The GPUs are bottom-barrel for compute-focused industries. It is mobile-grade hardware that arguably can't even scale to prior Mac Pro workloads.

> The GPU is monstrously good. Depending on the workload, the M1 series GPU using 120W could beat an RTX 3090 using 420W.

You're just listing the TDP max of both chips. If you limit a 3090 to 120W then it would still run laps around an M1 Max in several workloads despite being an 8nm GPU versus a 5nm one.

> It is kind of sad Apple neglects helping developers optimize games for the M-series

Apple directly advocated for ports like Death Stranding, Cyberpunk 2077 and Resident Evil internally. Advocacy and optimization are not the issue, Apple's obsession over reinventing the wheel with Metal is what puts the Steam Deck ahead.

Edit (response to matthewmacleod):

> Bold of them to reinvent something that hadn't been invented yet.

Vulkan was not the first open graphics API, as most Mac developers will happily inform you.

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brcmthrowaway 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The GPUs are bottom-barrel for compute-focused industries. It is mobile-grade hardware that arguably can't even scale to prior Mac Pro workloads.

Surprised Apple didn't create a TPU-like architecture. Another misstep from John Gianneadrea.

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bigyabai 28 minutes ago | parent [-]

I'm confused how anyone ever thought the NPU would be a good idea. The GPU is almost always underutilized on Mac and could do the brunt of the work for inference if it embraced GPGPU principles from the start. Creating a dedicated hardware block to alleviate a theoretical congestion issue is... bewildering. That goes for most NPUs I've seen.

Apple had the technology to scale down a GPGPU-focused architecture just like Nvidia did. They had the money to take that risk, and had the chip design chops to take a serious stab at it. On paper, they could have even extended it to iPhone-level edge silicon similar to what Nvidia did with the Jetson and Tegra SOCs.

	▲	zozbot234 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not sure even Apple thought that, given that they don't officially provide access to ANE internals under macOS (barring unsupported hacks). But if that was fixed, it could then be useful for improving the power efficiency of prefill, where the CPU/GPU hardware is quite weak (especially prior to the M5 Neural Accelerators).

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matthewmacleod 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Apple's obsession over reinventing the wheel with Metal

Bold of them to reinvent something that hadn't been invented yet.

	▲	an hour ago \| parent [-]
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