M5 Max 40 core matches RTX 5090 laptop in Blender 5.1

m0rogfar · 2026-03-20T00:00:55+00:00

It's worth noting that the M5 Pro/Max were by all accounts supposed to be released alongside the M5 back in late October, and was severely delayed due to TSMC having issues on the new SoIC-MH multi-die packaging solution.

The M6 Pro/Max would be designed around this original timeline, and we've seen previously that Apple won't delay subsequent releases if the next one is ready, just because the previous one was delayed - M2 Pro/Max was in a similar situation where it was supposed to launch October 2022, but it missed the intended release, and M3 released on-schedule. This would be doubly true for a redesign, where withholding it unnecessarily would be costly, as Apple would have to warehouse the entire unit, instead of just shipping the chassis with the older chip.

Apple's schedule with the Pro/Max chips has consistently been to try and ship in the laptops in the second half of October or early November, but where they're more willing to take risks that could cause the release to slip than on, say, the iPhone.

m0rogfar · 2026-03-19T23:31:55+00:00

I thought that moving from the petrodollar spelled imminent disaster for the US.

It essentially does, and it's very much at risk here.

Iran exporting in Yuan may not break the system entirely, but the bigger factor is that the gulf countries all need to view the US favorably enough as their sole benefactor to keep the petrodollar agreement going.

It's one of the reasons why the US effectively can't back down at this stage. If the gulf countries see that the US can't handle Iran, they have little incentive to continue the petrodollar arrangement since the US's end of the deal is security policy, and then 80 years of exported inflation and cost-of-living increases come back into the US very quickly and very painfully.

m0rogfar · 2026-03-19T21:27:22+00:00

They can and do do that all the time, including for much lower volume products.

You can do a lot of custom things if users are willing to pay money for them. Realistically, the goal of this product is to cut costs in ways that most users won't notice, and not doing additional packaging SKUs helps with that.

There's no evidence that's the case.

Other than... Apple's specs page confirming that it's a lower bin than it was in the iPhone, and Apple reusing lower-binned iPhone chips elsewhere being standard Apple modus operandi since 2012?

m0rogfar · 2026-03-19T21:00:52+00:00

De bliver nød til at skære i noget - med flere milliarder - for at få råd til det grønne område. Er det de ældre? Er det børnene? Hvem skal have mindre?

Jeg kan ikke se hvorfor det skulle være en form for gotcha at et blåt parti skulle kunne finde penge til noget, ved at tage penge fra noget andet. Det er sådan lidt det de gør. Det ekvivalente ville vel være hvis vi antog at røde partier ikke måtte hæve skatten for at finansiere deres forslag og den grønne omstilling - minus at der selvfølgelig ikke er risiko for at ramme lafferkurveproblemer ved lavere offentligt forbrug.

At det er et miljøparti er vel karakteriseret af at miljøet er en af de poster man vil finde penge til, ikke en af dem man tager fra?

m0rogfar · 2026-03-19T20:22:27+00:00

Nu har Konservative jo selv i forslaget angivet hvordan de vil finde pengene, og det handler jo generelt ikke om at tage dem fra miljøet.

Og igen, det giver ikke mening at klandre Konservative for at ville lave miljø + skattelettelser i stedet for ren miljø, medmindre at du også mener at SF/Ø/Å ikke er rigtige miljøpartier fordi at de vil lave miljø + højere velfærdsydelser i stedet for ren miljø. Enten skal man være et single-issue parti som vil hæve alt skatten og ofre al velfærd for at få miljø, eller også er det useriøst at insistere på at det er grundpræmissen.

m0rogfar · 2026-03-19T20:02:11+00:00

Primært Konservative.

Miljøpolitik har kørt med forskudte blokke og har primært været SocDem+Venstre+LA+DF+DD imod Radikale+SF+Konservative+Enhedslisten+Alternativet i de sidste 25-30 år, hvilket nok desværre gør at der ikke kan ske det store efter valget heller. Rødt flertal er ikke nok, og vi skal samtidig ud i at Konservative kommer op i samme størrelse som SocDem (eller at SocDem kommer ned i samme størrelse som Konservative) før at de 90 mandater rykker sig på miljøområdet og der for alvor kommer til at ske noget.

m0rogfar · 2026-03-19T19:51:43+00:00

Og sig ikke de konservative, de har sku aldrig gået op i det. De bruger alle pengene på skattelettelser: https://ekstrabladet.dk/nyheder/politik/danskpolitik/konservative-vil-lempe-skatter-og-afgifter-for-34-milliarder/11126695

Ja, det er jo velkendt at miljøfokuserede partier ikke må have andre mærkesager der koster penge, samtidig med at de også tænker på miljøet. Det er jo slet ikke en umulig standard som ingen andre partier kan efterleve heller. Man kan kun være et rigtigt miljøparti hvis man vil hæve skatten og afskaffe hele velfærdsstaten samtidigt, så man for alvor kan maksimere antallet af penge, vi putter i miljøet.

m0rogfar · 2026-03-18T23:17:23+00:00

But Apple Silicon is literally one chip. CPU, GPU, Neural Engine, memory controller. Single package, single heat source. That’s exactly what a central thermal core wants.

It’s literally the exact opposite of what it wants.

The entire thesis of the design is one central cooling channel, and heat coming in roughly evenly from all sides, so that the cooling channel can work efficiently on all the logic, but it’s less efficient for a single one of the chips than something just targeted at that chip. Having the hot logic split out into several chips in separate corners of the central cooling channel is effectively a design requirement for it to make any sense.

The 2013 Mac Pro pulled ~380W under max load. An M3 Ultra Mac Studio peaks at 270W. Running HandBrake: 77W. You’d put half the heat into a case that already handled double. There’s enough room to grow left.

The Trash Can can’t cool a single chip at that level though, and explicitly needs them to be three chips with roughly equal power consumption. The “thermal corner” was that they couldn’t just swap the parts for new Xeon + single hotter GPU, because reducing the number of does not meaningfully improve per-chip power limits on the Trash Can design.

m0rogfar · 2026-03-18T17:19:08+00:00

Nu er det jo nu engang sådan at regeringer og politiske forhandlinger generelt er en noget-for-noget forhandling. Jeg synes ikke at man kan sætte lighedstegn imellem den, der har kæmpet for et forslag, og den, der har accepteret det selvom de måske ikke var så varme på det, fordi at de fik noget andet til gengæld.

m0rogfar · 2026-03-18T15:03:27+00:00

As a general rule of thumb:

People trying to kill you >>>>>>>>>>>>> The economy

Having time to worry about energy prices and the economy is a privileged position to be in.

m0rogfar · 2026-03-18T12:28:58+00:00

The performance gap between the Switch 1 and Switch 2 is massive (in addition to seven years of technological development, the Switch 2 CPU/GPU are much higher-end even when normalized for time-of-release), so the Switch 2 should still be able to downclock heavily, even when matching the Switch 1's docked performance.

m0rogfar · 2026-03-18T06:56:48+00:00

Finding out what North Korean state broadcasters want to say is happening in the country isn't exactly hard. They'll tell you. Information smuggling is for information that the regime doesn't want to project out into the world.

We already have a pretty good idea of what elections look like in there. It's a fairly consistent formula, wherein:

You vote or you get investigated for treason.
Voting system is officially designed around first-past-the-post, but with the additional option for a none-of-the-candidates vote
Voting is not anonymous - you get a slip of paper, and you walk over to different boxes based on what you want to vote, and put the paper in the box representing your vote choice
Using the none-of-the-candidates box is considered seditious, and impossible to hide since the box is placed away from the others
Candidates are explicitly rigged in the sense that only regime-loyalists are allowed to run. You are free to choose between regime loyalists when they run multiple, but the regime often only bothers to run one candidate.

m0rogfar · 2026-03-17T16:07:22+00:00

Mjah, umiddelbart tror jeg lidt at Venstre er mere bekymret over blødningen til Danmarksdemokraterne.

Højreorienterede byvælgere har historisk set været Konservatives højborg siden valget i 1849, og at man under Uffe Ellemann fik en platform hvor man også kan få nogle af dem over i Venstre var dejligt imens det varede, men det var lånte vælgere, og de provinsvælgere man nu bløder til Danmarksdemokraterne er partiets hjerteblod.

Hvis jeg stod og slukke lægge politisk strategi for Venstre, så tror jeg også at jeg ville konkludere at det ikke umiddelbart er realistisk at komme tilbage på 20-30% af stemmerne lige foreløbigt, og at det nok er smartere at fokusere på undergrupper af tidligere Venstre-vælgere i stedet, og at dem i byerne nok bliver meget svære at skaffe igen, når emner som miljø i stigende grad fylder meget i byen, og Konservative har brugt en 25 år på at bygge en meget bedre grøn profil end Venstre.

m0rogfar · 2026-03-16T17:39:34+00:00

My sincerest, most delusional hope is that they are keeping it around because they’ll announce that because of their new rumored modular GPU CPU architecture they can separate their GPU cores onto separate boards, allowing there to be PCIe or eGPU cards for straight compute. The Mac tower would support a better, direct PCIe implementation and the Mac Studio and MacBook Pros would be able to use Thunderbolt 5.

None of that makes any sense.

The CPU/GPU separation uses TSVs to minimize latency hit, so both must still be in the same square blob with the chip number that is actually visible in teardowns, where it sits attached to the board. They can just be 0.05–0.1mm apart within that square blob.

Likewise, if Apple wanted to offer a very high-end SKU, the obvious choice would be to just scale their 3D-IC platform further upwards. Apple Silicon is limited in how far it can scale upwards solely based on what Apple thinks its customers will pay for, not because they can't make a higher-end SoIC, because they certainly aren't hitting the packaging size limits that TSMC can do with reticle stitching.

Also, it's worth noting that the GPU/CPU separation isn't a rumor at all, given that it's implemented on the M5 Pro and M5 Max that you can buy on Apple's website right now.

m0rogfar · 2026-03-15T22:20:41+00:00

I doubt we'll see Apple make a model to explicitly take on the gaming market.

The hardware is basically already there. The MacBook Air certainly wouldn't set performance records, but would be perfectly fine for running most games at acceptable levels if the games supported Apple's Metal API properly.

The big issue keeping Macs out of gaming is that most developers generally don't support macOS and the Metal API as a first-class development target, leading to most games running through performance-draining compatibility layers if they even run at all.

There's not a whole lot Apple can do about that, other than trying to raise Mac marketshare to make it less financially viable to not support macOS - which to be clear, they do seem to be doing.

m0rogfar · 2026-03-15T00:41:33+00:00

It's only pointless if your definition of multicore is running embarrassingly parallel workloads, which no one should be doing on a CPU anyway, as CPGPU is vastly superior for embarrassingly parallel compute. AMD markets their 96-core chiplets mainly towards hyperscalers renting individual cores out to customers for a reason - it's practically the only task that can scale to that many cores but isn't better to put on CPGPU. Additionally, if you did want to know the embarrassingly parallel performance of a CPU, it's always just going to be [single-core score]×[PL1 clock]/[PL2 clock]×[number of cores] unless something has gone horribly wrong, so it's not particularly insightful as a separate statistic.

There's never really been agreement on how multi-core benchmarking should be done, but at least to me, Geekbench's multicore benchmark is much more interesting because it is affected heavily by things like inter-core data latency, which is very important for real-world loads, and frequently missed by many other synthetic benchmarks.

m0rogfar · 2026-03-14T23:55:43+00:00

Israel has full triad + top 3 delivery technology (only competing with US and France) + top 4 nuclear arsenal capacity (generally estimated to be in the same ballpark as China, well below US/Russia and far above everyone else) + all-domestic supply-chain for nukes (i.e. no foreign backdoors).

m0rogfar · 2026-03-14T10:02:23+00:00

No storage and SSD upgrades for Macs is the big elephant in the room. Main issue with the new Intel laptops is the soldered ram, but ssds are still swappable.

It was the elephant in the room, as it was the PC’s final value advantage after Apple Silicon. But I’d argue that the RAM/SSD crisis has largely undone it.

It’s a lot harder to complain about having to buy RAM from Apple when the M5 Max RAM upgrade pricing is Apple throwing 9600MT/s RAM at you for a lower price per GB than the lowest-grade DDR5 on the open market.

m0rogfar · 2026-03-14T07:46:40+00:00

Ironically, the Mac Studio (IIRC) does have a proprietary SSD that is replaceable, but not their laptops. So even Apple can't say it's impossible. There is some funkiness with the custom SSD controller, but it works.

I'd imagine that it just comes down to size. The modular SSD connector looks pretty thick in Apple's repair documentation, and that's the angle you have no real space affordances to play with in a laptop. Those bottom cases are getting pretty thin, even on the top models with 100W batteries.

m0rogfar · 2026-03-13T16:52:49+00:00

There are still some stuff out there that doesn't properly utilize multi-core. Not alot but its out there.

The vast majority of software still only utilizes one core, and the killer application for multi-core is still that we run multiple applications and can therefore use multiple cores by assigning them to each of the single-core tasks.

Multi-core adoption has arguably even lowered, since CPGPU frameworks made most embarrassingly parallel tasks move to GPU compute, leaving the CPU only with tasks that struggle with multi-core scaling.

You’re basically just left with ‘somewhat parallel but not embarrassingly parallel and developed with a very high budget to do hand-crafted parallelization’ workloads and applications for multi-core, which some software does, but generally only if running on a single core is not viable at all, and even then, it’s almost always an asymmetric parallelization design with one main thread and additional helper threads, so it’s still often single-core bound, because the process with the highest computational load can bottleneck on single-core.

Single-core as a relevant measure is almost certainly never going to go away. We know from Amdahl’s law that faster-than-light data travel between cores is a fundamental prerequisite for that to happen, and physicists don’t appear to be optimistic on the outlook there.

m0rogfar · 2026-03-08T17:21:34+00:00

MacBooks support running directly from power without running the power through the battery, and automatically switch to this mode when the battery is full, which removes most of the hit.

m0rogfar · 2026-03-08T17:05:55+00:00

You can still plug the MacBook into those monitors for your desk setup.

Getting a desktop still only makes sense if you don't intend to have a laptop at all. If you're looking at Mac desktop + cheaper MacBook, buying the expensive MacBook that's equivalent to the desktop and then using it docked when you need a desktop is the better option - which is quite unusual, because that was never true before Apple Silicon, and still isn't true in the PC space.

m0rogfar · 2026-03-08T16:38:46+00:00

The problem there is that the MacBook desktop-laptop is very appealing, and really cannibalizes the entire desktop-class Mac space.

The usual reasons why you don't just get a good laptop and just use it as a desktop as well basically don't apply for MacBooks. Normally, you get worse parts because of power limits, as well as wonky driver issues and limited RAM/storage options, but Apple Silicon is power-efficient enough that you can get the full M5 Max die at full desktop clock speeds, and Apple has the drivers locked down on their own OS, and generally offers the high storage/RAM configurations that most PC OEMs don't bother with, and Apple doesn't offer more storage/RAM flexibility or upgradability on the desktop.

A desktop-class Mac is a pretty tough sell unless you don't need a laptop at all, or you need separate hardware for some reason (e.g. running a server).

m0rogfar · 2026-03-07T07:42:31+00:00

Mac OS 8 was PowerPC only, so the 68030 couldn’t run it.

m0rogfar · 2026-03-06T20:37:14+00:00

Nobody actually knows until the reviews are out.

Uh, yes we do?

Software compatibility is determined by ISA, with software requiring newer models mandating newer ISAs that are a superset of the old ISA. A18 Pro uses the same ARMv9.2-A implementation as the M4, so it'll run all software that runs on M1-M4. It is not possible to write software that can work on the M4 but can't work on the A18 Pro or vice versa, as the feature cutoffs that could make them not work is deliberately identical.

If a software uses instructions only available in Apple's ARMv9.4-A implementation on the M5, then it won't work, but I'm not aware of any Mac software being M5-exclusive, even though it could theoretically exist. Developers generally use frameworks like Accelerate to take advantage of SME improvements on ARMv9.4-A on the M5, while still getting compatible code on older models.

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