Recent content by Sofronis

  1. Sofronis

    Apple Announces M1 Ultra CPU, Mac Studio and Studio Display

    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...
  2. Sofronis

    Apple Announces M1 Ultra CPU, Mac Studio and Studio Display

    I'm mostly referring to the ProRes accelerators (basically apple integrated the Afterburner card into the SoC) which isn't something the average user would need. Then again, I think that the Mac Studio is mostly targeted at video editors/creators, since they are the ones that can take advantage...
  3. Sofronis

    Apple Announces M1 Ultra CPU, Mac Studio and Studio Display

    First of all, pastrychef, I'm not criticizing you or your decisions. I have nothing but respect for you. Nothing wrong with them; I was remarking upon the fact that performance in FCPX isn't really a fair "apples to apples" comparison to draw general conclusions about performance. Indeed they...
  4. Sofronis

    Apple Announces M1 Ultra CPU, Mac Studio and Studio Display

    M1 integrates specialized accelerators for video creation/processing so it makes sense that it is faster that a generalized CPU. It was basically designed for this use case. You maxed out the DIMM slots and max supported RAM size from the get-go, so you wouldn't be able to upgrade even if you...
  5. Sofronis

    New Apple Silicon Macs: MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini

    Isn't that the quintessence of great marketing? To make you want things you don't need? I can't remember the times I bought junk I didn't need, just because they were on sale, "50% off and it's only for today and there's limited supply, hurry!" or because I was procrastinating on doing...
  6. Sofronis

    New Apple Silicon Macs: MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini

    Hopefully not. DDR4 consumes very little power and doesn't need much cooling, if at all (unless you start overclocking it). This is more so with DDR5 and especially so with the LPDDR4X that Apple uses, which was specifically designed for embedded use. I know that I've started to sound like a...
  7. Sofronis

    New Apple Silicon Macs: MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini

    The RAM performs similarly to a high-end dual channel 4266 MHz kit, albeit it seems at higher latency. In my view, the on-package placement has more to do with energy efficiency and space/component/cost optimization, than with performance. The big performance driver is the core architecture...
  8. Sofronis

    New Apple Silicon Macs: MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini

    In all likelihood, at the end of 2022 Apple will move to 3nm, where I believe we'll see significant improvements. Also, ARM's new Armv9 ISA should be announced soon. Exponential growth though is, by its very nature, unsustainable. Eventually performance improvements will start tapering off. It...
  9. Sofronis

    New Apple Silicon Macs: MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini

    Yes, exactly. So now under the same heatsink that was cooling 28 cores before, you can put 64 high efficiency cores or you can make the heatsink much smaller and only cool e.g. 16 cores. Wouldn't the former be better than the latter for a performance oriented machine? Shaving a couple of liters...
  10. Sofronis

    New Apple Silicon Macs: MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini

    The thing that troubles me, is that they tried that with the Mac Pro and it didn't turn out very well. They admitted it was a mistake ("we painted ourselves into a thermal corner" they said) and gave us a big Mac Pro with lots or expansion space and thermal headroom. Now they want to make it...
  11. Sofronis

    New Apple Silicon Macs: MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini

    I didn't say that the M1 Macs are overpriced; at least not until you try to spec them up, which many might be forced to do, due to the complete lack of upgradeability. The point I was trying to make, which I probably failed to convey, is that this vertical integration and performance/efficiency...
  12. Sofronis

    New Apple Silicon Macs: MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini

    Demanding professionals and enthusiasts with heavy compute workloads, want flexibility and as much compute power as possible. You can't really offer that in a MacBook or a Mac mini. If they can't have it and they're not attached to macOS for some reason, they'll move to Linux/Windows (if they...
  13. Sofronis

    New Apple Silicon Macs: MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini

    Yes I think you're very right about this, but I believe that they moved fast not so much to meet the deadline, but to get quickly something inexpensive (they even reduced the price) to the hands of developers, so they can start porting their apps. Like you said, it's more like a DTK for the...
  14. Sofronis

    pastrychef's Asus ROG Strix Z370-G Gaming (WI-FI AC) build w/ i9-9900K + AMD 6600 XT

    I've also been getting kernel panics on wake from sleep under 10.15.4, but with my iGPU, boot will fail without WhateverGreen (some error about gfx firmware). So I disabled HDMI audio altogether (since I don't need it) by editing the BIOS with RU.efi and that seems to have fixed it (I followed...
  15. Sofronis

    2019 Mac Pro is Now Available at Apple.com

    Mac Pro benchmarks had started popping up in Geekbench charts, so I decided to test this hypothesis; although we probably shouldn't draw too many conclusions (Geekbench is a synthetic benchmark and systems/scores vary). I selected two Geekbench 5 CPU scores that are closest to the median for an...
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