Mac Machine Learning Speed Test

Blog post | Video walkthrough

A collection of simple scripts focused on benchmarking the speed of various machine learning models on Apple Silicon Macs (M1, M2, M3).

Scripts should also ideally work with CUDA (for benchmarking on other machines/Google Colab).

Note: Scripts are not designed to achieved state-of-the-art results (e.g. accuracy), they are designed to be as simple as possible to run out of the box. Most are examples straight from PyTorch/TensorFlow docs I've tweaked for specific focus on MPS (Metal Performance Shaders - Apple's GPU acceleration framework) devices + simple logging of timing. They are scrappy and likely not the best way to do things, but they are simple and easy to run.

Experiment Overview

The focus of these experiments is to get a quick benchmark across various ML problems and see how the Apple Silicon Macs perform.

The focus is on hardware comparison rather than framework to framework comparison and measuring speed rather than accuracy.

This repo contains code/results for the following experiments:

1. PyTorch Computer Vision (CIFAR100 image classification)
2. PyTorch Computer Vision (Food101 image classification)
3. PyTorch Natural Langua2ge Processing (NLP text classification)
4. TensorFlow Computer Vision (CIFAR100 image classication)
5. TensorFlow Computer Vision (Food101 image classification)
6. TensorFlow Natural Language Processing (NLP text classification)
7. LlamaCPP LLM test (text generation)
8. Geekbench ML (inference-only benchmarks)

While the focus is on Apple Silicon Macs, I've included my own deep learning PC (NVIDIA TITAN RTX) as well as a Google Colab free tier instance for comparison.

Getting Setup

If you have a brand new machine, you'll need to setup a few things before running the experiments.

The following steps will get you ready to go for all experiments (and many future machine learning experiments).

However, if you've already got conda, feel free to skip to the next section.

Base environment setup

1. Install homebrew (or run xcode-select --install in terminal and skip to next step)

Go to https://brew.sh/ and follow the main instructions on the front page.

Run the commands on the homebrew webpage in the terminal and follow the instructions when they appear.

2. Install miniforge to get conda: https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge

brew install miniforge

or

Download Miniforge3 for macOS ARM64 from: https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge/releases/latest/download/Miniforge3-MacOSX-arm64.sh

3. Run the following commands in terminal with Miniforge3 downloaded into the ~/Downloads folder:

chmod +x ~/Downloads/Miniforge3-MacOSX-arm64.sh
sh ~/Downloads/Miniforge3-MacOSX-arm64.sh

4. Follow the steps, for example, answer "yes", "yes", "ok" etc and then initialize conda to see if it works.

source ~/miniforge3/bin/activate

5. Important: Restart terminal and check conda is working.

If conda is working, you should have a (base) at the start of your terminal prompt.

For example: (base) daniel@Daniels-MacBook-Pro-3 ~ %

Setting up for machine learning tests

1. Clone this repo.

git clone https://github.com/mrdbourke/mac-ml-speed-test.git 

2. Change into the repo directory.

cd mac-ml-speed-test

3. Create conda environment.

conda create --prefix ./env python=3.10

Note: You could also use conda create --name some-env-name python=3.10 but I prefer --prefix as it's more explicit.

4. Check conda environments.

conda env list

5. Activate newly created conda environment.

conda activate ./env

6. Install necessities/helper packages.

Note: This may have a few extra packages that aren't 100% needed for speed tests but help to have (e.g. JupyterLab, PrettyTable).

conda install -c conda-forge pip pandas numpy matplotlib scikit-learn jupyterlab langchain prettytable py-cpuinfo tqdm

Install and Test PyTorch/Hugging Face Transformers

• Apple guide to installing PyTorch.
• PyTorch guide to installing PyTorch.
• Hugging Face Guides to Install Transformers, Datasets, Evaluate, Accelerate.

conda install pytorch::pytorch torchvision -c pytorch

Note: MPS (Metal Performance Shaders, aka using the GPU on Apple Silicon) comes standard with PyTorch on macOS, you don't need to install anything extra. MPS can be accessed via torch.mps, see more notes in the PyTorch documentation.

Test PyTorch Computer Vision (CIFAR100)

Experiment details:

Model	Dataset	Image Size	Epochs	Num Samples	Num Classes	Problem Type
ResNet50	CIFAR100	32x32x3	5	50,000 train, 10,000 test	100	Image Classification

Example usage of pytorch_test_computer_vision_cifar100.py for 1 epoch and batch size of 32:

python pytorch_test_computer_vision_cifar100.py --epochs=1 --batch_sizes="32"

Batch sizes can be a comma-separated list of batch sizes, e.g. "32, 64, 128, 256".

Default behaviour is to test for 5 epochs and batch sizes of "16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024".

The following:

python pytorch_test_computer_vision_cifar100.py

Is equivalent to:

python pytorch_test_computer_vision_cifar100.py --epochs=5 --batch_sizes="16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024"

Results will be saved to results/results_pytorch_cv/[file_name].csv where file_name is a combination of information from the experiment (see pytorch_test_computer_vision_cifar100.py for details).

Test PyTorch Computer Vision (Food101)

Experiment details:

Model	Dataset	Image Size	Epochs	Num Samples	Num Classes	Problem Type
ResNet50	Food101	224x224x3	5	75,750 train, 25,250 test	101	Image Classification

Note: Download Hugging Face Datasets to download Food101 dataset.

python -m pip install datasets

Example usage of pytorch_test_computer_vision_food101.py for 1 epoch and batch size of 32:

python pytorch_test_computer_vision_food101.py --epochs=1 --batch_sizes="32"

Batch sizes can be a comma-separated list of batch sizes, e.g. "32, 64, 128, 256".

Default behaviour is to test for 3 epochs and batch sizes of "32, 64, 128".

The following:

python pytorch_test_computer_vision_food101.py

Is equivalent to:

python pytorch_test_computer_vision_food101.py --epochs=3 --batch_sizes="32, 64, 128"

Results will be saved to results/results_pytorch_cv/[file_name].csv where file_name is a combination of information from the experiment (see pytorch_test_computer_vision_food101.py for details).

Test PyTorch Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Experiment details:

Model	Dataset	Sequence Size	Epochs	Num Samples	Num Classes	Problem Type
DistilBERT (fine-tune top 2 layers + top Transformer block)	IMDB	512	5	25,000 train, 25,000 test	2	Text Classification

Note: The pytorch_test_nlp.py uses Hugging Face Transformers/Datasets/Evaluate/Accelerate to help with testing. If you get into ML, you'll likely come across these libraries, they are very useful for NLP and ML in general. The model loaded from Transformers uses PyTorch as a backend.

python -m pip install transformers datasets evaluate accelerate

Example usage of pytorch_test_nlp.py for 1 epoch and batch size of 32:

python pytorch_test_nlp.py --epochs=1 --batch_sizes="32"

Batch sizes can be a comma-separated list of batch sizes, e.g. "32, 64, 128, 256".

Default behaviour is to test for 3 epochs and batch sizes of "16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512" (note: without 24GB+ of RAM, running batch sizes of 256+ will likely error, for example my M1 Pro with 18GB of VRAM can only run "16, 32, 64, 128" and fails on 256 with the model/data setup in python_test_nlp.py).

The following:

python pytorch_test_nlp.py

Is equivalent to:

python pytorch_test_nlp.py --epochs=3 --batch_sizes="16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512"

Results will be saved to results/results_pytorch_nlp/[file_name].csv where file_name is a combination of information from the experiment (see pytorch_test_nlp.py for details).

Install and Test TensorFlow

For more on running TensorFlow on macOS, see Apple's developer guide.

Note: Install TensorFlow Datasets to access Food101 dataset with TensorFlow.

python -m pip install tensorflow
python -m pip install tensorflow-metal  
python -m pip install tensorflow_datasets

Note: TensorFlow can be run on macOS without using the GPU via pip install tensorflow, however, if you're using an Apple Silicon Mac, you'll want to use the Metal plugin for GPU acceleration (pip install tensorflow-metal).

After installing tensorflow-metal and running the scripts, you should see something like:

2023-12-06 12:22:02.016745: I tensorflow/core/grappler/optimizers/custom_graph_optimizer_registry.cc:117] Plugin optimizer for device_type GPU is enabled.

Test TensorFlow Computer Vision (CIFAR100)

Experiment details:

Model	Dataset	Image Size	Epochs	Num Samples	Num Classes	Problem Type
ResNet50	CIFAR100	32x32x3	5	50,000 train, 10,000 test	100	Image Classification

Example usage of tensorflow_test_computer_vision_cifar100.py for 1 epoch and batch size of 32:

python tensorflow_test_computer_vision_cifar100.py --epochs=1 --batch_sizes="32"

Batch sizes can be a comma-separated list of batch sizes, e.g. "32, 64, 128, 256".

Default behaviour is to test for 5 epochs and batch sizes of "16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024".

The following:

python tensorflow_test_computer_vision_cifar100.py

Is equivalent to:

python tensorflow_test_computer_vision_cifar100.py --epochs=5 --batch_sizes="16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024"

Results will be saved to results/results_tensorflow_cv/[file_name].csv where file_name is a combination of information from the experiment (see tensorflow_test_computer_vision_cifar100.py for details).

Test TensorFlow Computer Vision (Food101)

Experiment details:

Model	Dataset	Image Size	Epochs	Num Samples	Num Classes	Problem Type
ResNet50	Food101	224x224x3	5	75,750 train, 25,250 test	101	Image Classification

Example usage of tensorflow_test_computer_vision_food101.py for 1 epoch and batch size of 32:

python tensorflow_test_computer_vision_food101.py --epochs=1 --batch_sizes="32"

Batch sizes can be a comma-separated list of batch sizes, e.g. "32, 64, 128".

Default behaviour is to test for 3 epochs and batch sizes of "32, 64, 128".

The following:

python tensorflow_test_computer_vision_food101.py

Is equivalent to:

python tensorflow_test_computer_vision_food101.py --epochs=3 --batch_sizes="32, 64, 128"

Results will be saved to results/results_tensorflow_cv/[file_name].csv where file_name is a combination of information from the experiment (see tensorflow_test_computer_vision_food101.py for details).

Test TensorFlow Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Experiment details:

Model	Dataset	Sequence Size	Epochs	Num Samples	Num Classes	Problem Type
SmallTransformer (custom)	IMDB	200	5	25,000 train, 25,000 test	2	Text Classification

Example usage of tensorflow_test_nlp.py for 1 epoch and batch size of 32:

python tensorflow_test_nlp.py --epochs=1 --batch_sizes="32"

Batch sizes can be a comma-separated list of batch sizes, e.g. "32, 64, 128, 256".

Default behaviour is to test for 3 epochs and batch sizes of "16, 32, 64, 128".

The following:

python tensorflow_test_nlp.py

Is equivalent to:

python tensorflow_test_nlp.py --epochs=3 --batch_sizes="16, 32, 64, 128"

Results will be saved to results/results_tensorflow_nlp/[file_name].csv where file_name is a combination of information from the experiment (see tensorflow_test_nlp.py for details).

Install and Test LlamaCPP (Llama 2 LLM test)

Experiment details:

Model	Task	Num Questions	Num Answers	Total Generations
Llama 2 7B .gguf format	Text Generation	20	5	20*5 = 100

• See: https://llama-cpp-python.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install/macos/ (note: this focuses on macOS install, I haven't tested with CUDA)

CMAKE_ARGS="-DLLAMA_METAL=on" FORCE_CMAKE=1 python -m pip install llama-cpp-python

After installing llama-cpp-python, you will need a .gguf format model from Hugging Face.

• Download a model from Hugging Face with .gguf extension, e.g. https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Llama-2-7B-Chat-GGUF/blob/main/llama-2-7b-chat.Q4_0.gguf → llama-2-7b-chat.Q4_0.gguf
  • Download link: https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Llama-2-7B-Chat-GGUF/resolve/main/llama-2-7b-chat.Q4_0.gguf?download=true
  • Download code:

• Install wget if necessary, requires homebrew: https://brew.sh/

brew install wget 

• Download a .gguf LLM file from Hugging Face, on TheBloke profile, usage/results will vary depending on which model you use, choosing llama-2-7b-chat.Q4_0.gguf as an example:

wget https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Llama-2-7b-Chat-GGUF/resolve/main/llama-2-7b-chat.Q4_0.gguf

Once you've downloaded your model file, put it in the same directory as llama2_test.py (or update the model_path argument to point to the file).

Example usage of llama2_test.py to generate an answer to 1 example question 1 time using the llama-2-7b-chat.Q4_0.gguf model:

python llama2_test.py --path_to_gguf_model="llama-2-7b-chat.Q4_0.gguf" --num_questions=1 --num_times_per_question=1

Default behaviour is to generate an answer to 20 example questions 5 times each using the llama-2-7b-chat.Q4_0.gguf model (100 total generations).

The following:

python llama2_test.py

Is equivalent to:

python llama2_test.py --path_to_gguf_model="llama-2-7b-chat.Q4_0.gguf" --num_questions="all" --num_times_per_question=5

Results will be saved to results/results_llama2/[file_name].csv where file_name is a combination of information from the experiment (see llama2_test.py for details).

• Note on LLM files: you can use other .gguf models, e.g. llama-2-13b, 70b, other variants etc, I just went with 7b to demonstrate (as to run 70b, you will need a lot of RAM, ~70GB+ in half precision, ~40GB in Quantize 4 precision)

Results

The following are the machines I tested. For all of the M3 variants of the MacBook Pro's, they were the base model in their class (e.g. an M3 Pro MacBook Pro with no upgrades from the Apple Store).

Machine	CPU	GPU	RAM	Storage	Price (USD)
M1 Pro 14" 2021	10-core CPU	16-core GPU	32GB	4TB SSD	~$3,500
M3 14" 2023	8-core CPU	10-core GPU	8GB	512GB SSD	$1,599
M3 Pro 14" 2023	11-core CPU	14-core GPU	18GB	512GB SSD	$1,999
M3 Max 14" 2023	14-core CPU	30-core GPU	36GB	1TB SSD	$3,199
Deep Learning PC	Intel i9	NVIDIA TITAN RTX (24GB)	32GB	1TB SSD	~$3,000
Google Colab Free Tier	2-core CPU	NVIDIA Tesla V100 (16GB)	12GB	100GB SSD	Free or $10/month for more compute

Notes:

• Only training time was measured as this generally takes far more time than inference (except for Llama 2 text generation, this was inference only).
• If a result isn't present for a particular machine, it means it either failed or didn't have enough memory to complete the test (e.g. M3 Pro 14" 2023 with 8GB RAM couldn't run batch size 64 for PyTorch CV Food101).

TensorFlow Computer Vision (CIFAR100)

TensorFlow Computer Vision (Food101)

TensorFlow Natural Language Processing (NLP)

PyTorch Computer Vision (CIFAR100)

PyTorch Computer Vision (Food101)

PyTorch Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Llama 2 (LLM)

Geekbench ML

All tests were done using Geekbench ML 0.6.0 for Mac.

Tests include a series of inference-only benchmarks across different domains.

Machine	Num CPU cores	CPU	CPU-link	Num GPU Cores	GPU	GPU-link	Neural Engine	Neural Engine-link
MacBook Pro M1 Pro 14 inch, 2021	10	1809	Link	16	5192	Link	6462	Link
MacBook Pro M3 14 inch, 2023	8	2356	Link	10	5747	Link	8399	Link
MacBook Pro M3 Pro 14 inch, 2023	11	2355	Link	14	7030	Link	10237	Link
MacBook Pro M3 Max 14 inch, 2023	14	2393	Link	30	9008	Link	9450	Link

Discussion

It's quite clear that the newest M3 Macs are quite capable of machine learning tasks.

However, dedicated NVIDIA GPUs still have a clear lead.

The results also show that more GPU cores and more RAM equates to better performance (e.g. M3 Max outperforming most other Macs on most batch sizes).

An interesting result was that the M3 base chip outperformed (or performed level with) the M3 Pro and M3 Max on smaller-scale experiments (CIFAR100, smaller batch sizes).

I'm not 100% sure why this is the case but my intuition tells me this is likely because the overhead of copying data to and from the GPU is more expensive than the actual training itself (e.g. the GPU is waiting for data to be copied to it, rather than being fully utilized).

So in practice, the M3 can compete with M3 Pro and M3 Max because the actual computation doesn't take long but the copying does.

Either way, the Food101 examples show a more realistic example with larger image sizes. It's here that the machines with more GPU cores perform faster and the machines with more RAM can handle larger batch sizes.

For the best results, you'll want to always pack as much data into the GPU as possible (to utilize all of your GPU cores) and avoid copying data between memory.

I thought that the unified memory system on the M-series chips would reduce copying overheads. Perhaps this is not yet the case from a software perspective (e.g. PyTorch and TensorFlow are not designed for Apple Silicon).

Maybe newer frameworks designed for Apple Silicon such as MLX will better utilize the unified memory system. This will require further investigation.

The Geekbench ML results were as expected (newer and bigger chips doing better) with the exception of the M3 Max performing slightly worse on the Neural Engine than the M3 Pro. However, I'd take this number with a grain of salt as it will likely be close to unnoticed in real-world applications.

Recommendations

For smaller experiments, fine-tuning models and learning the fundamentals of machine learning, the M3 Macs will be more than fine to use.

But for larger scale workloads, you'll likely still want a dedicated NVIDIA GPU.

Personally, I use my M1 MacBook Pro as a daily driver but perform all larger-scale deep learning experiments on my NVIDIA GPU PC (connected via SSH). For example, I do plenty of data exploration for Nutrify (an app my brother I have built to help people learn about food) but all model training happens on a NVIDIA Titan RTX.

And Google Colab helps to fill in the gaps whenever necessary.

Based on the results across the new M3 Macs, I'm not personally going to upgrade my M1 MacBook Pro.

But I am curious to see how a spec'd up M3 Max (or future M3 Ultra) would go with a dedicated MLX model against my NVIDIA GPU PC.

In summary my recommendations are:

• Go for as much RAM and GPU cores as you can afford, typically in that order.
  • More GPU cores = faster training/inference.
  • More RAM = larger batch sizes/models.
• Avoid the 8GB RAM M3, 16GB is a good minimum.
  • As value for money, the M3 Pro with a RAM upgrade (16GB -> 36GB) and GPU upgrade (14-cores -> 18 cores) still comes in cheaper than an M3 Max.
• If you've got the option, perhaps spend less on a MacBook and buy a dedicated NVIDIA GPU and setup a deep learning PC you can SSH into (this is what I do).
  • For example, get the baseline M3 with a RAM upgrade and spend the rest of the money on a NVIDIA GPU.

Notes

• Big big big: found you need to increase ulimit -n on M3 Pro and M3 Max to run larger experiments (e.g. default on M3 Pro, M3 Max is ulimit -n 256, I increased to ulimit -n 2560 (10x increase, which is the default on the base M3 and my M1 Pro) and was able to run larger experiments, e.g. batch size 64+ for computer vision)
  • If you get the error OSError: [Errno 24] Too many open files... (or something similar), try increasing ulimit -n
• As far as I know, float16 (mixed-precision training) doesn't work on MPS devices, this is why I've used float32 for all tests, float16 will typically halve training times on compatible devices (e.g. NVIDIA GPUs).
• Also, MPS doesn't support torch.compile() which also speeds up training times on NVIDIA Ampere GPUs & above.
• Tests should not be compared between frameworks, e.g. TensorFlow vs PyTorch for X task. They are more designed to compare the same code across hardware.

Potential upgrades

• Add total memory count + num GPU cores to results e.g. "Apple_M1_Pro_18GB_Memory_14_GPU_Cores..."
• Add scikit-learn/XGBoost tests, e.g. 100,000 rows, 1,000,000 rows?
• Could I use Keras 3.0 for the same code to run on multiple backends? 🤔
• Apple has recently released a deep learning framework called MLX which is designed for Apple Silicon, this may significantly improve speed on Apple Silicon Macs, see the mlx/ directory for more. See this example of Llama 2 running on MLX - https://huggingface.co/mlx-llama/Llama-2-7b-chat-mlx