Apple's M1 Pro, M1 Max SoCs Investigated: New Performance and Efficiency Heights
by Andrei Frumusanu on October 25, 2021 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- Apple
- MacBook
- Apple M1 Pro
- Apple M1 Max
Conclusion & First Impressions
The new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips are designs that we’ve been waiting for over a year now, ever since Apple had announced the M1 and M1-powered devices. The M1 was a very straightforward jump from a mobile platform to a laptop/desktop platform, but it was undeniably a chip that was oriented towards much lower power devices, with thermal limits. The M1 impressed in single-threaded performance, but still clearly lagged behind the competition in overall performance.
The M1 Pro and M1 Max change the narrative completely – these designs feel like truly SoCs that have been made with power users in mind, with Apple increasing the performance metrics in all vectors. We expected large performance jumps, but we didn’t expect the some of the monstrous increases that the new chips are able to achieve.
On the CPU side, doubling up on the performance cores is an evident way to increase performance – the competition also does so with some of their designs. How Apple does it differently, is that it not only scaled the CPU cores, but everything surrounding them. It’s not just 4 additional performance cores, it’s a whole new performance cluster with its own L2. On the memory side, Apple has scaled its memory subsystem to never before seen dimensions, and this allows the M1 Pro & Max to achieve performance figures that simply weren’t even considered possible in a laptop chip. The chips here aren’t only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you’d have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max – it’s just generally absurd.
On the GPU side of things, Apple’s gains are also straightforward. The M1 Pro is essentially 2x the M1, and the M1 Max is 4x the M1 in terms of performance. Games are still in a very weird place for macOS and the ecosystem, maybe it’s a chicken-and-egg situation, maybe gaming is still something of a niche that will take a long time to see make use of the performance the new chips are able to provide in terms of GPU. What’s clearer, is that the new GPU does allow immense leaps in performance for content creation and productivity workloads which rely on GPU acceleration.
To further improve content creation, the new media engine is a key feature of the chip. Particularly video editors working with ProRes or ProRes RAW, will see a many-fold improvement in their workflow as the new chips can handle the formats like a breeze – this along is likely going to have many users of that professional background quickly adopt the new MacBook Pro’s.
For others, it seems that Apple knows the typical MacBook Pro power users, and has designed the silicon around the use-cases in which Macs do shine. The combination of raw performance, unique acceleration, as well as sheer power efficiency, is something that you just cannot find in any other platform right now, likely making the new MacBook Pro’s not just the best laptops, but outright the very best devices for the task.
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Speedfriend - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
This isn't their first attempt. They have been building laptop version of the A series chips for years now for testing. There have been leaks about this for years. Assuming that the world best SOC design team will make a significant advancement from here after 10 years of progress on A series is hoping for a bit muchrobotManThingy - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
All of the games are x86 translated by Apple's Rosetta, which means they are meaningless when it come to determining the speed of the M1 Max or any other M1 chip.TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
Real-world software isnt worthless.AshlayW - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
"The M1X is slightly slower than the RTX-3080, at least on-paper and in synthetic benchmarks."Not quite, it matches the 3080 in mobile-focused synthetics where Apple is focusing on pretending to have best-in-class performance, and then its true colours shows in actual video gaming. This GPU is for content creators (where it's excellent) but you don't just out-muscle decades of GPU IP optimisation for gaming in hardware and software that AMD/NVIDIA have. Furthermore, the M1MAX is significantly weaker in GPU resources than the GA104 chip in the mobile 3080, which here, is actually limited to quite low clock speeds, it is no surprise it is faster in actual games, by a lot.
TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
Rarely do synthetics ever line up with real word performance, especially in games. MatcHong 3060 mobile performance is already pretty good.NPPraxis - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
Where are you seeing "actual gaming performance" benchmarks that you can compare? There's very few AAA games available for Mac to begin with; most of the ones that do exist are running under Rosetta 2 or not using Metal; and Windows games using VMs or WINE + Rosetta 2 has massive overhead.The number of actual games running is tiny and basically the only benchmark I've seen is Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I need a higher sample size to state anything definitively.
That said, I wouldn't be shocked if you're right, Apple has always targeted Workstation GPU buyers more than gaming GPU buyers.
GigaFlopped - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
The games tested were already ported over to the Metal API, it was only the CPU side that was emulated, we've seen emulated benchmarks before, the M1 and Rosetta does a pretty decent job at it and when they ran the games at 4k, that would have pretty much removed any potential bottleneck. So what you see is pretty much what you'll get in terms of real-world rasterization performance, they might squeeze an extra 5% or so out of it, but don't expect any miracles, it's an RTX 3060 Mobile competitor in terms of Rasterization, which is certainly not to be sniffed at and very good achievement. The fact that it can match the 3060 whilst consuming less power is a feat of its own, considering this is Apple first real attempt at desktop level or performance GPU.lilkwarrior - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
These M1 chips aren't appropriate for serious AAA Gaming. They don't even have hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and other core DX12U/Vulkan tech for current-gen games coming up moving forward. Want to preview that? Play Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition.OrphanSource - Thursday, May 26, 2022 - link
you 'premium gaming' encephalitics are the scum of the GD earth. Oh, you can only play your AAA money pit cash grabs at 108 fps instead of 145fps at FOURTEEN FORTY PEE on HIGH QUALITY SETTING? OMG, IT"S AS BAD AS THE RTX 3060? THE OBJECTIVELY MOST COST/FRAME EFFECTIVE GRAPHICS CARD OF 2021??? WOW THAT SOUNDS FUCKING AMAZING!Wait, no I, misunderstood, you are saying that's a bad thing? Oh you poor, old, blind, incontinent man... well, at least I THINK you are blind if you need 2k resolution at well over 100fps across the most graphics intensive games of 2020/2021 to see what's going on clearly enough to EVEN REMOTELY enjoy the $75 drug you pay for (the incontinence I assume because you 1. clearly wouldn't give a sh*t about these top end, graphics obsessed metrics and 2. have literally nothing else to do except shell out enough money to feed a family a small family for a week with the cost of each of your cutting edge games UNLESS you were homebound in some way?)
Maybe stop being the reason why the gaming industry only cares about improving their graphics at the cost of everything else. Maybe stop being the reason why graphics cards are so wildly expensive that scientific researchers can't get the tools they need to do the more complex processing needed to fold proteins and cure cancer, or use machine learning to push ahead in scientific problems that resist our conventional means of analysis
KYS fool
BillBear - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
The performance numbers would look even nicer if we had numbers for that GE76 Raider when it's unplugged from the wall and has to throttle the CPU and GPU way the hell down.How about testing both on battery only?