Doug S (foo.delete@this.bar.bar) on June 16, 2022 9:56 am wrote:
>
> ...Even a 50% performance difference wouldn't get someone wanting a Mac to
> switch to Windows, or someone who has always bought Windows to buy a Mac.
> Now if the gap was 2x that might change, but there's no chance we'll ever
> see anything remotely close to that.

Admittedly the discussion is mostly about traditional CPU performance, but
for some video workloads I think the M1 Ultra is 2x faster than Intel right now.
E.g, transcoding 4k ProRes 422 to ProRes Proxy, it does about 850 frames/sec.
I don't think any version of Quick Sync has ProRes encode/decode acceleration.

That said, there are apparently scalability issues with the M1 Ultra's
video engines. It has four accelerators for H264/HEVC and four for ProRes.
Unfortunately it appears only one of each type is currently available.
I don't know if the problem is thread safety of the
MacOS Video ToolBox framework, or what. If true, this illustrates it doesn't
matter how fast the hardware is unless there is coordinated development
of software at the system, framework and application layers. If this isn't
addressed, and the new Mac Pro has double again the number of accelerators,
it will just be more dark silicon.

If only there was a company that made both system software and hardware
and could coordinate these things :)