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Xiao_Xi

macrumors 68000
Oct 27, 2021
1,627
1,101
For those who were wondering what happened to all the TSMC N3B-based SoCs that Apple had supposedly been making since January, it seems that Apple had Macs in a warehouse since July.
 

Chancha

macrumors 68020
Mar 19, 2014
2,307
2,134
So I got myself an M3 Max binned SKU. Is there a way for me to check how the memory behaves, as in how many DRAM are used or how the physical memory channels are laid out, without tearing the thing down?
 

leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,516
19,664
So I got myself an M3 Max binned SKU. Is there a way for me to check how the memory behaves, as in how many DRAM are used or how the physical memory channels are laid out, without tearing the thing down?

Well, you can measure the peak memory bandwidth, but what good will it do? It’s going to be 350GB/s. We know how many channels there are and how wide the bus is.
 

Chancha

macrumors 68020
Mar 19, 2014
2,307
2,134
Well, you can measure the peak memory bandwidth, but what good will it do? It’s going to be 350GB/s. We know how many channels there are and how wide the bus is.
Guess we just wait for the inevitable teardown videos then. Max Tech and co are going to de-lid it in the next 24 hours for sure.
 

leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,516
19,664
Guess we just wait for the inevitable teardown videos then. Max Tech and co are going to de-lid it in the next 24 hours for sure.

Something that would be interesting is to run a RAM bandwidth test on the CPU, but I don’t know any tools for that…
 

altaic

macrumors 6502a
Jan 26, 2004
711
484
Guess we just wait for the inevitable teardown videos then. Max Tech and co are going to de-lid it in the next 24 hours for sure.
Who is the “co” part of that? Any idea if they’ll post high res die shots? I’m not interested in their analysis, just the photos.
 

Chancha

macrumors 68020
Mar 19, 2014
2,307
2,134
Who is the “co” part of that? Any idea if they’ll post high res die shots? I’m not interested in their analysis, just the photos.
This Chinese YouTube channel has been posting extremely high quality teardown of phones and various electronics for a long time, but they are relatively unknown to the west. They do Apple stuff as well. Check for example the Mac Studio and M2 Air teardowns, guy even spent time talking about PSU sources and stuff (at that time people speculated PSU supplier lottery with regards to that noise issue).
 
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Chancha

macrumors 68020
Mar 19, 2014
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Xiao_Xi

macrumors 68000
Oct 27, 2021
1,627
1,101
Something that would be interesting is to run a RAM bandwidth test on the CPU, but I don’t know any tools for that…
I'm not sure how Chips and Cheese tested M2 Pro. Would a similar benchmark work on M3?
 

name99

macrumors 68020
Jun 21, 2004
2,407
2,308
Well, you can measure the peak memory bandwidth, but what good will it do? It’s going to be 350GB/s. We know how many channels there are and how wide the bus is.
Actually we DON'T know what that peak memory bandwidth will be...

On the one hand, the memory may be compressed, so that effective bandwidth is larger than 300GB/s.
On the other hand, that effective bandwidth may not be visible to a cluster (or to compute generally) if the bandwidth between a cluster and the SLC is still capped at around ~100GB/s
On the third hand, maybe that bandwidth is capped higher, since this is a newer SoC.
On the fourth hand, with six rather than four CPUs in a cluster, a higher cluster<->SLC bandwidth makes sense.

So bottom line is
- unless you're willing to do a serious deep dive into the new architecture, testing a lot of different bandwidths under different conditions (multiple threads, GPU bandwidth, compressible vs incompressible data sets, etc) you're unlikely to be able to conclude much of interest or validity from a single number derived from code you can't modify and control.

What COULD be done to investigate this, by amateurs, is on a low-end machine (ie an 8GB machine) create the scenarios that people claim lead to thrashing on these machines (which appears to be something like create 20 tabs in Chrome), do the same thing on an M2 equivalent 8GB machine, and see if there is a noticeable difference.

I don't think you can do a perfect investigation right now; the memory footprints between the M3 Pro and M2 generation don't quite match. But you could try this sort of thing and at least see what happens, if there is a noticeable performance drop at, say 1.5x as many tabs, or if you can go quite a bit further (which would suggest some sort of transparent [non-page-based!] memory compression.
 

leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,516
19,664
Actually we DON'T know what that peak memory bandwidth will be...

Good point! Once I get my Max I will try to do a very naive GPU bandwidth test, curious what it will show.

By the way, would you be so kind to point me to a resource you trust that deals with benchmarking cache sizes? I’d like to write my own tool but I’m very new to the topic.
 

name99

macrumors 68020
Jun 21, 2004
2,407
2,308
Good point! Once I get my Max I will try to do a very naive GPU bandwidth test, curious what it will show.

By the way, would you be so kind to point me to a resource you trust that deals with benchmarking cache sizes? I’d like to write my own tool but I’m very new to the topic.

You can look at my code dump at
https://github.com/name99-org/AArch64-Explore .

It should be fairly obvious how to modify the code to get timings for reading (or writing) successively larger buffers.


I think I even created two sets of buffers (one all 0, one random data) to see if Apple handled them differently.
(On M1, the answer is no. Or, more precisely, not in a way that's user visible. There's a patent that lines that are all zero are moved around the SoC in a way that uses lower energy, but that doesn't extend on M1 to any sort of compression of all-zero lines in any of the caches, or for DRAM bandwidth.)

But I didn't do any sort of GPU investigation at the time I did that work...
Philip Turner did some GPU benchmarking here (though I disagree with some of his analysis as to what his numbers mean...)
You may find it a fun project to compile his code and replicate his work :)

 

leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,516
19,664
You can look at my code dump at
https://github.com/name99-org/AArch64-Explore .

It should be fairly obvious how to modify the code to get timings for reading (or writing) successively larger buffers.

Thanks, will have a look!

Philip Turner did some GPU benchmarking here (though I disagree with some of his analysis as to what his numbers mean...)

Yeah, I've been working on my own tests for a while. Philipp did some great work, but I have difficulty understanding some the terminology and methods he uses (in particular, his mention of "N-issue" is in conflict with my comprehension of how these GPUs work).
 

KenkoPa

Suspended
Nov 8, 2023
28
19
For those who were wondering what happened to all the TSMC N3B-based SoCs that Apple had supposedly been making since January, it seems that Apple had Macs in a warehouse since July.
Wow! That's very expensive inventory cost. At most it should be 1 month worth of stocks.
 

kiranmk2

macrumors 68000
Oct 4, 2008
1,665
2,307
So I got myself an M3 Max binned SKU. Is there a way for me to check how the memory behaves, as in how many DRAM are used or how the physical memory channels are laid out, without tearing the thing down?
Do you have a Geekbench 6 score for this? I haven't seen any results for the binned/14-core version as Apple sent out the 16-core version for reviews.
 

Chancha

macrumors 68020
Mar 19, 2014
2,307
2,134
Do you have a Geekbench 6 score for this? I haven't seen any results for the binned/14-core version as Apple sent out the 16-core version for reviews.
They did send out some, but only few, the scores could be filtered out on GB website search by the Mac15,11 identifier.
Anyway mine scored:
single: 3203
multi-core: 19483
Metal: 122732
OpenCL: 75813
 

MayaUser

macrumors 68040
Nov 22, 2021
3,177
7,196
@leman do you think in the next 20 years , arm based systems can be a viable option for the servers centres ?
I mean nowadays these full servers buildings are requiring so much pure water and top filtrations systems that cost my goodness ...
 
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leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,516
19,664
@leman do you think in the next 20 years , arm based systems can be a viable option for the big servers centres ?!
I mean nowadays these full servers buildings are requiring so much pure water and top filtrations systems that cost my goodness ...

Why next twenty years? They are viable today. You can buy cloud compute time on Amazon ARM for cheap.

But I’m not sure that the environmental impact of servers will change much because of ARM. For example, Zen4c cores are rather efficient as well…
 

MayaUser

macrumors 68040
Nov 22, 2021
3,177
7,196
Why next twenty years? They are viable today. You can buy cloud compute time on Amazon ARM for cheap.

But I’m not sure that the environmental impact of servers will change much because of ARM. For example, Zen4c cores are rather efficient as well…
i mean in UK for example just for the water and electricity to hold 3 buildings full of servers (main data centre) (not arm based) costs around 350 mil pounds/year
I wonder with more efficient arm based systems that by cutting some water and electricity the bill can be cut also in half or neat that?!
 

leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,516
19,664
i mean in UK for example just for the water and electricity to hold 3 buildings full of servers (main data centre) (not arm based) costs around 350 mil pounds/year
I wonder with more efficient arm based systems that by cutting some water and electricity the bill can be cut also in half or neat that?!

If you compare something like Graviton3 to Intel Xeons, easily. Graviton3 vs newest EPYC, probably not so much.
 
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