Can you shed some light on how an unoptimized state of software would lead to the situation of having more graphic cores needing to downclock while running parallel? Or should we see it the other way, that those cores aren’t downclocked they just don’t get to run fully yet?
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Mac Studio Performance - Disappointing News
- Thread starter CodeSpyder
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I was hyped for a M1 Max Mac mini, then Apple dropped the Mac Studio...
Retrospect has me now thinking a M2 Pro-powered Mac mini might be best for what I want to do with it, learning Swift/Swift UI in Xcode & dabbling with Blender...
M2 Pro SoC:
- A15-based
- 12-core CPU (8P/4E)
- 16-core GPU
- 16-core Neural Engine
- 32GB LPDDR5 SDRAM
- 200GB/s UMA
if your expected ship date is before april 14, then you should def cancel
What is significant about April 14 (aside from the fact that it is the day before my birthday)...?
NAB is a week after, kinda hoping Apple shows up pimping the Mac Studio & the latest version of Final Cut Pro (you know, the one used by Apple for all their FCP "benchmarks" at the "Peek Performance" event)...?
If you earn money from working on your computer, the performance gains (and time savings) far outweigh the marginal increase in cost in going from Max to Ultra. Bang for buck is with the Max, which is why most home users will be more than happy with that setup.
One example of this. In the world of composing music with sample libraries (e.g. Spitfire Audio's BBC Symphony Orchestra), serious amateurs want 64GB of memory. Professional composers want 128GB in their desktop. Those people, unless they're buying a Mac Pro, are part of the Ultra target market.
By the by, it's interesting that Apple, at its March 8th event, highlighted the DAW Ableton Live, because Logic is more widely used by composers working on film, television and orchestral scores.
Max Yuryev's segment about Logic and music in his video about the Max and Ultra is embarrassing.
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To the extent that your professional workflow benefits meaningfully from the additional RAM or CPU/GPU horsepower, and to the extent that you spend sufficient time at those margins of capability, sure.
There are plenty of professional workflows that won't benefit materially from double the outlay.
Apple does mass deployments through a business division that I imagine negotiates on price.
For an individual/small business making money from his computer, which is what @fcracer appears to be talking about, it may indeed be the case that "the performance gains (and time savings) far outweigh the marginal increase in cost in going from Max to Ultra". Obviously, it depends on what kind of work you're doing and what kind of revenue you're generating.
Also, and to borrow a phrase from Marques Brownlee, for some people the Ultra may well be a "mini Mac Pro" that could save them a fair amount in capital expenditure.
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When you depreciate and amortize the costs of these computers over time, the difference between Max and Ultra is relatively small, especially if the Ultra can provide utility to the business for a longer period of time than the Max.
I actually got a Apple Business MyAccess account, though it is more for small business not "mass deployment" that is enterprise. The typical discount on SME side is 7% for "old" devices, and for the case of new devices with limited supply like the MBP 14" 16" and now the Studio, they are not discounted at all (no matter how large the order quantity is).
And in my mid size business perspective, the Ultra asking price of at least $1400 over the Max config needs to be proven to give more performance than what we see now to be justified, for the given tasks that we will use it for.
It also doesn't help that I have yet to receive my BTO config orders for test units. This is like the only reason people like us are looking at videos like Max Tech's to make wild conjectures since we can't even test this ourselves yet.
You can honestly learn swift and swiftUI on a MacBook Air if you want friend. My companies very big app was bearable on an i7/i9, but anything with even an M1 is flying.
While what you noted it true and this is also how we operate, however, there is another consideration that is a hard budget amount for any given areas of expenses. For instance, if I am to allocate X amount of budget for Mac purchasing down the 3 year following, the difference between the stock Ultra vs the stock Max is enough for us to deploy an addition fleet of base 14" MBP replacing the Intel ones we were using.
Indeed, good point. It’s always frustrating when short term budget goals trump potentially better long term decisions. Either way, Max or Ultra, there will be a lot less time across the corporate world for washroom and coffee breaks while waiting to render or export
Max Tech is frankly, ridiculous, and should not be taken as anything more than entertainment. If you like his form of entertainment, good for you. I find him annoying AF.
My Ultra with its 64 Core GPU, 128GB of RAM, and 4TB SSD is humming along just fine and impressing me with it's capabilities, while I write this alongside the work it's also doing. If the Ultra isn't enough for you, then you probably have a Linux Desktop with a 3090 or better running CUDA someplace other than your desktop if you also appreciate quiet.
If all you do is surf YouTube, write your hot takes on forums after watching those YouTube, browse the web and check your email, you don't need an Ultra and don't need to worry about any potential problems Max Tech thinks he's found.
My Ultra with its 64 Core GPU, 128GB of RAM, and 4TB SSD is humming along just fine and impressing me with it's capabilities, while I write this alongside the work it's also doing. If the Ultra isn't enough for you, then you probably have a Linux Desktop with a 3090 or better running CUDA someplace other than your desktop if you also appreciate quiet.
If all you do is surf YouTube, write your hot takes on forums after watching those YouTube, browse the web and check your email, you don't need an Ultra and don't need to worry about any potential problems Max Tech thinks he's found.
Couldn't agree more with pretty much everything
Let me say first off, I know I'm not the intended market for the Studio Ultra, but I bought one anyway just to evaluate for my own workflows. I don't edit videos, compose/create music or any photography, I just would like significant CPU resources to speed my workflows up. To be honest, I'd probably benefit more from multiple M2 Mac Minis than the Studio Ultra, single core speed would effect most of my workflows more than just more of the same cores.
However, one of the tasks I regularly undertake is Handbrake re-encoding and this is where I wanted/expected to see a massive performance increase, else the Ultra was going back before the 14 days.
Initially, it didn't blow my socks off. It was certainly quicker than an M1 Mini (1080p H.264 -> 1080p H.265 (10bit) using VideoToolBox hardware encoder), the M1 averages around 190fps, the Ultra 310fps. With the M1, the CPU looked like the bottleneck, with the Ultra, CPU was certainly not, so I'm assuming the H.265 media engine was.
However, running 2-4 Handbrake encodes in parallel does redline the CPU and yields over 520fps, with 3 in my case performing the best. My test dataset of 1hr 58min of video runtime of various 1080p and 4k test files went from 44min encode time on the M1 down to 19min single thread on the Ultra, down to just over 12 mins as 3 threads.
The reason for mentioning any of this is that FCP will surely be using the same VTB encoding APIs as Handbrake and unless it's optimised to break the encode into multiple threads across multiple encoder engines, most of the capability of the 4x engines will go to waste. Like is said, I don't use FCP and have no idea whether it does split encodes already across multiple engines, but most of the videos I've watched demonstrating its' speed concentrate on how it performs with filters and effects and utilises the power of the CPU and the GPUs while exporting a single piece of video, but fundamentally it appears from what I'm seeing, a single media engine is quite easy to overwhelm with the power of the 20 core CPU and can only be exploited through parallelisation of tasks.
Whereas people who edit video are more interested in how Final Cut performs during ... wait for it ... editing. However, showing that takes knowledge of the programme and time and effort, and will only attract viewers who actually understand, and are interested in, editing, and who have an attention span longer than a nanosecond. It's much easier for a "critic" like Max Yuryev to "test" export times. That's far less challenging for both him and his viewers, whose attention he needs to make advertising and "merch" money.
In the real world, people who edit video have better things to do than hover over their computer while Final Cut exports video. For that matter, I can't even remember the last time that I exported video using Final Cut's "share" presets. That's what Compressor is for.
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FCP has been updated to work with the additional media encoders and decoders on the M1 Ultra, however Apple has not yet released that update so the general public running FCP on an M1 Ultra Mac Studio are not yet able to take advantage of that.
At the moment, only Apple Internal and those who received an M1 Ultra Mac Studio review unit from Apple have this updated version per reports.
At the moment, only Apple Internal and those who received an M1 Ultra Mac Studio review unit from Apple have this updated version per reports.
Agreed, there are some awful YouTube reviewers talking about the Mac Studio and M1 processors like they're a 30 year system engineer veteran(Max Tech). It's simply sad the trash that people buy into from YouTub videos. Max Tech has got to be one of the worst!
I enjoy reading everybody's comments. I feel better now about my purchase (if it ever arrives). I'm a retired electrical engineer and an iOS Programmer of minor repute. I am getting into Augmented reality and want to delve into machine learning and metal, so I think I'll be exercising those cores, if not immediately then down the road a bit.
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I found his videos to be quite helpful in understanding the Mac Studio and what limitations it has. Max has certainly provided helpful information which is more than I can say of F-Train.
You will be happy, I have had my Ultra for 3 weeks, I use it most for audio work, some light photo work and video, plus database development with 4th Dimension and FileMaker Pro. So far even though most of the applications I use have not been updated to run natively on the Apple Silicon they still run much faster than on by 2012 12-core intel machine. I am looking forward to the applications I am using to be updated especially my iZotope applications.