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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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.