When Apple introduced its new Apple M1 Ultrathe the company’s most powerful internal processor and the flagship of its brand new Mac Studio, it did so with graphics that boasted that this processor was capable of beating the best Intel processor or even the Nvidia’s RTX 3090 GPUall with his own strength.
The graphs produced by Apple, as the company has now used to do in recent years, have been madly labeled with “relative performance” on the Y axis, and it doesn’t tell us what specific tests it runs to get to any. number of uses to then calculate “relative performance”.
Our colleagues at The Verge however managed to get their hands on a Mac Studio, and were able to compare the Apple M1 Ultra chip by noting that, in most tests, actually it is no faster than an RTX 3090as much as Apple would like to say it is.
To hear it said by Apple, the Apple M1 Ultra is a silicon miracle, one that combines the hardware of two M1 Max processors for a single chipset that is nothing more than the “world’s most powerful chip for a personal computer”, and if you’ve just looked at Apple’s charts, you might be tempted to accept those claims.
However, in the moment of truth, things are different, in fact even if the Apple M1 Ultra beat the RTX 3090 system for the “relative” performance of the GPU, while absorbing enormously less power – which, in itself it’s a fantastic result – the same cannot be said for other tests.
But that’s because Apple’s chart is, for lack of a better term, cropped. The company only shows head-to-head for areas where the M1 Ultra and RTX 3090 are competitive against each other, and it’s true – under those circumstances, you’ll get more money with the M1 Ultra than you would. you would do on an RTX 3090.
But what the graph doesn’t show is that while the M1 Ultra’s line pretty much stops there, the RTX 3090 has a lot more power it can draw from.
As you can see, the M1 Ultra is an impressive piece of silicon – it easily outperforms a nearly $ 14,000 Mac Pro or Apple’s most powerful laptop with ease. But it appears Apple is simply not showing the full performance of the competitor it is chasing here: its graph for the 3090 ends at around 320W, while Nvidia’s card has a TDP of 350W (which can be pushed even higher. from peaks in demand or further user changes).
It’s kind of like arguing that since your electric car can use a lot less fuel when driving at 80mph than a Lamborghini, it has a better engine, not to mention the fact that a Lambo can still go twice as fast.
Why pump the Apple M1 Ultra chip so much?
And yes, it’s really impressive that Apple is accomplishing so much with (relatively) so little power. I’m sure Apple’s chart is accurate in showing that at relative power and performance levels, the M1 Ultra does slightly better than the RTX 3090 in that specific comparison. But it’s actually missing the rest of the graph where the 3090’s line tops the M1 Ultra (although it also uses a lot more power).
The fact is, Apple didn’t need to do all this graphics cheating – the M1 Ultra is legitimately something to brag about, and the fact that Apple has managed to merge two disparate chips into a single unit on this scale is an impressive feat. which fruits are apparently in almost every test my colleague Monica Chin has performed for her review.
Apple’s UltraFusion interconnect technology here actually does what it says on the box and offered nearly double the M1 Max in benchmarks and performance tests. Apple taped two M1 Max chips together and actually got twice the performance of the M1 Max. No other chip maker has ever really managed to do that.
It’s great and much more impressive and interesting for Apple to have spent time showing its best cutting edge chip that beat the older Intel computer processors that skipped the last few generations of altered chip or graphics designs that established the M1. Ultra ready for failure under the control of the real world.
It’s okay that Apple’s latest chip can’t beat the most powerful dedicated GPU on the planet! The 3090 is nearly the size of an entire Mac Studio on its own and costs nearly a third more than Apple’s most powerful machine. But I can’t help but want Apple to focus on accurately showing customers the real strengths, benefits and triumphs of the M1 Ultra instead of creating charts that lead us to chase benchmarks that, deep down, Apple needs to know. that can’t match. At least not yet.
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