Sure, you can configure a cheaper server with just the hardware needed for this benchmark, this is just the fastest machine we have in our cluster RAM-wise, that has one NUMA node. That's why we added it as an extra point of reference. The core comparison is of course between two generations of MacBooks, as the title suggests.
Plus, $3000 on Macbooks isnt going to exclusively to CPU and RAM either. You buy the whole system. I am not even sure if we can find out the price of the M1 alone. I guess it will be around $500 for the M1 SoC vs $6000 for the Threadripper, still a 12x difference, even if we keep their power consumption out of the equation.
The 3995WX is a 6 grand chip. Not cheap, but you don't need to pay 50k for a workstation if you're going to compare it to a Macbook. That 1TB of RAM will be a much more significant part of the cost of the machine, but you could never get that in an M1 Mac so the cost is a useless metric.
I can't tell if these tests make use of multiple threads or not. I don't think they are, because the 128 threads should absolutely crush the 16 threads of the 9980HK.
If it's not, Apple's flagship chips are sorely losing to a chip that's been optimised to bring multicore performance by sacrificing single core performance. It'd be like bringing an F1 car to a dirt track and measuring performance against a rally car, and still losing to the F1. That wouldn't bode well for an M1 Mac Pro at all, unless there's some serious GPU power hidden in there that an AMD GPU wouldn't be able to provide at a similar price.
Whether it is fair (or not) is a value judgement. All I said was that the comparison was done poorly.
Those choices together with single-threaded memory-intensive benchmarks (esp. those sensitive to memory latency) is problematic because the whole point of using a workstation CPU like the Threadripper Pro is for multi-threaded performance with a wide memory bus (sometimes NUMA). And they make a big deal out of it, emphasising the $50k price tag to paint the M1 Pro/Max as some sort of "Dragon Slayer". If they did a more rounded comparison including stuff like kernel compile times, etc. then maybe they are justified, but as it stands it's just unprofessional.
It would be utterly astonishing if the the MacBook outperformed the workstation on all benchmarks. The post doesn’t claim that it does.
The fact that the MacBook outperforms the workstation on some benchmarks is an interesting and, for some users, relevant datapoint. To point this out with full and detailed disclosure of the tests performed isn’t unprofessional at all.
I genuinely thought it was one of the most interesting articles on the M1 we’ve seen. Thanks for your work in putting it together - any follow ups would be much appreciated.
