this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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Apple today announced the new Mac Studio, the most powerful Mac ever made, featuring M4 Max and the new M3 Ultra chip.

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[–] jarfil 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

M3 Ultra chip with 32-core CPU, 80‑core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine, 512 RAM

That RAM is nice, but core count doesn't say much at this point: there are different cores with different architectures, multithreading, pipelining, caches, speeds, etc.

I'd rather see a TOPS comparison:

  • M3: claims 18 TOPS
  • M4: up to 38 TOPS
  • nVidia H100: up to 3900 TOPS/TFLOPS (INT8/FP8)

Meta is claiming to have 350,000 H100s, to put things into perspective.

[–] IrritableOcelot 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I mean, sure, but largely GPU-based TOPS isn't that good a comparison with a CPU+GPU mixture. Most tasks can't be parallelized that well, so comparing TOPS between an APU and a TPU/GPU is not apples to apples (heh).

[–] jarfil 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Agreed, but my point is that stating "x-core CPU, y-core GPU, z-core NPU", is basically non-information.

  • CPUs run general logical processing
  • GPUs run integer/float matrices
  • NPUs run minimal effort matrices for inference

I'd like to see the TOPS for each of those, instead of a "core count" that tells me nothing about actual performance. Even the TOPS are orientative... but would be a good start.