Apple Silicon Performance in Scientific Computing

With the release of the Apple Silicon System-on-a-Chip processors, and theimpressive performance shown in general use by both the M1 and M1 Ultra, thepotential 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-centerGPUs, including an NVIDIA V100 with PCIe, an NVIDIA V100 with NVLink, and anNVIDIA A100 with PCIe. The scientific performance is measured using theScalable Heterogeneous Computing (SHOC) benchmark suite using OpenCLbenchmarks. We find that both M1 processors outperform the GPUs in allbenchmarks.