen works like a charm😏

 

[prefuse07]

In what ways specifically is Win 11 better than 10? Asking seriously, not as a troll. I can (and have) debloated Win10 and manually turned off literally dozens of services beyond that and my PC went from feeling "ok" to VERY fast. What are you finding is better with 11, which makes this a lot more difficult?

It's just really optimized, and runs very well on these machines. The GUI is also much more streamlined and easier to use. One complaint I do have it that you can no longer move the taskbar (I personally prefer vertical on the left side). But other than that, I can't even use Windows 10 anymore after using 11 since it first released.