It feels a bit like we entered the “consumer grade workstation” era a while back when AMD started selling 16-core CPUs that will happily socket into run of the mill consumer motherboards and that continued with the higher end M-series SoCs.

It really is cool to see. It’s nice that that kind of horsepower isn’t limited to the likes proper “big iron” like it once was and can even be reasonably be packaged into a laptop that is decent at being mobile and not an ungainly portable-on-a-technicality behemoth.

The one thing that has me a bit bummed with this is that the Ultra, which I had planned to upgrade to, is only an M3 not an M4. Bit disappointing after waiting this long.

Not all that disappointing considering that most of the performance improvement in M4 seems to come from increased power consumption. In some applications, M4 performs worse per watt than M3.

Yeah but if you’re buying an Ultra you’re probably more concerned with raw performance than perf-per-watt. These aren’t exactly used in laptops.

Exactly. And especially for my incredibly mixed use case, which includes some light gaming in crossover, the gpu improvements in m4 are apparently non-trivial.

I’m sure whichever I end up with will be a pretty big upgrade over my basest of base model 32GB M1.

The thing I’m most curious about on the new machines, especially the Ultra, is the thermals. I only care about perf per watt if it becomes unfavorable enough that the fan spins up above idle during normal Tasks. On my M1 the only way to get it to audibly spin up is to get the machine to near total load nd hold it there for some time.

> Not all that disappointing considering that most of the performance improvement in M4 seems to come from increased power consumption

Disappointing for those of us who don't care about power consumption in a desktop.

Is the M4's media processing superior to the M3? Would the M3 Ultra not perform as well on video editing?

The M3 Ultra is two M3 chips together on one die. In aggregate they should outperform an m4 max by quite a bit.

I meant single-core performance.

These chips actually have hardware video encode/decode separate from the CPU.

I'm surprised you use Macs since you usually lean toward more open HW and FOSS.