Comment by gcanyon

13 hours ago

Anyone know how this compares to Apple’s M5 chips? Or is that comparison <takes off sunglasses> apples to oranges.

It doesn't matter, because you will never find M5 chips on cloud offerings, or server racks.

It is kind of rediculous that the only server option with Apple hardware has been to stack up mac minis.

They got rid of the server and workstation market, focusing on consumers only.

Features like hardware FP8 support definitely make it apples-to-oranges.

  • But doesn't the Apple M series NPU support FP8, and as it's a monolithic die (except for the GPU in the M5 Pro and Max) it could be argued it has hardware FP8 support, no?

    • By that logic, on the M4 (which still has the GPU on the same die as the CPU), CPU cores have hardware accelerated raytracing, which is obviously nonsense.

M5 are 9-18 cores and optimized for power-efficiency, those are more like Xeons, with 200-300W TDP, I'd bet.

  • If M5 has 9-18 cores and takes ~20w, then that's ~1-2w per CPU core. If these are 200-300W, and have ~100-200 CPU cores, then guess what? That's also ~1-2w per CPU core.

    Xeons, Epycs, whatever this is - they are all also typically optimized for power efficiency. That's how they can fit so many CPU cores in 200-300W.