Apple Announces The M2 Ultra SoC - 24 Core CPU, Up To 192GB Unified Memory

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Apple Announces The M2 Ultra SoC - 24 Core CPU, Up To 192GB Unified Memory

In addition to announcing the Apple Vision Pro AR headset, a 15-inch MacBook Air, and other new hardware, Apple lifted the lid on the M2 Ultra SoC. The Apple M2 Ultra is impressive from the technical specs and hopefully won't be too long before it begins working under Linux...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Apple-M2-Ultra

[andyprough]

That's a lot of cell phone cores. That thing's going to play Pokemon Go like nobody's business.

And the Instagram and Snapchat image filters are going to be lit.

[schmidtbag]

I like Hector's style: we'll get there when we get there, and if you don't like it, don't buy early.

[mitchellrenouf]

Apple needs to sell motherboards with socketed components and have prices competitive with Intel and AMD if anyone wants to take them seriously. You basically turn your computer into a space heater if you use the entire 6Ghz base clocks or more a modern i9 can do so you may even get 7Ghz+ base speed with a M2 ultra using the same coolers with the apple gpu and npu unused. The turbo only exists because people don't have proper cooling so they don't want them to feel bad when they only get 40% or less of the total CPU power. Laptops did a lot of damage to compuing power. Apple is even a lot more open than AMD firmware wise and should just add support to Linux themselves because it doesn't matter if people use macOS since they are a hardware company. All I know is macOS died when they stopped caring about officially allowing the free software desktop enviroments and closed sourced their drivers.

[Spacefish]

Actually Zen 4 on 4nm (Phoenix) is faster / more efficient compute wise.. But the M2 Ultra has a much greater memory bandwidth (800GB/s vs the ~150GB/s of Phoenix)
The 800GB/s is even faster than a single socker 12 DDR5 Channels EPYC 9**** CPU which has ~480GB/s of Bandwidth...

That´s why they can do tenth of 4k streams and things like that, as they have the bandwidth + special accelerators (ProRes is not that complicated to encode, but you still need the bandwidth to feed the raw footage to the encoder).

[kylew77]

IF you want a laptop with good Linux support buy a Chromebook or something from system 76, not an Apple with their walled garden. It similar to when people buy an MS surface and it has poor linux support, well duh it is made by Microsoft for Windows! Another good option is a business class ThinkPad from Lenovo, those have Linux preload support. Notice I didn't say any ThinkPad because as I learned the hard way buying an E series and expecting to use it as a Unix workstation with OpenBSD is foolhardy. Too many rough edges.

[sophisticles]

I agree with Hector, if you spend the big bucks to buy a system with one of these and are stupid enough to want to run Linux on it, then don't harass the Asahi "developers" with questions as to when Vaporware Linux will finally be finished because it never will be.

Imagine someone spending 10+ grand on a high end system featuring one of these processors and wanting to void the warranty by wiping the excellent Max OS and installing a half-baked kludge of an OS in its place.

No thanks, you can keep your Linux, i will stick with Mac OS if I ever have the dough to buy one of these.

[dragon321]

No thanks, you can keep your Linux, i will stick with Max OS if I ever have the dough to buy one of these.

Stick to whatever you want but at least learn name of it. What is "Max OS"?

[mitchellrenouf]

macOS isn't usable unless you install GNU tools most people just buy a mac because the macOS default shell looks pretty but they're simply unacceptable performance wise compared to what they can do overclocked for large projects. I won't be using AMD because even Apple has more open firmware unless you use an AMD APU like chromebooks have. With Intel you can run 12-14th gen overclocked with coreboot and with apple you can use u-boot which is what fedora may be soon chainloading from bios. The only issue with apple is lack of PCI-E slots and overclocking the linux support is already enough for people who use a real graphics card. People can't seriously tell me they would wait extra hours or more by not overclocking as much as they can for CPU intensive tasks.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Apple needs to sell motherboards with socketed components and have prices competitive with Intel and AMD if anyone wants to take them seriously.

What does "take them seriously" mean in this context? Apple has a 2.89 TRILLION dollar USD market cap. They are the most valuable company on the planet.