Craig Hunter Reviews the 20-Core M1 Ultra Mac Studio

Craig Hunter:

The main focus of my reviews has always been about CPU performance in real world engineering benchmarks, and this is where things take a dramatic turn with the Mac Studio. To really convey my experience, I want to set the stage with previous results from the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) benchmark I’ve been running for the last 10 years. These results cover four generations of pro desktop Mac systems running Intel CPUs. [...]

As shown above, we see a pretty typical trend where machines get less and less efficient as more and more cores join the computation. This happens because the computational work begins to saturate communications on the system as data and MPI instructions pass between the cores and memory, creating overhead. It’s what makes parallel CFD computations such a great real world benchmark. Unlike simpler benchmarks that tend to make CPUs look good, the CFD benchmark stresses the entire system and shows us how things hold up as conditions become more and more challenging.

Now let’s take a look at what happened when I repeated this test for the Mac Studio and plotted results on the same chart.

Off the chart, literally.

★ Thursday, 28 April 2022