My initial idea was about Blender and I don't know how Blender handles parallel computers when it comes to rendering.
That is an interesting idea, take a part of the cluster with you as an external compute node, but would require tailor made software or atleast a lot of custom work in your clustering program. The big thing with threadripper is that all cores are on the same substrate, and inter-die latency is much lower as compared to dividing a workload into multiple 'nodes' in a cluster with just 10G between them, which is comparatively slow. Overall, there are possible drawbacks (and literal, due to lack of applications in macos in some areas) but I really would love to see some practical experiments with this idea For Threadripper, you don't have that chance. With a laptop, you can detatch a part of the system and take wherever you go. But for performance per buck, there is a mobility element to this idea. But maybe there will be an incredible bottleneck, I don't Probably yeah. So if the application supports them, there may even be a better performance than those. Again, the program should be able to use that parallel structure of In addition to the CPU cores, there are 16 neural engines and for some tasks even 8 GPU cores (like when you use CPU cores for denoising, even you are rendering with a GPU). According to Linus' video, it doesn't share any lane with other hardware so the data stream should be smooth all the time. That is why I included the 10Gigabit ethernet. But again I don't know if you can connect ARM-based Minis together (although with 10 bit ethernet and a high quality switch it is probably I was thinking of network systems. So it would not be too far off to compare these two ideas. But Threadripper is also a very case-specific hardware as Linus said. But if anyone has an opportunity, I think this would be a nice indeed. I don't have enough knowledge, nor the money to test these ideas out.
Or is it not feasable? Maybe ARM-based Mac Minis simply don't work together?
But by how far? Will it compensate the power consumption, heating, maintenance of the PC case? Also the limitations of macos on ARM and unavailability of Windows (therefore lots of applications) on the system? Or what are the limitations? Obviously the raw power will be less than a Threadripper. So I was doing a thinking exercise: Has anyone compared the performance of multiple Mac Minis to the Threadripper 3970x (or 3990x)? What are the benefits? Like power consumption, multiple ready to use devices to use whatever you need? Or taking the laptop and going to another city and overseeing the render (or any other work) that is happening on the Minis? Using a remote desktop system to make changes from afar and hit "render" so while you are doing your presentation things happen in your house (or in your office)? Adding the power of the laptop to the mix when you are at place, but in other times the system works well enough? How about future upgrades, adding new Minis (M1 or newer) to the mix and improving the farm altogether? In my country (Turkey, currently like the bottom of the barrel in terms of countries of the world) a complete Threadripper 3970x system is roughly the same price as 4 semi-upgraded Mac Minis (16Gb RAM, 10 gigabit Ethernet) + a semi upgraded Macbook Air (again, 16GB RAM and 512GB drive). I don't have a lot of Mac experience but I heard (and saw a couple of photos) that you could do that with the old Minis.Īnd what does it have to do with Threadripper? Let me explain.
I was wondering has anyone tried to connect multiple ARM-based Mac Minis to complete a collective task (for example, a detailed 3d render in Blender) like in the old days.