| > I’ve got a first gen M1 Max and it destroys all but the largest cloud instances (that cost its entire current market value per month!) You're either underestimating how big cloud instances can get or overestimating how much it costs to rent a cloud instance that would beat an M1 Max at any multi-core processing. According to Geekbench, the M1 Max macbook pro has a single-core performance of 2374 and multicore of 12257; AWS's c8i.4xlarge (16 vCPUs) has 2034 and 12807, so relatively equivalent. That c8i.4xlarge would cost you $246/mo at current spot pricing of $0.3425/hr, which is, what, 20% of the cost of that M1 Max MBP? As discussed recently in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47291906, Geekbench is underestimating the multi-core performance of very large machines for parallelizable tasks -- the benchmark's performance peaks at around 12x single-core performance. (I might've picked a different benchmark but I couldn't find another benchmark that had results for both the M1 Max and the Xeon Scalable 6 family.) If your tasks are _not_ like that, then even a mid-range cloud instance like a 64-vCPU c8i.16xlarge (which currently costs $0.95/hour on the spot market) will handily beat the M1 Max, by a factor of about 4. The largest cloud instances from AWS have 896 vCPUs, so I'd expect they'd outperform the M1 Max by about 50-to-1 for trivially parallelizable workloads. Even if you stay away from the exotic instances like the `u7i-12tb.224xlarge` and stick to the standard c/m/r families, the c8i.96xlarge has 384 vCPUs (so at least 24x the compute power of that M1 Max) and costs $3.76/hr. |
A 5 month ROI on a hardware investment would be excellent, so not sure what you're trying to say here?