Can the new higher end Chips increase in performance with more wattage…? At the moment we’ve only seen CPU cores @ 3.2GHz and GPU @ 1.3GHz With a 60/90 watt limit laptop enclosure. Does anyone know if they can be pushed/allowed to go higher with increased wattage that would be possible in a 200Watt 5K iMac chassis…? Nothing crazy mind you…maybe 3.5GHz CPU and 1.8GHz GPU.
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M1 Pro and M1 Max power scaling
- Thread starter Rickroller
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Not sure, but I would suggest that if Apple wanted more performance at a higher power draw, Apple would be far better going for more cores. A 16 P-core CPU with 64-core GPU would draw 200W after a minor overclock compared to the MBPs.
The extra performance you would get out of pushing the M1 Pro/Max up to 200W would be minimal, because you get VERY poor scaling. Something like a square or even cubed relationship between power and performance.
Alternatively, something interesting would be a higher-performance, single-thread, high power core. Basically an 'X-core' to run single-thread stuff, complementing the existing E and P-cores. Probably unlikely to happen though, and the existing single-thread performance of the M1 P-cores is already exceptional.
The extra performance you would get out of pushing the M1 Pro/Max up to 200W would be minimal, because you get VERY poor scaling. Something like a square or even cubed relationship between power and performance.
Alternatively, something interesting would be a higher-performance, single-thread, high power core. Basically an 'X-core' to run single-thread stuff, complementing the existing E and P-cores. Probably unlikely to happen though, and the existing single-thread performance of the M1 P-cores is already exceptional.
In that case Apple would be better off creating a DUO type version of these Pro and Max chips. I could imaging a back to back package could be what they try, as at least the cooling system would be in the same area. And yes that would make pretty good sense as it’ll allow them to meet 2x performance inside 200 or so watts for a possible M1 Max DUO system. This of course brings into questionn the unit cost of these chips.
Agreed. Has anyone done a deep dive into high power mode yet? I suspect it just keeps all cores and other units in an active state rather than sleep or deep sleep, so the cores don’t take time powering up.
The AnandTech reviewer mentioned in a comment that the geekbench benchmarks didn’t do well because the GPUs didn’t have time to be fully utilized. However, he didn’t try high power mode out.
It’d be nice to see a comparison of the different power modes. Also a deeper dive into what they’re actually configuring— should be a fun little reverse engineering project.
That’s what the desktop/workstation class Jade 2C SoC is supposed to be. To take it even further, there is also a rumored Jade 4C SoC which I’ll leave to your imagination.
I’ve seen/heard the Jade C rumors, but is there a reason Apple won’t make DUO version of the M1 Pro…? In some cases you might want more CPU cores, but would be forced to get the extra GPU cores if they only made the 2C and 4C systems out of the Max version. So hypothetically 16+4 CPU with 32 GPU cores. Also although I can see how they could put a DUO package together, I’m not sure they can stitch four into one node, so it’ll be going back to the future with the Mac Pro being able to be built with 2 x DUO chips.
Folks with a background in chip design have speculated that Apple utilizes low-power logical gates that would give it an advantage in energy efficiency at the expense of clock range. From all we have seen, 3.2ghz seems to be the limit for Firestorm CPUs. It won’t go higher no matter what.