It's amusing that you're concerned about someone making a joke turning this into Slashdot, because the actual discussion here comparing specs and cost of Intel vs. Mac could be lifted directly from the Slashdot archives circa the late 90s (adjusting for the specs).
Intel certainly wins on single core, but the m1 Ultra multicore scores are still impressive in comparison being generally 23-24000, while the 12900k are around 15-20000.
Sure, Intel focuses on single thread perf, high power (241 watt max tdp), and automatically overclocks to 5.1 GHz, only if you have enough power, cooling, and a bunch of idle cores. Thus the 15% variation in submitted scores. It's also rather memory bandwidth constrained, and shows impressive numbers with a single core running.
Apple on the otherhand doesn't overclock, focuses on multi-core performance, has great memory bandwidth, and all the submitted scores are within 1%.
The M1 ultra is also 1.32x faster in the multiprocessing benchmark. Looks pretty impressive to me, even ignoring the much less power the M1 ultra uses.
I'll never understand religious loyalty to a corporation.
The computer in the OP is fully assembled and has a 128GB of memory, a nice GPU, and 8TB SSD. Why be so obtuse.
If you're just trying to compare to the entry level Mac Studio at least have the decency to throw in a full parts list, like you know, with a graphics card..
Why do you need a dedicated graphics card for CPU compute? If anything GPU is your concern you're not really interested in an M1 Ultra nor in a 12900K anyways. The CPU itself includes a GPU that is sufficient for anything except GPU heavy workloads, so the parts list is fully complete.
The M1 Ultra version starts at 4000$ dollars with a 1TB hard drive and 64GB memory, but I thought a 32GB option was available, so that's what I went with. By all means add another 32GB for 120$, that's why I sent a link that's fully configurable.
As for a parts list, I sent one because the request was to spec out. If you actually go look for a fully assembled machine you are likely to find one with a similar price.
If you want to add an RTX3070, 256GB of RAM, and an 8TB SSD, you can go ahead, it will still be over a thousand dollars cheaper than the corresponding Mac Studio. Again, that's why I sent the link, so you can play around with it.
Lastly, I don't see how this is any kind of loyalty to a corporation. It's simply pointing out the truth that the computer in question is just very expensive if you care about performance. As far as I'm concerned, it's trying to deny the obvious that the M1 Ultra is slower in workloads that can't use 16 cores efficiently at multiple times the price that looks like religious loyalty to a corporation to me. Especially when the corporation in question does what it can to lock you in, which just isn't the case for AMD or Intel.
If you really need 4 more cores and at the same time do not care about single core performance enough to go with a 12900k, but at the same time care about it enough not to go with a threadripper, to such a degree that you can justify spending 2000$ more, and don't care about GPU performance either, then sure the Mac Studio is for you. Otherwise, it only makes sense if you love macOS at thousands of dollars worth (or are locked into the ecosystem). There's nothing wrong about acknowledging it's an extremely niche product that is almost never justifiable on performance grounds.
I think it is important to compare comparable things.
> If you want to add an RTX3070, 256GB of RAM, and an 8TB SSD, you can go ahead, it will still be over a thousand dollars cheaper than the corresponding Mac Studio.
If you want something comparable to a Mac Studio you would need to add those things. I'm glad you managed to agree to that. A thousand dollar delta on a $4000 computer is nothing to sneeze at, however yours is a parts list and a Mac Studio is a complete product.
> Lastly, I don't see how this is any kind of loyalty to a corporation.
It read as if you were carrying water for Intel.
> It's simply pointing out the truth that the computer in question is just very expensive if you care about performance.
People care about all kinds of things. Obviously if you have no software to run that would benefit from the combination of hardware the Mac Studio offers you would be better off with something else. Horse for courses.
If you enjoy spending time assembling hardware that's great too.
> There's nothing wrong about acknowledging it's an extremely niche product that is almost never justifiable on performance grounds.
>If you want something comparable to a Mac Studio you would need to add those things. I'm glad you managed to agree to that. A thousand dollar delta on a $4000 computer is nothing to sneeze at, however yours is a parts list and a Mac Studio is a complete product.
There is no corresponding product at that price. The 4000$ Mac Studio 7TB less RAM, half of the memory, and a fraction of the GPU performance. The Mac you're describing costs 8000$ dollars, and were comparing it to a 2500-3000$ dollar computer.
It's not a 1000$ dollar delta on a 4000$ computer, it's a 2000+$ delta on a 4000$ computer and a 5000$ delta on an 8000$ computer.
> It read as if you were carrying water for Intel.
I honestly can't see how that came across. Someone asked for the spec out of a 12900K computer because comparing the price of a CPU to that if a full computer is unfair, so I gave it. I personally wouldn't buy a 12900K myself, it's ridiculously overkill and on everything except the highest of single core performance Intel is currently a worse proposition than AMD.
> People care about all kinds of things. Obviously if you have no software to run that would benefit from the combination of hardware the Mac Studio offers you would be better off with something else. Horse for courses.
Sure, but the point I'm trying to make is that there is a tiny, tiny, tiny amount of use-cases where there is a genuine performance advantage. The original assertion that the 12900K (or in half of the use cases, a Threadripper) is superior in performance is generally accurate for the 80% of people that run single threaded or lightly threaded workloads on the CPU, and for the 10% of people that only care about multi threaded workloads a Threadripper is better. For the 10% of people that run a particular mix of both, half of them have the GPU of the M1 Ultra as a deal-breaker. Obviously it's all dependent on the particular use case, it's just that those are much rarer than most think on the performance front. There are other valid reasons besides performance of course.
> If you enjoy spending time assembling hardware that's great too.
You don't have to - pre-assembled computers are generally cheaper than building them yourself these days. The reason I have given a parts list is because that's the fairest way to compare various configurations without listing off 20 different SKUs.
I regularly downvote comments that make no points, are solely there to make a gag, and add no substance to the discussion.