[wtallis]

> Blender Benchmark

Maybe use a benchmark that actually makes sense for CPUs, rather than something that's always much faster on a GPU (eg. M3 Pro as any sane user would use it for Blender is 2.7x the performance of a Ryzen 7950X, not 0.4x).

> Apple Mac mini, 32gb, M2 Ultra, 2TB SSD, $2600

Not a real thing. You meant M2 Pro, because the Max and Ultra chips aren't available in the Mac mini.

[KingOfCoders]

I would love to quote a compiler comparison, but I don't know a good and accepted compiler benchmark. What would you use as a compiler benchmark? (Preferably Go, but I assume Rust would be better, as it is much slower, so the differences are bigger)

(corrected my c&p mistake with the mini, thanks)

[phonon]

You can look at the Geekbench 6 component.

https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench6-benchmark-internals... (page 18)

[KingOfCoders]

Thanks, Clang looks good, now I need to check how to sort CPUs/systems by the Clang benchmark, no success for now.

"Randomly" picking

    14900K     215.3 Klines/sec  
    7950x      230.3 Klines/sec  
    M2 Ultra   233.9 Klines/sec
    M3 Max     196.5 Klines/sec

[aurareturn]

Single thread:

M3 Max: 3898

7950x: 2951

The ST advantage of Apple Silicon is real. 7950x does do better in highly parallel tasks.

To me, Apple Silicon is clearly leading clients over AMD/Intel. Hence, my original reason for why AMD's announcement isn't "exciting". Because Apple Silicon is so far ahead in client.

Of course, AMD can crank up the core via Epyc/Threadripper and Apple has no answer. For that, you'd need to look into ARM chips from Ampere/Amazon for a competitor.

[KingOfCoders]

Yes, and is great if you are a gamer / have software that doesn't multi-core.

[hajile]

Or if you don't want to blow out the power bill.

A 7950x system at IDLE uses 50% more power than an M3 Max going all-out on a CPU workload.

https://www.guru3d.com/review/amd-ryzen-9-7950x-review/page-...

[JonChesterfield]

Building clang using itself is a reasonable approximation to a compiler benchmark, speaking as someone who spends a depressing fraction of his life doing that over and over for permutations of the source code. That's somewhere in the five to ten minutes range on a decent single socket system.

[KingOfCoders]

Do you know of a benchmark site that compares clang compilations for different systems (CPU/RAM/SSD)?

[codewithcheese]

Think chromium compile is widely used

[KingOfCoders]

Can you point me to a comparison site? Didn't find a M3/M2/7950/... comparison site for chromium compile times :-(

(Even phoronix is scares and mostly focuses on laptops - I have no laptop)

[pquki4]

There probably isn't a site that just comparess chromium compilation time, but you can find the number in many YouTube and text reviews.

[bee_rider]

Is blender 100% GPU now? Last time I used it, there were multiple renderers available, and it wasn’t a 100% win to switch to GPU. IIRC the cpu did better in ray tracing(?). This was a couple years ago though so things may have changed or I might not be recalling correctly.

[wtallis]

I think GPU rendering was always faster as long as you had a supported GPU. Now that the Cycles renderer has support for all the major GPU APIs/vendors, the only reasons to render on the CPU are if you don't have a half-decent GPU, or if your scene doesn't fit in your GPU's memory. Neither of those are a concern on Apple systems.

At least on NVIDIA hardware, Blender can use the GPU's raytracing capabilities rather than just the general-purpose GPU compute capabilities. Which means it doesn't take a very expensive GPU at all to outperform high-end CPUs.