M1 Max 24-Core real-world experiences

[Analog Kid]

Good flex, I must admit.

I guess the point is that the M1 Max was hyped up to be much more than it is. (Shocking, I know.)

Uh, no. The point is a lack of reading comprehension. This isn't about how M1 Max was marketed, it was a very narrowly stated question about experience with two specific M1 Max configurations.

 

[Analog Kid]

I shared my experience. And even if it is not successful, but this is also an experience This is a forum. Or is it usual to say exclusively positive facts about the products that the company has released? I don’t like it. I will not hide it.

I've had good experience Oxo Good Grips can openers. Maybe we should discuss that next?

Or maybe we should utilize the capability of these forums to create an arbitrarily large number of threads focused on individual topics and not dump irrelevant conversation into whatever one we choose?

 

[throAU]

ITT user of highly specialised intel software expects MacBook running in 100 watts to compete with 1200 watts of PC components plus a shelf of disk at >8x the price

 

[dmr727]

I've had good experience Oxo Good Grips can openers. Maybe we should discuss that next?

Rosle Stainless Steel. Get outta here with that Oxo stuff!

 

[wilberforce]

nvm

 

[Mr.Fox]

This is not about you or what you can buy but personal experiences with a MBP 14" or 16" with M1 Max and 24 Core GPU. What are you adding to the conversation since all you have said is M1 is not powerful enough and then posted a bunch of desktop specs.

I am sorry but if you just want to argue that you are better then fine! Your Scalderlake Desktop is the king of Windows desktops-enjoy and get off a Mac forum!

500watt Scalderlake without dedicated gpu beats 100 watt M1 max with gpu???

If there is a moderator could they remove the posts that have nothing to do with the thread? You can get rid of all of mine. To the OP I am sorry it seems this thread is going sideways.

a bright personality with a premature verbal ejaculation, but in the case there is something to say? I do not like it, close the forum

 

[Technerd108]

It was hyped for me at my work, like a miracle device with the performance of almost a Mac Pro in 2019, which copes with all tasks and does everything phenomenally quickly. Even some videos on You Tube showed where he puts both Intel and AMD on the spatulas in some tasks, including video processing. I bought it. I worked with him. He worked, or rather, created a violent imitation of it, suspected that something was amiss, time began to take more time at work than expected. I successfully sold it without regret and bought myself a desktop computer.

This has nothing to do with the OP original question. Why not make a specific thread or find one better suited to your subject matter.

 

[JD@OBL]

Been using my M1 Max for a six weeks now... it's been next level buggy but that could be Monterey, or my add-ons. I'll explain...

My M1:

Before this I had purchased an M1 Mini, M1 Air and M1 Macbook 13". My Geekbench profile is here with speeds if curious.. going back 12 years through several Macs. ? The M1 is fast (mini/air/mbp 13) but my main daily driver, my 2019 Mac Pro 16 core, Vega II Duo, Afterburner, 382gb ram etc was still faster for me in multicore video editing etc.

The M1's were quick, but would lag in that I was able with my MP to be connected to multiple screens, raids etc and have multiple programs open without slowing down. With the M1, screens could be figured out but it would never successfully index my raids and yes, I would connect one, let it go u til done and the connect another etc... it would time out (for lack of better term) each time.

Pocked up the M1 Max and thought... FINALLY a replacement for my beast.

I have had it reset out of the blue multiple times, time out on indexing or the latest bug... imessage/messages starts fine after a reset... I can receive messages, but sending results in not delivered. I then have to log out of messages, restart, log back in and wait for it to happen again.

I have three tb3 items connected to my laptop, two OWC thunderflex 8 raids, one is 112tb hdd in raid 5 and the other is 96tb hdd in raid 5 and 16tb SSD in raid 0. In the open pcie slot in this second raid I also have an Accelsior 8tb SSD card in raid 0. The first raid's pci-e slot contains a 10gbe card for quicker connectivity. Both raids have a display-port plug so between those and the laptop's hdmi plug out... I connect two BenQ 32" 4K screens there and a LG 49" wide screen.

Overkill city, I know. I work with video up to 8k so I built a quick set up got editing... or so I told myself.

Overall, I LOVE the laptop but it falls behind quick it seems on indexing, I suspect too much going on bandwidth wise. Imspike to a tech at OWC and he told me that the M1 has 3 independent busses so my set up shouldn't slow it down.

Yet... it restarts randomly, never finishes indexing all the things, finder will randomly quit and not be able to be restarted, instead showing a white dot flash under the icon for a moment as it closes again. Lol. Bluetooth randomly doesn't connect my to my sony's as well. When I do ask it to restart, it can take up to 15 minutes.

I assume it's all Monterey bugs honestly. No idea.

 

[Fomalhaut]

Really?? Why do people keep saying such complete nonsense??

First of all I don't know how you compared a desktop with Alderlake i9 and 3090 since you can't even buy them yet?? At least not on New Egg. You can get a CyberPowerPC with 3080 i9 12900K and 16gb ram for almost $3k.

The specs you are suggesting would be much more expensive.

Whenever they release the new desktop Mac would be a better comparison to your suggested setup.

It just seems you want to complain for the sake of complaining. Enjoy Scalderlake but why comment on a Mac forum when your post is questionable as best as being truly legit and if you are then I apologize.

@Mr. Fox answered a similar query of mine, and does on face value have the machine he quoted - at a cost of $21,000.

It's hardly an apple-to-apples comparison with an M1 Max laptop, however good they may be, so he clearly hit the limits of the MBP's capability.

We need to be realistic about what current Apple Silicon offerings can actually deliver, and realise that a lot of comparisons are made to desktop machines. The fact we are even making such comparisons speaks highly of what Apple has achieved in a relatively thin and portable laptop computer.

It will be interesting to see what the Mac Pro offers later this year, especially in its GPU capability compared to the high-end offerings from Nvidia and AMD.

 

[Technerd108]

@Mr. Fox answered a similar query of mine, and does on face value have the machine he quoted - at a cost of $21,000.

It's hardly an apple-to-apples comparison with an M1 Max laptop, however good they may be, so he clearly hit the limits of the MBP's capability.

We need to be realistic about what current Apple Silicon offerings can actually deliver, and realise that a lot of comparisons are made to desktop machines. The fact we are even making such comparisons speaks highly of what Apple has achieved in a relatively thin and portable laptop computer.

It will be interesting to see what the Mac Pro offers later this year, especially in its GPU capability compared to the high-end offerings from Nvidia and AMD.

That was exactly my point. He is making a ridiculous comparison of a dual Nvidia 3090, the fastest Intel desktop cpu, and huge ram to a MBP??? This is a Mac Pro comparison and I bet whenever the Mac Pro is released it may just surprise him.

 

[Fomalhaut]

I shared my experience. And even if it is not successful, but this is also an experience This is a forum. Or is it usual to say exclusively positive facts about the products that the company has released? I don’t like it. I will not hide it.

Your experience is valid, but it is considered to be "poor form" to hijack a thread by posting information that is not related to the original post. It's a question of forum etiquette.

You would get a better response if you create a brand new thread with a title like "MBP16 did not live up performance expectations for real-time modelling" or something similar, relevant to your experience.

 

[Fomalhaut]

That was exactly my point. He is making a ridiculous comparison of a dual Nvidia 3090, the fastest Intel desktop cpu, and huge ram to a MBP??? This is a Mac Pro comparison and I bet whenever the Mac Pro is released it may just surprise him.

I agree. Apart from hijacking the thread (he may not have understood forum etiquette), the comparison is somewhat stretched.

I think his point was that he was "sold" an unrealistic expectation that the M1 Max could match a powerful desktop setup, and in his defence, the way some YouTube channels were singing the praises of the M1 Pro/Max, this is understandable.

In the end he found that there is no "silver bullet" where you can spend $5000 and magically get the performance of a $20,000 system.

In general, these kind of comparisons are meaningless unless you specify exactly what workloads you are running and what your specific use cases and requirements are.

A lot of people get hung up on benchmarks and specs, when the only salient question is how fast machine X can do your work. If it's faster than machine Y, and costs a similar amount, then you probably have your answer. If machine X is a bit slower, but a lot cheaper than machine Y, then you have to decide how much that speed is worth to you. For some people it is not worth spending 4 times the money to work 4 times faster. For others it will be.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that there are faster machines than Apple laptops with M1 Max. Whether you want or need these depends on individual circumstances.

 

[Ray777]

Been using my M1 Max for a six weeks now... it's been next level buggy but that could be Monterey, or my add-ons. I'll explain...

My M1:

View attachment 1943218

Before this I had purchased an M1 Mini, M1 Air and M1 Macbook 13". My Geekbench profile is here with speeds if curious.. going back 12 years through several Macs. ? The M1 is fast (mini/air/mbp 13) but my main daily driver, my 2019 Mac Pro 16 core, Vega II Duo, Afterburner, 382gb ram etc was still faster for me in multicore video editing etc.

The M1's were quick, but would lag in that I was able with my MP to be connected to multiple screens, raids etc and have multiple programs open without slowing down. With the M1, screens could be figured out but it would never successfully index my raids and yes, I would connect one, let it go u til done and the connect another etc... it would time out (for lack of better term) each time.

Pocked up the M1 Max and thought... FINALLY a replacement for my beast.

I have had it reset out of the blue multiple times, time out on indexing or the latest bug... imessage/messages starts fine after a reset... I can receive messages, but sending results in not delivered. I then have to log out of messages, restart, log back in and wait for it to happen again.

I have three tb3 items connected to my laptop, two OWC thunderflex 8 raids, one is 112tb hdd in raid 5 and the other is 96tb hdd in raid 5 and 16tb SSD in raid 0. In the open pcie slot in this second raid I also have an Accelsior 8tb SSD card in raid 0. The first raid's pci-e slot contains a 10gbe card for quicker connectivity. Both raids have a display-port plug so between those and the laptop's hdmi plug out... I connect two BenQ 32" 4K screens there and a LG 49" wide screen.

Overkill city, I know. I work with video up to 8k so I built a quick set up got editing... or so I told myself.

Overall, I LOVE the laptop but it falls behind quick it seems on indexing, I suspect too much going on bandwidth wise. Imspike to a tech at OWC and he told me that the M1 has 3 independent busses so my set up shouldn't slow it down.

Yet... it restarts randomly, never finishes indexing all the things, finder will randomly quit and not be able to be restarted, instead showing a white dot flash under the icon for a moment as it closes again. Lol. Bluetooth randomly doesn't connect my to my sony's as well. When I do ask it to restart, it can take up to 15 minutes.

I assume it's all Monterey bugs honestly. No idea.

That is quit a setup you've got hooked up your mac! LOL, mine doesn't come close?

I do also believe Monterey has lots of bugs which still needs fixing.

Didn't come across many myself.
Only had one big one, a System shutdown, but that one got fixed already with the latest update.

--Here's hoping apple will do a good job on finding and crushing most of the other bugs in Monterey.

 

[Silentwave]

Using mostly for video work, I tested out FCPX, Premiere Pro (intel version under Rosetta2), and DavinciResolve 17

For instance in Premiere Pro (the least optimized of the bunch, and non-native using Rosetta2..)

Out of curiosity - why Premiere's Intel version?

 

[TarkinDale]

I have a 16 inch 24 core, 32GB RAM 2TB SSD. Good battery life. It is fast with Photoshop. Word 2019 isn’t particularly fast with a 150,000 word Word doc, but it’s Using Rosetta and I doubt it was that optimised for begin with. I use Vellum to generate formatted books. I was hoping the pdf creation would be almost instantaneous, but I have to wait whole seconds… Not an issue, but it did surprise me. My penchant for 500 open tabs is handled by safari, though I hate the way tab groups reload pages.
Essentially, it’s a fast, capable machine. I do feel that there are years of software optimising ahead that will make the technology shine even more.

 

[Ray777]

Out of curiosity - why Premiere's Intel version?

Because the M1 Native version was still to buggy for me.. , it does export quite a lot faster, but that's not of really big importance for me right now.

I' worked on apple years ago, then went Window route, but there I started to notice a big difference in stability between certain PP versions. On my windows I eventually kept one Machine stuck on PP CC2018 and it has performed completely flawless without any single crash, it was/is the most stable version for me on Windows.
Newer Adobe-Cloud versions just kept on turning out being very buggy, with crashing becoming the normality of the day... (super frustrating..)

Adobe loves to introducing new features... yet seem to lack to first focus on stabilizing the software and really crushing the bugs (of which some are there like 'forever')
I'd rather have them making it work much better as a whole, then giving us new features all the time.



So 'why Premiere's Intel version?
Simply because I can cope with having slower export speeds, but not with having a super laggy/buggy edit-workspace to work with.

That's why I was curious to see how the stability was on the new Apple silicon mac, with different/older Intel versions of PP to see how 'stable' they performed under Rosetta2

A few intel versions seem to work nicely stable without crashing, ..the biggest gripe is the much slower startup time with Rosetta2,... but once it's all started up I am rather surprised at how they perform.

Hopefully Adobe will improve the native version, ..yes, in speed, but even more so in stability.

--In the mean-time I'm also re-learning FCPX on the side, (having only realy tried it in the early beginning)
FCPX or DavinciResolve might turn me over to change ship in NLE.. but that all depends on Adobe their effort in really making their software more stable.

 

[Analog Kid]

I agree. Apart from hijacking the thread (he may not have understood forum etiquette), the comparison is somewhat stretched.

I think his point was that he was "sold" an unrealistic expectation that the M1 Max could match a powerful desktop setup, and in his defence, the way some YouTube channels were singing the praises of the M1 Pro/Max, this is understandable.

In the end he found that there is no "silver bullet" where you can spend $5000 and magically get the performance of a $20,000 system.

In general, these kind of comparisons are meaningless unless you specify exactly what workloads you are running and what your specific use cases and requirements are.

A lot of people get hung up on benchmarks and specs, when the only salient question is how fast machine X can do your work. If it's faster than machine Y, and costs a similar amount, then you probably have your answer. If machine X is a bit slower, but a lot cheaper than machine Y, then you have to decide how much that speed is worth to you. For some people it is not worth spending 4 times the money to work 4 times faster. For others it will be.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that there are faster machines than Apple laptops with M1 Max. Whether you want or need these depends on individual circumstances.

That's why I'm hoping this thread gets some legitimate discussion. The difference between 24 and 32 GPU cores seems incremental in both performance and price-- but if the performance doesn't matter, why not go with 16 cores? It's an odd middle ground. I'll be curious to see what people's hands on experiences are.

 

[alien3dx]

Lol, the person whom ehm2 should at least wait for the mac pro version equivilant "Workstation" .Sometimes, you can outsource processing to data centre/cloud if possible.It all depend on people and idea how to overcome the problem.

 

[TracerAnalog]

There was an Apple MacBook Pro version 16 only (M1 Max 10C CPU, 32C GPU, 64GB RAM, 8TB SSD). Sold in exactly one month. Too weak and slow for my tasks. I don’t want to mess with M1 anymore.
Collected the assembly. The sky and the earth in comparison with M1))) And I have no regrets.
intel i9 12900KF -5.2GHz
DDR5- 128Gb
Asus ROG MAXIMUS Z690 EXTREME
2x RTX3090
4TB SSD m2 (Windows 11 and software)
HDD- 400TB

How’s the battery life on that beast?

 

[Tagbert]

That's why I'm hoping this thread gets some legitimate discussion. The difference between 24 and 32 GPU cores seems incremental in both performance and price-- but if the performance doesn't matter, why not go with 16 cores? It's an odd middle ground. I'll be curious to see what people's hands on experiences are.

The reason why there is a 24 core version is that Apple lays out the chip to make a 32 core version. Then they make the chips and test them individually. With that many cores there is a chance that one or more will fail the tests. If they do, then they are disabled. To keep the number of variants under control, they settle on a target of 24 cores and if any cores fail, they disable that plus enough to get to 24. That doesn't mean that it is a failed chip. chips are designed with modular units, in part, because defects happen and they can do this kind of disabling to avoid throwing the whole chip away. They could do a 16 core chip but that would probably be done with a different, smaller layout and would cost more than it was worth to have a different chip just for that purpose.

 

[throAU]

Yet... it restarts randomly, never finishes indexing all the things, finder will randomly quit and not be able to be restarted, instead showing a white dot flash under the icon for a moment as it closes again. Lol. Bluetooth randomly doesn't connect my to my sony's as well. When I do ask it to restart, it can take up to 15 minutes.

I assume it's all Monterey bugs honestly. No idea.

I had a couple of bugs in Monterey 12.0 but 12.1 for me has been pretty solid so far.

Random re-starts are not a thing for me, if you keep seeing them and other problems, I'd return the machine - I don't think its Monterey.

I've had maybe 1-2 unexpected re-starts since picking mine up in early November.

 

[StoneJack]

Morale
Wait for macpro M for alder lake comparisons
Meanwhile enjoy your MacBook pro
It is not fastest computer on earth but it is fine for its price

 

[Fomalhaut]

That's why I'm hoping this thread gets some legitimate discussion. The difference between 24 and 32 GPU cores seems incremental in both performance and price-- but if the performance doesn't matter, why not go with 16 cores? It's an odd middle ground. I'll be curious to see what people's hands on experiences are.

I've seen a few tests on YouTube where the 24-core M1 Max gets very close the 32-core version, especially in the 14" MBP, so I wouldn't say the performance difference is incremental or linear. (I think "Constant Geekery" and "MaxTech" have some tests of the 24 vs 32 core M1 Max).

Personally, I think it's the sweet-spot for the MBP14 - I wanted the M1 Max for the improvements for video editing (and some modest improvements for a few other tasks), but the performance improvement of the 32-core over the 24-core is far smaller than the difference between the 16-core M1 Pro and the 24-core M1 Max - for many GPU tasks, there is an almost linear (50%) improvement with the 24-core, but this improvement drops off significantly with the 32-core. In a few cases the 32-core GPU performed *worse* than the 24-core - probably due to thermal constraints causing the clock-speed to throttle. The battery life on the 24-core version may also be marginally better.