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0 pointsKingOfCoders1y ago0 comments

[If you're a laptop user, scroll down the thread for laptop Rust compile times, M3 Pro looks great]

You're misguided.

Apple has excellent Notebook CPUs. Apple has great IPC. But AMD and Intel have easily faster CPUs.

https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=...

Blender Benchmark

      AMD Ryzen 9 7950X (16 core)         560.8
      Apple M2 Ultra (24 cores)           501.82
      Apple M3 Max (12 cores)             408.27
      Apple M3 Pro                        226.46
      Apple M3                            160.58

It depends on what you're doing.

I'm a software developer using a compiler that 100%s all cores. I like fast multicore.

      Apple Mac Pro, 64gb, M2 Ultra, $7000
      Apple Mac mini, 32gb, M2 Pro, 2TB SSD, $2600

[Edit2] Compare to: 7950x is $500 and a very fast SSD is $400, fast 64gb is $200, very good board is $400 so I get a very fast dev machine for ~$1700 (0,329 p/$ vs. mini 0,077 p/$)

[Edit] Made a c&p mistake, the mini has no ultra.

0 comments

aurareturn1y ago

That seems wrong.

Though Blender may have an optimization for avx512 but not for SME or Neon.

But the vast majority will use GPUs to do rendering for Blender.

Try SPEC or its close consumer counterpart, Geekbench.

As an anecdote, all my Python and Node.js applications run faster on Apple Silicon than Zen4. Even my multithread Go apps seem to run better on Apple Silicon.

arp2421y ago

Now you're just asserting things unencumbered by even the slightest evidence.

On Passmark Apple CPUs are pretty far down the list.

On Geekbench I gave up after scrolling a few pages.

And "run faster on Apple Silicon than Zen4" means nothing. On the low end you have fairly cheap Ryzen 3 laptop chips, and on the high end you have Threadripper behemoths.

aurareturn1y ago

Passmark is a pretty bad CPU benchmark. It generally has poor correlation.

I would stick to SPEC and Geekbench.

Even Cinebench 2024 isn't too bad nowadays though R23 was quite poor in correlation.

In general, not only are Apple Silicon CPUs faster than AMD consumer CPUs, but they're 2-4x more power efficient as well.

2 more replies

KingOfCodersOP1y ago

"But the vast majority will use GPUs to do rendering for Blender."

And the argument is, you can't use Blender to compare CPU performance because of that?

"Even my multithread Go apps seem to run better on Apple Silicon."

As a Go developer, I'd love to hear your story: How much faster does your Apple Silicon compile compare to a Zen4 (e.g. the 7950x?)? For example 100k lines of Go code.

I might switch back to Apple again (used Apple for 20+ years), if it's faster at compilation speed.

hajile1y ago

M4 is looking pretty interesting. Near 10% IPC uplift and they bumped the e-core on the base M4, so we're probably looking at the same 12 p-cores for the M4 max, but likely going from 4 to 12 e-cores (two of the 6-core complexes).

In multithreaded workloads, 2 of their current e-cores are roughly equivalent to 1 p-core, so that would represent the equivalent of 4 extra p-cores.

resource_waste1y ago

> How much faster does your Apple Silicon compile compare to a Zen4 (e.g. the 7950x?)?

Good ol, compare a $400 piece of equipment with a $3000 piece of equipment. I wonder what will win. (unironically, most of the time, the $3000 piece of equipment doesnt win)

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tsimionescu1y ago

On Geekbench, though they are segregated in separate pages so I'm not sure if the comparison is fully correct, the M2Ultra is behind the top 3 PC processors (2 Intel and 1 AMD) for multi-core, and it is indeed the best at single core.

KingOfCodersOP1y ago

Yes see the GB6 benchmarks for compilation

    M2 Ultra   233.9 Klines/sec
    7950x      230.3 Klines/sec  
    14900K     215.3 Klines/sec  
    M3 Max     196.5 Klines/sec

are nearly the same.

rubin551y ago

Would that be comparing to Windows on Zen4 or to Linux on Zen4? On Windows I've noted that especially forking performance takes a big hit which causes many dynamic languages that do stuff with say invoking a runtime binary being 100s of times slower on windows (tried with bash and python).

hajile1y ago

There's something wrong with your M3 Max stuff. I believe it comes in 14 and 16-core variants while the M3 Pro comes in 11 and 12-core variants.

In any case, M3 Max uses less than 55w of power in CPU-only workloads while a desktop 7950x peaked out at 332w of power according to Guru3D (without an OC).

The fact that M2 Ultra hits so close while peaking out at only around 100w of CPU power is pretty crazy (M2 Ultra doesn't even hit 300w with all CPU and GPU cores maxed out).

KingOfCodersOP1y ago

Yes you're right the M3 Max has 14/16 and the M3 Pro 11/12 cores.

wtallis1y ago

> Blender Benchmark

Maybe use a benchmark that actually makes sense for CPUs, rather than something that's always much faster on a GPU (eg. M3 Pro as any sane user would use it for Blender is 2.7x the performance of a Ryzen 7950X, not 0.4x).

> Apple Mac mini, 32gb, M2 Ultra, 2TB SSD, $2600

Not a real thing. You meant M2 Pro, because the Max and Ultra chips aren't available in the Mac mini.

KingOfCodersOP1y ago

I would love to quote a compiler comparison, but I don't know a good and accepted compiler benchmark. What would you use as a compiler benchmark? (Preferably Go, but I assume Rust would be better, as it is much slower, so the differences are bigger)

(corrected my c&p mistake with the mini, thanks)

phonon1y ago

You can look at the Geekbench 6 component.

https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench6-benchmark-internals... (page 18)

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JonChesterfield1y ago

Building clang using itself is a reasonable approximation to a compiler benchmark, speaking as someone who spends a depressing fraction of his life doing that over and over for permutations of the source code. That's somewhere in the five to ten minutes range on a decent single socket system.

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codewithcheese1y ago

Think chromium compile is widely used

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bee_rider1y ago

Is blender 100% GPU now? Last time I used it, there were multiple renderers available, and it wasn’t a 100% win to switch to GPU. IIRC the cpu did better in ray tracing(?). This was a couple years ago though so things may have changed or I might not be recalling correctly.

wtallis1y ago

I think GPU rendering was always faster as long as you had a supported GPU. Now that the Cycles renderer has support for all the major GPU APIs/vendors, the only reasons to render on the CPU are if you don't have a half-decent GPU, or if your scene doesn't fit in your GPU's memory. Neither of those are a concern on Apple systems.

At least on NVIDIA hardware, Blender can use the GPU's raytracing capabilities rather than just the general-purpose GPU compute capabilities. Which means it doesn't take a very expensive GPU at all to outperform high-end CPUs.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

aurareturn1y ago

That seems wrong.

Though Blender may have an optimization for avx512 but not for SME or Neon.

But the vast majority will use GPUs to do rendering for Blender.

Try SPEC or its close consumer counterpart, Geekbench.

As an anecdote, all my Python and Node.js applications run faster on Apple Silicon than Zen4. Even my multithread Go apps seem to run better on Apple Silicon.

arp2421y ago

Now you're just asserting things unencumbered by even the slightest evidence.

On Passmark Apple CPUs are pretty far down the list.

On Geekbench I gave up after scrolling a few pages.

And "run faster on Apple Silicon than Zen4" means nothing. On the low end you have fairly cheap Ryzen 3 laptop chips, and on the high end you have Threadripper behemoths.

aurareturn1y ago

Passmark is a pretty bad CPU benchmark. It generally has poor correlation.

I would stick to SPEC and Geekbench.

Even Cinebench 2024 isn't too bad nowadays though R23 was quite poor in correlation.

In general, not only are Apple Silicon CPUs faster than AMD consumer CPUs, but they're 2-4x more power efficient as well.

2 more replies

KingOfCodersOP1y ago

"But the vast majority will use GPUs to do rendering for Blender."

And the argument is, you can't use Blender to compare CPU performance because of that?

"Even my multithread Go apps seem to run better on Apple Silicon."

As a Go developer, I'd love to hear your story: How much faster does your Apple Silicon compile compare to a Zen4 (e.g. the 7950x?)? For example 100k lines of Go code.

I might switch back to Apple again (used Apple for 20+ years), if it's faster at compilation speed.

hajile1y ago

In multithreaded workloads, 2 of their current e-cores are roughly equivalent to 1 p-core, so that would represent the equivalent of 4 extra p-cores.

resource_waste1y ago

> How much faster does your Apple Silicon compile compare to a Zen4 (e.g. the 7950x?)?

Good ol, compare a $400 piece of equipment with a $3000 piece of equipment. I wonder what will win. (unironically, most of the time, the $3000 piece of equipment doesnt win)

1 more reply

tsimionescu1y ago

KingOfCodersOP1y ago

Yes see the GB6 benchmarks for compilation

    M2 Ultra   233.9 Klines/sec
    7950x      230.3 Klines/sec  
    14900K     215.3 Klines/sec  
    M3 Max     196.5 Klines/sec

are nearly the same.

rubin551y ago

hajile1y ago

There's something wrong with your M3 Max stuff. I believe it comes in 14 and 16-core variants while the M3 Pro comes in 11 and 12-core variants.

In any case, M3 Max uses less than 55w of power in CPU-only workloads while a desktop 7950x peaked out at 332w of power according to Guru3D (without an OC).

The fact that M2 Ultra hits so close while peaking out at only around 100w of CPU power is pretty crazy (M2 Ultra doesn't even hit 300w with all CPU and GPU cores maxed out).

KingOfCodersOP1y ago

Yes you're right the M3 Max has 14/16 and the M3 Pro 11/12 cores.

wtallis1y ago

> Blender Benchmark

> Apple Mac mini, 32gb, M2 Ultra, 2TB SSD, $2600

Not a real thing. You meant M2 Pro, because the Max and Ultra chips aren't available in the Mac mini.

KingOfCodersOP1y ago

(corrected my c&p mistake with the mini, thanks)

phonon1y ago

You can look at the Geekbench 6 component.

https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench6-benchmark-internals... (page 18)

1 more reply