Questions about new Mac studios

[juh]

Hi

I'm a film composer, I've been working with PT on a Macpro 2013 for years and I'm starting to feel limits with the new audio soundbanks that need more and more processing.

So I'd like to buy a new Mac studios (M1 max) but before that I have several questions :
- What's the difference between unified memory and my current RAM (DDR3) ?
- Is it relevant to choose 32 GPU better than 24, or does it only concern graphic uses ?
- Is the internal SSD far more efficient than an external SSD ? (my current one is plugged in a USB port in my macpro2013)
- The 4 thunderbolts plugs in the Mac studio are connected to the same bus or splitted into several bus ?
- Will I have such a big improvment with a Mac studio M1 max ?

Thanks for your precious help

[Obsidian Dragon]

Originally Posted by juh

Hi

I'm a film composer, I've been working with PT on a Macpro 2013 for years and I'm starting to feel limits with the new audio soundbanks that need more and more processing.

So I'd like to buy a new Mac studios (M1 max) but before that I have several questions :
- What's the difference between unified memory and my current RAM (DDR3) ?
- Is it relevant to choose 32 GPU better than 24, or does it only concern graphic uses ?
- Is the internal SSD far more efficient than an external SSD ? (my current one is plugged in a USB port in my macpro2013)
- The 4 thunderbolts plugs in the Mac studio are connected to the same bus or splitted into several bus ?
- Will I have such a big improvment with a Mac studio M1 max ?

Thanks for your precious help

1. Unified memory is directly on the "System on a Chip" (SOC) architecture and shared directly with the CPU cores and GPU cores. It is magnitudes faster than your previous RAM (DDR3). For film composers, some sample libraries need to be loaded into RAM (due to older, slower hard drives). This means if you use these sample libraries, you'll need enough RAM to preload them. Thus, RAM size is your main concern. The M1Max system come with 32GB or 64GB and the M1Ultra come with 64GB or 128GB. Again, these are built into the chip, hence are not upgradable by you in the future. Therefore buy what you need up front.

2. The 32 GPU model give more graphic performance than the 24 GPU model but really only benefits you for graphics and video. However the increase in cost is only $200 US, so it can better future proof your investment in case you need to delve into video or photo editing.

3. The internal SSD in the current Mac Studio's are extremely fast compared to previous generations of SSDs and way faster than SSDs connected via slow USB ports. In fact, these SSD's are faster than even the Thunderbolt specifications (at least that is what I've read). As for capacity, the internal SSD is not upgradeable, so buy what you need up front.

4. On the Mac Studio (M1Max version) there are four Thunderbolt4 ports (6 on the M1Ultra version). With earlier Thunderbolt3 ports, there was concern that when they share a bus, one peripheral may impact the speed of the others on the same bus. The Thunderbolt4 specification states that each port gets the 40GB/s bandwidth so this should no longer be a concern unless you daisy chain many high bandwidth devices off of one port. Having said that, I have yet to find a clear statement about how the Thunderbolt4 bus is implemented in the Mac Studio.

5. How the increased performance will affect your workflow is unique to you. Apple has a pretty flexible return policy in the US, so you might try one out and keep it if you like it, or return it if it does not perform to your expectations.

[juh]

Thanks a lot Obisidian Dragon for your answer, everything's clear for me now !

[Steven1145]

I did a few drive speed tests with the Black Magic Design utility, and the internal SSD of the Mac Ultra (same as Max I would think) has a W/R of around 5500 Mo/s. This is just about TEN times the speed of the two Samsung SATA drives that I mounted on a Sonnett PCI card in the Thunderbolt PCI chassis.
Incredibly fast storage on these Macs.

[Eric Lambert]

Originally Posted by Steven1145

TEN times the speed of the two Samsung SATA drives

Holy smokes! Usually I would be happy with some "twice as fast" right, but he springs this serious "ten times" s#!t on us.

[Steven1145]

I thought the SATA SSD were defective, until I saw that they advertised 530Mo/s and that it was decent for a SATA SSD...
In our two 7.1 Mac Pro machines we have Sonnett Pcie cards that hold up to 4 M2 drives, these were measured at just over 1100 Mo/s. The Mac Studio ssd is five times faster than those.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Steven1145

I thought the SATA SSD were defective, until I saw that they advertised 530Mo/s and that it was decent for a SATA SSD...
In our two 7.1 Mac Pro machines we have Sonnett Pcie cards that hold up to 4 M2 drives, these were measured at just over 1100 Mo/s. The Mac Studio ssd is five times faster than those.

Some general comments.

Be careful saying "SSD", performance and quality vary widely especially within M.2 drives today (some of which are only SATA on M.2).

~550MB/s is the effective cap of SATA III performance, lots of SSDs from good ones to ones I would not trust as far as I can throw them can reach that performance. SATA III is ancient technology, and since NVMe M.2 drives do not cost a whole lot more $/TB I'd always try to use them over SATA SSD where possible.

I'll set aside that BlackMagic speed tests results may not be translatable much to real world application performance, but ~1.1 GB/sec for a M.2 SSD is pretty slow even given the Mac Pro 2019 is crippled by being PCIe 3 (thanks Intel), and that nice Sonnet 4x4 M.2 card is PCIe 3 as well. Not sure what is going on there, maybe you just have slow M.2 SSD cards. Blackmagic reports about 2.4 GB/sec read and write to a Samsung 980 Pro in my Thunderbolt 3 expansion chassis... i.e. about the same PCIe 3 crippled performance measurement I would expect to see in a Mac Pro 2019.

And be a little careful comparing Mac Studio models, and please spec the configs you are measuring. They can have one or two SSDs and it is likely two SSD ship in RAID 1 config.

To put things in perspective with current technology, a Samsung 980 Pro in a PCIe 4 slot will deliver something like Blackmagic measured speeds of 4.3/5.3 GB/s write/read. The WD Black SN850 M.2 beats that at 5.3/5.3 GB/s. Both ~$150/TB M.2 consumer SSD, which makes Apple SSD prices at $250/TB to $275/TB for larger SSD configs a bit painful, but not terrible when you consider all up costs if doing external storage. But don't get carried away thinking the Mac Studio SSD performance is some wild exotic thing, yes the internal SSD *is* likely the best place to spend money on for fast storage, but that storage performance is not radically different than what is available in modern higher end PCs (especially AMD PCs with lots of PCIe 4 slot options).

Heavy duty stress tests between the Studio internal SSD and 980 Pro and SN850 class M.2 drives would be great to see, would love to see Anandtech do their SSD benchmark goodness. And vendors are out there are already sampling PCIe 5 M.2 cards.... Sadly for much of the Mac world Thunderbolt 3/4 will be a bottleneck for a while (including on the Studio... so again those internal SSDs are faster and you don't have to deal with cables and expansion chassis etc.).

I hope we see a new Mac Pro with lots of PCIe 4 or 5 slots and ability to just plug in PCIe to M.2 adapter cards... and would be wonderful if it had PCIe bifurcation (but I doubt it being Apple) so we could plug in simple cheap multi-M.2 slot PCIe adapter cards... (i.e. not require a more complex/expensive PCIe switch based card like the Sonnet 4x4 is today).

[Steven1145]

Thanks Darryl, I stand corrected.

[Marsdy]

Originally Posted by Steven1145

I thought the SATA SSD were defective, until I saw that they advertised 530Mo/s and that it was decent for a SATA SSD...
In our two 7.1 Mac Pro machines we have Sonnett Pcie cards that hold up to 4 M2 drives, these were measured at just over 1100 Mo/s. The Mac Studio ssd is five times faster than those.

That doesn’t sound right unless it’s using a SATA NVMe. If you’re measuring with BlackMagic Speed Test at the default settings the Sonnet card should be reading around 8000MB/s for four drives in RAID 0 array or around 3500MB/s for a single M2 with NVMe M2 Samsungs

[BScout]

Originally Posted by Steven1145

I thought the SATA SSD were defective, until I saw that they advertised 530Mo/s and that it was decent for a SATA SSD...
In our two 7.1 Mac Pro machines we have Sonnett Pcie cards that hold up to 4 M2 drives, these were measured at just over 1100 Mo/s. The Mac Studio ssd is five times faster than those.

1100 Mb/s is under performing for that Sonnet PCIe card with 4 x M2 in a 7,1 Mac Pro.
And this won't account for all/any of this, but is that card in a x16 slot or x8 slot (should be in an x16)