Meet Apple's Enormous 20-Core M1 Ultra Processor, the Brains in the New Mac Studio Machine:
Apple on Tuesday announced its highest-end M1 Mac processor to date, a model that links two M1 Max chips together into a single package with 20 processing cores, 64 graphics cores, and support for up to 128GB of memory. The chip, with a remarkable 114 billion transistors, debuted at Apple's March product launch event and powers the high-end $3,999 configuration of the new Mac Studio desktop computer.
The chip uses dedicated circuitry on last year's M1 Max with a high-speed silicon link called UltraFusion to marry the two processors together without a complicated design that would mean problems for programmers, Apple said. It's emblematic of the increasing push across the semiconductor industry to use packaging technology to link smaller chip elements into one larger processor.
UltraFusion employs a technique called a silicon interposer, essentially a layer in the chip package with 10,000 high-speed links between the two slices of silicon. "This is a super clever approach to maximize a mature design," said Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin. Compared to the first-generation M1, the M1 Ultra has seven times as many transistors, the basic electronic building block in a processor.
Apple said a Mac Studio powered by the M1 Ultra is 1.9X faster than an Intel-powered Mac Pro with a 16-core Intel Xeon processor and 1.6X faster than a Mac Pro with a 28-core Xeon, though it didn't detail what speed tests it used. The Mac Studio's high performance comes with a high price tag, but creative pro customers who need to wrestle huge video files or programmers building new software can be willing to pay for top computing horsepower.
The UltraFusion has over twice as many interconnects as my first computer had bytes of RAM.
(Score: 5, Informative) by krishnoid on Thursday March 10 2022, @07:34PM (1 child)
They may not detail which speed tests they used, but there are some comparative benchmarks on the M1 Pro and M1 Max [youtu.be] and a little investigation on the M1 Ultra [youtu.be].
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday March 11 2022, @05:50AM
How does it handle Amdahl's Law? From fast-forwarding through the linked advertorial, it looked like they were mostly running a bunch of stuff intended to show off the capabilities of parallelisable CPU-bound applications.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 10 2022, @08:17PM (6 children)
Right there in the article, the reason why we all need the latest silicon interposers, just to run the damn userland bloat created on high-end developer machines.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday March 10 2022, @08:36PM (5 children)
Got a new M1Max MBP 16 (not with my money, or I wouldn't have gotten it). First thing, install XCode. The bloody thing spent over an HOUR of pure CPU time to just UNPACK that. The App Store App crapped out at 3/4 during initial download, so I read forum posts on how to rectify this, and they all also said to be very patient during the final unpacking phase. I was prepared and had 'top' open. The process actually burned through over an hour of multiscalar 2+ GHz CPU time. Real, "hot", user CPU consumption, not waiting for something (unless it was spinlocking). Wallclock unpacking time was slightly below an hour, because it seemed to be distributed to two cores, but the download before unpacking literally took a full workday (I'm on 6 MBit DSL here).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 10 2022, @09:26PM
Cool story bro
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 10 2022, @09:56PM (1 child)
XCode is not THAT big. What do you think was going on?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Friday March 11 2022, @12:09AM
IDK. There was a process named something like "installhelper" that gobbled up the time at an average of 150% CPU. Maybe a really shitty implementation of the unpacking algorithm?! But it seems to be the normal behaviour. I read that there are separate, non App-Store downloads which quickly (as it goes with that size) unpack. I'm a bit at a loss why it has to be that large. but it comes with full support for no less than seven platforms, TV, Phone, Watch, and Mac with separate simulation for the non-Mac ones. The iPhone platform support alone takes 5GB. That's definitely the "userland bloat" the OP mentioned.
I'm not sure this is all well maintainable, and I have no idea where the Mac steers to. One has to look at the financials, and the Mac is just a fraction of the iPhone, so it gets neglected (cf them not fixing the memory leak in the Monterey Finder search and such). And, anyway, a 10 year old quad Ivy Bridge Retina MBP is as good as any new machine for 95% of imaginable use cases (short of hardcode video crunching or machine learning stuff), so rather than providing an optimal tool, they put their efforts into trying to lock users in cloud subscriptions.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday March 10 2022, @10:21PM
If you watch the release video [youtube.com], they seem to emphasize video performance and capabilities a lot. Hell, they even added an SD-card slot and full-sized HDMI connector back in. I bet they're targeting it at video production more than anything else nowadays.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday March 13 2022, @03:50PM
https://wccftech.com/2022-mac-pro-use-two-m1-ultra-chipsets/ [wccftech.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday March 10 2022, @08:31PM (6 children)
For much of its history, Apple has been a systems integrator, not a hardware designer. The 6502 used in the Apple II line came from a MOS Technology group that splintered from Motorola, and got into IP troubles over that. Wozniak built a system around the 6502, but no one at Apple had any part in the initial 6502 design.
Apple jumped around, using Motorola CPUs, then Intel. Seemed to be more focused on distinguishing themselves through software, most notably, the whole GUI thing with Mac OS up to version 9. Then, for version 10, they dumped their old code base for a fresh start with a BSD code base. But recently, they ditched Intel and produced this M1 chip. Perhaps that move is a logical extension of their success with portable hardware such as their iPads and iPhones.
So I don't know. Where is Apple going? What's next, an "Ultra" SSD? Maybe wall sized 16K touch screen monitors, with Apple modified DisplayPort to handle the immense quantities of data that'd require? Be pretty cool to have a monitor measured in meters, not cm, as long as it isn't budget bustingly expensive. Though I don't know how a person would use that, might need one of those old style barber chairs, on wheels, built to raise the user way up, like in Rabbit of Seville. Something would be figured out.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Thursday March 10 2022, @09:05PM (2 children)
Custom silicon with Threadripper-like performance is pretty deep. It would be deeper if they started purchasing or building their own fabs. I don't see them bothering with SSDs and other commodities.
For screens, they get supplied by companies like Samsung, LG, and BOE.
One thing they want to do is make their own wireless modems [macworld.com] for iPhone, iPad, etc. This would be a big loss for Qualcomm.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 11 2022, @03:18AM (1 child)
Apple makes their own SSD controllers. Marcan (one of the folks reverse engineering the M1 for Asahi Linux) commented on it. They were getting absolute shit performance when doing an fsync from Linux on the Apple SSD. After more investigation, he determined that MacOS has just as shitty performance if you really force a full fsync using a diff syscall on macos, but for the fsync syscall, MacOS just lies and doesn't really sync to the storage, to be faster.
"Apple's custom NVMe drives are amazingly fast - if you don't care about data integrity."
https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1494213855387734019 [twitter.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 11 2022, @09:43PM
What part of Apple doesn't lie?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 10 2022, @10:25PM (1 child)
MacOSX is a Mach kernel with BSD userspace. It is derived from NeXT, not so fresh start, and not so related to FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc. All the Objetive C comes from NeXTSTEP (which, "coincidence", was ported to multiple architectures including Intel).
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Thursday March 10 2022, @11:12PM
Actually, the NeXTSTEP O/S [wikipedia.org] was based on on BSD even though the kernel was different.
I last used Mac OS X about 8 years ago and at the time if you had linux/unix experience and opened up a command prompt you would feel right at home with the CLI and commands.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 11 2022, @07:54AM
Let me clue you in: "budget bustingly expensive" is a synonym for Apple.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday March 10 2022, @10:30PM
This machine has more cores then my first computer had kilobytes of RAM.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 10 2022, @10:37PM (2 children)
So, I could (for two freaking thousand dollars) get one with ... 8GB of RAM.
It's as if they're not even trying any more. This isn't near enough for modern sound libraries working with film or game studios, and to get the bigger one that doesn't even have the theoretical maximum of 128GB (which, judging by their work so far, isn't upgradable without upgrading the whole package) costs twice as much. Oh, and this is unified memory, so it's used for graphics as well, which means that doing things like film cues will be even more restricted than the on-paper maximum.
If all you're doing is chiptune, it doesn't matter. Guess what, you could do that on your phone, but at these prices you'd be better off buying a professional hardware workstation like an Akai Professional MPC X, a sound module like a Roland Integra, and saving the change for a high quality controller, some cables and trimmings, and a steak dinner for two.
Just one more proof that Apple stopped giving a greasy tacoshit about the state of the art in music production somewhere around 2005, if that late.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday March 10 2022, @11:13PM (1 child)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Studio#Specifications [wikipedia.org]
Wrong. For $2k you get 32 GiB of memory. M1 Max can have 32/64, M1 Ultra can have 64/128.
The M1-based products like Mac Mini have a minimum of 8 GiB of memory, and they are down at around $600.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 11 2022, @12:30AM
OK, that's better than we'd feared, but even so for two grand it's not a better deal than a new PC4.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 10 2022, @11:33PM
The real innovation announced yesterday was the $59.99 M1 Ultra iWipe microfiber cloth for cleaning the chip. It consists of two Apple iWipes connected together with Apple's innovative UltraThread. "This is a super clever approach to maximize a mature design," said Creative Strategies Apple Fanboi Ben Bajarin.