Hardware support: Thoughts on Cinebench R23 and Geekbench GPU compute for M1 Ultra or Apple Silicon in general.

Thoughts on Cinebench R23 and Geekbench GPU compute for M1 Ultra or Apple Silicon in general.
Anandtech: Geekbench 5 Compute scores are not accurate for Apple Silicon with 32 or more GPU cores
Is it possible that we'd ever see a true "WiFi Audio" standard?
AMD hiring RISCV role - 145742
TechPowerUp: "AMD Radeon Super Resolution RSR Quality & Performance Review"

Thoughts on Cinebench R23 and Geekbench GPU compute for M1 Ultra or Apple Silicon in general.

Posted: 18 Mar 2022 01:43 AM PDT

tl;dr - They are not fair comparisons against x86 and Nvidia/AMD GPUs

I'm not going to be very deep but just enough to make you guys understand things.

1. Cinebench R23

CR23's render engine uses Intel Embree which is Intel's library to accelerate Ray tracing compute using CPU. It supports various SIMD instruction sets for x86 architecture and among these are SSE or AVX2. AVX2 is Intel's latest SIMD instruction set which is superior to SSE. And, CR23 is AVX heavy, so you know where this is going. Now, ARM's SIMD instruction set is NEON. But Intel Embree obviously doesn't support NEON native implementation. So, CR23 to even run on Apple silicon, Intel Embree needs to be rewritten for ARM64 which thanks to Syoyo Fujita, became possible. Now, SSE or AVX2 intrinsics need to be translated to NEON intrinsics for every application which is a huge pain in the ass. But there's a library, it's a header actually, available to do that but it's only SSE2NEON and not AVX2NEON. Going by the Github comments for Apple's pull request on Intel Embree, Apple is working on bringing AVX2NEON support for Apple silicon. Even after that, I'm not sure if CR23 will be a fair comparison. Intel might introduce a superior SIMD instruction set and then Apple again has to do a pull request on Intel Embree for NEON translation? Man, that's PAIN.

2. Geekbench GPU Compute

First of all, I've seen a few comments here that you can't compare Metal vs CUDA. Not true. Geekbench is a cross-platform benchmark and it's perfectly fine to compare Metal CUDA. What is not a fair comparison is OpenCL comparisons since it's deprecated in macOS. But, the real issue is, for some reason, the GPU compute benchmark doesn't ramp up GPU frequencies or even consume close to maximum power GPU would consume when it's on full load for Apple silicon. How would this be a fair comparison when GPU is not even utilized to its fullest in Apple silicon? This was first noted in M1 Max/M1 Pro review as a comment by u/andreif who is ex Anandtech and currently works at Nuvia.

3. Question(s) you might have

A. If Geekbench GPU compute doesn't work as expected for Apple silicon, how can we compare GPU performance against Nvidia or AMD?

I would highly recommend GFXBench 5.0 Aztec Ruins High Offscreen and 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Unlimited. They both are native to Apple silicon supporting Metal and more importantly, really stress the GPU and give you a clear picture of the performance since they are offscreen tests. But keep in mind, 3DMark is still an iOS app. Not sure if there would be any penalty 'cause of that vs native windows implementation. And, no, SPECviewperf v2.0 doesn't support Metal if you are wondering. Below are the screencaps from Dave2D's and Arstechnica's Mac Studio review:

Dave2D - GFXBench 5.0 Aztec Ruins High

Arstechnica - 3DMark Wild Life Extreme (Unlimited)

B. If Apple Silicon GPUs are so powerful then why Blender benchmarks are underwhelming compared to that of Nvidia?

Two Reasons:

-> Blender 3.1 is just the first stable release supporting Metal in cycles and even Blender themselves in a video going over all the updates said that more performance optimizations for Metal are yet to come. I would definitely expect Apple silicon GPU to match CUDA scores of the latest Nvidia GPUs in blender benchmarks in the future.

-> But that's only in CUDA. Nvidia would still smoke Apple Silicon in Optix 'cause Apple doesn't have anything close to Optix since there are no Ray Tracing cores in Apple GPUs for Metal to take advantage of. I'd love to see Apple package RT cores in their GPU designs and optimize Metal to take advantage of those cores or even write separate API for accelerated ray tracing like Optix.

C. How can we compare the CPU performance of Apple Silicon against an x86 chip if CR23 is not fair?

As a consumer, I really don't know. Maybe, Blender benchmarks using CPU? But if you're a professional, you already know about industry-standard benchmarks like SPEC, SPEint, SPECfp, etc. But I don't think anyone except Anandtech uses these benchmarks and the real problem is these youtubers, man. It's just painful to watch and even more painful to read the comments of the viewers who take these benchmarks results as if it's all that matters when buying a machine.

D. Is there any game(s) out there to test that would be a fair comparison to measure GPU performance?

World of Warcraft. It's one of the very few games that's native to Apple Silicon and also supports Metal.

4. Final Note

I have reached out to Verge(Becca, Monica, Nilay, and Chaim) and Arstechnica(Andrew Cunningham) to correct them on their recent Mac Studio video/article. I didn't get any reply. I even reached out to Linux and MKBHD guys(Andrew, Adam, and Vinh) for their upcoming reviews with these points. But again, no reply. I don't blame them though. Maybe they didn't see my messages yet. I reached out via Twitter DM after all. Hence I wrote this post to bring little awareness to people who might not know about these details. Finally, it is very important to understand that Apple doesn't sell you SoCs. They sell you computers so make a choice wisely w/o falling for these youtubers or tech publications like Verge who run these benchmarks w/o doing any research on the tools they use and the inaccurate information that might come off of these results.

As always, healthy discussions are always welcome. Cheers!

submitted by /u/im_jerry87
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Anandtech: Geekbench 5 Compute scores are not accurate for Apple Silicon with 32 or more GPU cores

Posted: 17 Mar 2022 08:17 PM PDT

So I wonder why Geekbench scores have so far shown M1Max very far off it's expected score relative to the M1 (22K)? I've checked other GPUs in its score range across a variety of APIs (including Metal) and so far they all show the expected scaling (or close enough) between TFLOP and GB score except the M1 Max. Even the 24 core Max is not that far off, it's the 32 core scores are really far off. They should be in the 70Ks or even high 80Ks for perfect scaling which is achieved by the 16-core Pro GPU, but the 32-core scores are actually in the upper 50Ks/low 60Ks. Do you have any hypotheses as to why that is? Also does the 16" have the high performance mode supposedly coming (or here already)?

u/andreif reply:

The GB compute is too short in bursts and the GPU isn't ramping up to peak frequencies. Just ignore it.

https://imgur.com/a/CgaQLOV

Source is in the comments: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/7

submitted by /u/senttoschool
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Is it possible that we'd ever see a true "WiFi Audio" standard?

Posted: 17 Mar 2022 10:22 PM PDT

The possibilities are endless. I'm talking about basically a replacement for what Bluetooth does now while keeping the same PHY with usecases in mind more like portable speakers or multichannel codecs versus actual TWS earbuds, and seamlessly transmitting audio with graceful bitrate fallback just like aptX does. When you compare the data rates the most immediate thing that comes to mind is finally having truly lossless playback. I'm not discussing whether it's discernible in listening tests, rather just the technical availability of said feature. Why hasn't there been any apparent movement to even consider a working draft of this? Has it gone the way of abandonware like Miracast?

submitted by /u/blueredscreen
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AMD hiring RISCV role - 145742

Posted: 17 Mar 2022 04:45 PM PDT

submitted by /u/3G6A5W338E
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TechPowerUp: "AMD Radeon Super Resolution RSR Quality & Performance Review"

Posted: 17 Mar 2022 05:56 PM PDT