https://wccftech.com/apple-m2-ultra-soc-isnt-faster-than-amd-intel-last-year-desktop-cpus-50-slower-than-nvidia-rtx-4080/
4 replies (most recent on top)
"The ultra isn’t in laptops. The ultra in the Mac Pro starts at 7 grand"
You could also have said it's in a Mac Studio starting at $4K and the size of the smallest SFF with an almost silent operation but decided to cherry pick a data point to mislead. How many equivalent SFF fit those Intel CPU's and RTX 4080's with no fan noise ?
It has a niche where you can use 128GB to 192GB of high bandwidth memory available to both CPU and GPU.
There’s probably some 3D rendering or video production use cases that simply aren’t possible on any PC.
But it’s very niche.
High volume profit center for macs are the laptops.
The ultra isn’t in laptops. The ultra in the Mac Pro starts at 7 grand, if you’re going to pay a 4 grand premium, is 200$ of extra power over its lifetime really that important?
I have a m2 Max, the battery life is awe inspiring. M2 ultra doesn’t best the competition for its use case.
CPUs are intentionally engineered for a target market. When engineering the M2, Apple had a certain market in mind, and design and performance trade-offs were made accordingly. Power efficiency seems to be a big priority.
The M2 Ultra has a TDP of 60W. The i9-13900K has a base consumption of 125W, and draws up to 253W under stress. So do the math. Intel achieves 32% better single-core performance and 41% better multi-core performance (Cinebench) for 422% of Apple's power consumption. If there's something impressive here, it's that Apple is able to do so much with so little.
If Apple wanted to, they could probably conjoin two M2 Ultra's and soundly beat the i9-13900K by a considerable margin and still use about half the same power to do so.
The real question is why any consumer would need that much compute, and the target market for such a niche is probably very small which is why Apple didn't do that