Which is the hungriest Synth CPU wise nowadays?

[vertibration]

The whole point of buying an M1 is silicon native plugins that are optimized for CPU reduction.

Its not whether an M1 is more powerful or less powerful that the best AMD or Intel, its how a plugin is optimized. You can have a PC that outperforms an M1, but a silicon native plugin running in lets say Logic X will be smooth as butter. I cant remember how many instances of Diva that Urs said you could run, but it was an insane amount with high voice counts without any drop outs.

Urs develops on a Mac and prefers Macs, and prioritizes Macs. If you're going to bring optimization in, then a developer would have to well and truly optimize for all 3 CPUs (Intel, AMD, and Mac) in order to compare more objectively. Until then, it's TBD.

Oh word, he told you that?

[agharta]

The M1 isn't faster than a mid tier desktop Intel i5 in benchmarks. The Apple hype train is rollin' hard.

I don't know where you got this from, but it's definitely false.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

As of May 11th M1 is obviously not at the top, but the some of them cost more than a whole Mac by itself. XEON, Threadripper, EPYC... the Core i9 12900 managed to score higher... good for Intel.

The M1 Ultra doesn’t look good value when you compare it against desktop chips as opposed to server chips.
It’s just above a £350 Ryzen 9 5900X but it starts at £4K for the entry level system.
Fortunately the lesser variants are much better value, especially the base model.

I don’t know what you are talking about when you say that the Mac Studio has been compared to a PC with “server chips.”

You also mentioned above Xeon and EPYC which are server chips.

"I compared the Apple M1 Ultra chip to a high end Intel 12900K consumer grade chip that is often used in gaming rigs such as the Corsair One “small form factor” PC that costs around $4,500 and comes with only a 2 TB NVMe internal drive."

In the link you gave, the £4K base Ultra Studio has CPU performance a bit more than a £350 Ryzen 9 5900X and less than the Ryzen 9 5950X.
You can buy or build a system with one of those Ryzens from £1K up to £4k or more.
The difference is that you have a wide range of choice on how much to spend.
With the Ultra, it starts at £4K and goes up to a lot more.

If I want to spec a PC as a fairly high end DAW for orchestral work, the difference between a self build and Apple is £2.5K v £7K.
This for 16 cores (Ryzen 9 5950X), 128GB RAM and 8TB PCIe 4 SSD.

"Again, the Mac Studio Ultra is not overpriced for what you get."

That's subjective.
They sound like great machines, but for DAW users you are paying for a lot of unnecessary GPU etc.
I'd happily save the £4.5K as shown above.

[Teksonik]

That was my question. What about a dollar for dollar comparison? I see the Mac studio starts at $2000 and goes to $4000 (Apple Studio Monitor starting at an additional $1599).

Could you build a PC for that money or less that could out perform an M1 Mac or at least perform as well ?

At what point does added performance become so unnoticeable that it has no real value compared to additional cost?

I wonder if there is a car analogy in there somewhere? "My car has 1000 Horsepower". Do you ever race your car? "No". Then why do you need 1000 HP other than to brag about how many HP you have?

Are system specs really all about practical performance or do they just have to do with bragging rights to some degree?

[rod_zero]

From an audio production perspective with the m1 chips you are probably overpaying for the GPU side.

[Schmidi]

Unfortunately, certain patches in Pigments, VCS3, and DCAM Fusor can really tank my CPU. The host makes a performance hit difference too (ahem, Ableton)

[chk071]

That's what I mean. Frustrating to explore the max of your CPU in any case.

Well, I'm happy that most stuff has a significantly lower CPU footprint now (most stuff hits at least 50 to 60 % less here).

[vertibration]

From an audio production perspective with the m1 chips you are probably overpaying for the GPU side.

I mean, I paid like $500 for my mac mini M1.......just use it for music. So......yea. I feel pretty good about that. Running 73 tracks without freezing any of them sure is nice

[rod_zero]

From an audio production perspective with the m1 chips you are probably overpaying for the GPU side.

I mean, I paid like $500 for my mac mini M1.......just use it for music. So......yea. I feel pretty good about that. Running 73 tracks without freezing any of them sure is nice

I should have probably made the clarification that it applies to the high end M1 chips: max and ultra, AFAIK Mac is targeting video professionals

[sQeetz]

double again

[sQeetz]

[I'm stupid]

[sQeetz]

[i'm the stupidest one quoting the ones I'm trying to edit]

[sQeetz]

From an audio production perspective with the m1 chips you are probably overpaying for the GPU side.

That's true.
I game from time to time, though, and although Macs are not targeted for gamers, there are some titles from my Steam catalog that run quite nice on the meager entry level M1 (*). I would definitely appreciate the extra GPU power of a Max or Ultra for that.
I might as well just get an Xbox someday.... because f**k Playstation!!!!!!

(*) the ones not available on MacOS run passably on Parallels, though...

[sQeetz]

[double]

[sQeetz]

[triple]

[vurt]

double again?