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
CPU ST Performance: Not Much Change from M1
Apple didn’t talk much about core performance of the new M1 Pro and Max, and this is likely because it hasn’t really changed all that much compared to the M1. We’re still seeing the same Firestrom performance cores, and they’re still clocked at 3.23GHz. The new chip has more caches, and more DRAM bandwidth, but under ST scenarios we’re not expecting large differences.
When we first tested the M1 last year, we had compiled SPEC under Apple’s Xcode compiler, and we lacked a Fortran compiler. We’ve moved onto a vanilla LLVM11 toolchain and making use of GFortran (GCC11) for the numbers published here, allowing us more apple-to-apples comparisons. The figures don’t change much for the C/C++ workloads, but we get a more complete set of figures for the suite due to the Fortran workloads. We keep flags very simple at just “-Ofast” and nothing else.
In SPECint2017, the differences to the M1 are small. 523.xalancbmk is showcasing a large performance improvement, however I don’t think this is due to changes on the chip, but rather a change in Apple’s memory allocator in macOS 12. Unfortunately, we no longer have an M1 device available to us, so these are still older figures from earlier in the year on macOS 11.
Against the competition, the M1 Max either has a significant performance lead, or is able to at least reach parity with the best AMD and Intel have to offer. The chip however doesn’t change the landscape all too much.
SPECfp2017 also doesn’t change dramatically, 549.fotonik3d does score quite a bit better than the M1, which could be tied to the more available DRAM bandwidth as this workloads puts extreme stress on the memory subsystem, but otherwise the scores change quite little compared to the M1, which is still on average quite ahead of the laptop competition.
The M1 Max lands as the top performing laptop chip in SPECint2017, just shy of being the best CPU overall which still goes to the 5950X, but is able to take and maintain the crown from the M1 in the FP suite.
Overall, the new M1 Max doesn’t deliver any large surprises on single-threaded performance metrics, which is also something we didn’t expect the chip to achieve.
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vlad42 - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
And there you go making pure speculative claims without any factual basis for the quality of the ports. I could similarly make absurd claims such as every benchmark Intel's CPU looses is because that is just a bad port. Provide documented evidence it is a bad port as you are the one making that claim (and not bad Apple drivers, thermal throttling because they would not turn on the fans until the chip hit 85C, etc.).Face it, in the real world benchmarks this article provides, AMD's and Nvidia's GPUs are roughly 50% faster than Apple's M1 Max GPU.
Also, a full node shrink and integrating a dGPU into the SOC would make it much more energy efficient. The node shrink should be obvious and this site has repeatedly demonstrated the significant energy efficiency benefits of integrating discrete components, such as GPUs, into the SOCs.
jospoortvliet - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link
Well they are 100% sure bad ports as this gpu didn't exist. The games are written for a different platform, different gpus and different drivers. That they perform far from optimal must be obvious as fsck - driver optimization for specific games and game optimization for specific cards, vendors and even drivers usually make the difference between amd and nvidia - 20-50% between entirely unoptimized (this) and final is not even remotely rare. So yeah this is an absolute worst case. And Aztec Ruins shows the potential when (mildly?) optimized - nearly 3080 levels of performance.Blastdoor - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
Apple's GPU isn't magic, but the advantage is real and it's not just the node. Apple has made a design choice to achieve a given performance level through more transistors rather than more Hz. This is true of both their CPU and GPU designs, actually. PC OEMs would rather pay less for a smaller, hotter chip and let their customers eat the electricity costs and inconvenience of shorter battery life and hotter devices. Apple's customers aren't PC OEMs, though, they're real people. And not just any real people, real people with $$ to spend and good taste .markiz - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
When you say "Apple has made a design choice", who did in fact make that choice? Can it e attributed to an individual?Also, why is nobody else making this choice? Simply economics, or other reasons?
markiz - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
Apple customers having $$ and taste, at a time where 60% of USA has an iphone can not exactly be true. Every loser these days has an iphone.I know you were likely being specific in regards to Macbooks Pros, so I guess both COULD be true, but does sound very bad to say it.
michael2k - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
That would be true if there were and AMD or NVIDIA GPU manufactured on TSMC N5P node.Since there isn't, a 65W Apple GPU will perform like a 93W AMD GPU at N7, and slightly higher still for an NVIDIA GPU at Samsung 8nm.
That is probably the biggest reason they're so competitive. At 5nm they can fit far more transistors and clock them far lower than AMD or NVIDIA. In a desktop you can imagine they can clock higher 1.3GHz to push performance even higher. 2x perf at 2.6GHz, and power usage would only go up from 57W to 114W if there is no need to increase voltage when driving the GPU that fast.
Wrs - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
All the evidence says M1 Max has more resources and outperforms the RTX 3060 mobile. But throw crappy/Rosetta code at the former and performance can very well turn into a wash. I don't expect that to change as Macs are mainly mobile and AAA gaming doesn't originate on mobile because of the restrictive thermals. It's just that Windows laptops are optimized for the exact same code as the desktops, so they have an easy time outperforming the M1's on games originating on Windows.When I wanna game seriously, I use a Windows desktop or a console, which outperforms any laptop by the same margin as Windows beats Mac OS/Rosetta in game efficiency. TDP is 250-600w (the consoles are more efficient because of Apple-like integration). Any gaming I'd do on a Windows laptop or an M1 is just casual. There are plenty of games already optimized for M1 btw - they started on iOS. /shrug
Blastdoor - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
As things stand now, the Windows advantage in gaming is huge, no doubt.But any doubt about Apple's commitment to the Mac must surely be gone now. Apple has invested serious resources in the Mac, from top to bottom. If they've gone to all the work of creating Metal and these killer SOCs, why not take one more step and invest some money+time in getting optimized AAA games available on these machines? At this point, with so many pieces in place, it almost seems silly not to make that effort.
techconc - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
It's hard to speak about these GPUs for gaming performance when the games you choose to run for your benchmark are Intel native and have to run under emulation. That's not exactly a showcase for native gaming performance.sean8102 - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
What games could they have used? The only two somewhat demanding ARM native macOS games are WoW, and Baldur's Gate 3.