User Review of M1 Ultra for Engineering
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I thought this CFD benchmark was very interesting and decided to investigate a little.
First of all, the USM3D CFD software used here, isn't widely available to the public. To download it, you have to register and submit a
request that needs NASA's approval.
CFD computation in general, is a memory bound workload, that quickly saturates memory bandwidth, which of course the M1 Ultra has in spades in order to feed its massive GPUs.
The M1 Max has a total of 409GB/s of memory bandwidth for the GPU, but only 224GB/s (204GB/s for the Pro) is available to the CPU performance cores. You can read more
here.
So the M1 Ultra has 448GB/s of aggregate bandwidth for its 16 performance cores (those were used in the test), compared to the Mac Pro's
~85GB/s for its 28 cores, which explains this huge performance delta. As a side note, CFD is also well suited for GPU acceleration and
NASA notes 4x-8x faster compute using Nvidia GPUs. The USM3D software used in the test above doesn't support GPUs.
I also found some additional benchmarks using the OpenFOAM CFD, from
this thread:
Apple MacBook Pro 16" (2021, 32 GB, M1 Pro)
# cores - time (s)
1 - 458.33
2 - 257.38
4 - 145.35
6 - 118.88
8 - 98.11
Core i5-12600 DDR5 6000
# cores - time (s)
1 - 399.94
2 - 213.75
4 - 131.87
6 - 107.09
Ryzen 7 5800X3D 2x8GB DDR4 3800
# cores - time (s)
1 - 304
2 - 188
4 - 135
6 - 124
8 - 122
Unfortunately, most common workloads can't really take advantage of increased CPU memory bandwidth, showing very modest improvements (if at all). For up to ~16 cores, dual channel DDR4/5 seems to be enough for the vast majority of workloads, with the only real-world exception being 7-Zip compression. You can read more
here and
here.
So I have to disagree with the article author that CFD computations are a "
great real world benchmark". Far from it actually. It's a niche scientific/engineering workload.
As to points about modularity or fitness for a purpose, this is a red-herring.
I don't really understand the point you're trying to make comparing Intel/Microsoft/Apple and PC/Mac/Hackintosh.
What I'm saying is that the Mac Pro is a modular computer and the Mac Studio simply isn't and shouldn't be promoted as one; unless we've changed the definition of "modular".
…they've just assumed that Apple has been withholding from them the egalitarian wealth of the PC market for the purposes of claiming a luxury tax.
I know this has been beaten to death, but I just couldn't help myself:
- 980 Pro: 500GB -> 2TB = +$180
- Mac Studio: 500GB -> 2TB = +$600
So like you said: "
customer takes what you give and gets used to it".
As to how FCPX just plays to their strengths? That's the whole damn point!
I'll try to reiterate my point. The large performance gains in FCPX are in part due to specialized video accelerators (i.e. ProRes) made specifically for it. Just because FCPX is e.g. 5x faster, it doesn't mean that everything else will also be 5x faster.
To be clear, I'd be a fool to bash Apple's achievements with the M1 SoCs; they are amazingly power efficient and perfect for battery powered devices. The Pro/Max versions are very well suited for video creators. The pricey M1 Ultra is probably overkill for most users.