Apple Silicon Performance in Scientific Computing

TL;DR

This paper evaluates Apple Silicon's performance in scientific computing, demonstrating that M1 and M1 Ultra outperform high-end GPUs in benchmark tests, suggesting their potential for scientific applications.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of Apple Silicon processors against top-tier GPUs using standardized benchmarks, highlighting their superior performance in scientific computing tasks.

Findings

M1 and M1 Ultra outperform GPUs in all benchmarks

Apple Silicon shows promise for scientific computing

Benchmark results favor Apple Silicon over traditional GPUs

Abstract

With the release of the Apple Silicon System-on-a-Chip processors, and the impressive performance shown in general use by both the M1 and M1 Ultra, the potential use for Apple Silicon processors in scientific computing is explored. Both the M1 and M1 Ultra are compared to current state-of-the-art data-center GPUs, including an NVIDIA V100 with PCIe, an NVIDIA V100 with NVLink, and an NVIDIA A100 with PCIe. The scientific performance is measured using the Scalable Heterogeneous Computing (SHOC) benchmark suite using OpenCL benchmarks. We find that both M1 processors outperform the GPUs in all benchmarks.