Apple M5 rumors

[leman]

Honestly, only 6x faster AI than M1 is less progress than I’d have expected by now.

The clock frequency has increased only marginally (25%), we have two extra GPU cores, and the MXU units have 4x throughout in fp16. I can see how they arrive at 6x improvement. It’s still 15 TFLOPs - the same as M4 Max or half of Nvidia 5050. I think that’s not bad at all for starters. The GPU has seen some other massive improvements too. Integer multiplication is twice as fast, exp/log are twice as fast, and I’m sure there are other things too.

BTW, Apple undersells their MXU units. The 4x improvement applies to FP16 precision, but INT8 runs almost two times faster still. So I’d expect around 25-30 TOPS for INT8 out of M1 GPU.

 

[Jimmyjames]

Honestly, only 6x faster AI than M1 is less progress than I’d have expected by now.

So much of that is down to the meagre improvements in AI from M1 to M4. There were improvements in other areas of course.

 

[casperes1996]

Honestly, only 6x faster AI than M1 is less progress than I’d have expected by now.

Really? I feel like it's pretty in-keeping with my expectations. 6x in a little under 5 years is alright this day and age. Moore's Law has been misunderstood to mean 2x the performance every 2 years, even though it was always about transistor count, and while that isn't consistently happening anymore, 6x in 5 years outperforms that by a little bit. It's not general purpose and jumps due to dedicated hardware blocks are of course often quite big, but I still think it's pretty decent

 

[NotEntirelyConfused]

Something odd - the new M5 AVP is claimed to render 10% more pixels. But they explicitly *don't* say the displays are larger, and the tech specs still say "23 million pixels". Any idea what this really means? Less reliance on foveated rendering maybe?

Notably, the refresh rate now goes up to 120Hz, which is a major improvement. It's hard to imagine the original AVP had hardware capable of this, being held back by the M2, so that implies new displays anyway.

 

[Cmaier]

Really? I feel like it's pretty in-keeping with my expectations. 6x in a little under 5 years is alright this day and age. Moore's Law has been misunderstood to mean 2x the performance every 2 years, even though it was always about transistor count, and while that isn't consistently happening anymore, 6x in 5 years outperforms that by a little bit. It's not general purpose and jumps due to dedicated hardware blocks are of course often quite big, but I still think it's pretty decent

My thought was that M1 had a lot of low hanging fruit. Its AI capabilities weren’t mature in the same way that its CPU capabilities were.

 

[Jimmyjames]

If the M5 Max also sees the 74% uplift in Blender that is advertised for the base M5, then it easily beats the 5090 laptop and pretty much matches the RTX 5080.
I am well aware that there is a high chance that the Max doesn’t match the increase of the base M5.

 

[leman]

My thought was that M1 had a lot of low hanging fruit. Its AI capabilities weren’t mature in the same way that its CPU capabilities were.

I've been wondering why Apple is so late to the party with GPU matrix acceleration. It is possible that they initially bet on SME and NPU being enough. Obviously the industry developed in a different direction, so the current MXU implementation might be more of an emergency solution. It is also clear that they did not have much time to work on the Metal Tensor API.

 

[Jimmyjames]

I've been wondering why Apple is so late to the party with GPU matrix acceleration. It is possible that they initially bet on SME and NPU being enough. Obviously the industry developed in a different direction, so the current MXU implementation might be more of an emergency solution. It is also clear that they did not have much time to work on the Metal Tensor API.

How long as Olivier been in charge of GPU architecture? Three years? Not a very long time I suppose but perhaps they should have done better.