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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web2dot0 - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
You just made his case. 😂melgross - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
We’re all ready seeing optimized software from Blackmagic, and others. Blackmagic is claiming anything from 2 times to over 7 times performance gains in Resolve 17.4 with the 32 core Max.Apple also has a power mode that we can access which will turn the fans to max level for extra performance. I’m looking to try that when my 16” comes in a few days. I wonder if that feature was tested, as it wasn’t mentioned.
Gaming, well, yeah. Over the decades most ports were bad. I don’t have any thought that the ones tested here were much better. Then running under Rosetta 2, as good as it is, isn’t helping.
daveinpublic - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
Huh, nice way to hijack the top comment.name99 - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
So nothing changes.Gamers have always hated Apple. Doesn't change.
Developers have been uninterested in Apple. Probably doesn't change.
None of this matters to Apple, or most of its customers. Doesn't change.
*Perhaps* Apple will make some attempt to grow Arcade upwards, but honestly, why bother? Almost all the ranting about gaming HW in threads like this is trash talk and aspirational; it does no translate into purchases, certainly not of Apple HW, and usually not of Wintel HW. It's no different from the sort of comments you might read on a Maserati vs Ferrari comment board -- and as uninteresting and unimportant to either the engineers at both companies, or most of the *actual* customers.
web2dot0 - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
Developers love MacBookPro what are you talking about?!?mlambert890 - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
He's talking about *game developers* targeting MacOS. Not that in developers in general tend to like MacBooks (although certainly not Windows developers obviously)TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
Apple developers love macbook pros. The rest of the world sees them for the overpriced shiny facebook machines they've become. Gone are the days of the 2010 era tank macbook pros that lasted forever, chromebooks have better build quality and longer lifespans then modern apple products.steven4570 - Friday, October 29, 2021 - link
"The rest of the world sees them for the overpriced shiny facebook machines they've become. "Not really
Hrunga_Zmuda - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
It's not M1X. There are two chips, M1 Pro and M1 Max.I'm guessing that next year, the entry level chips will be M2 and the big boys will be M2 Pro and M2 Max.
TedTschopp - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
The money in the gaming space is in mobile gaming, not in AAA gaming, and Apple is the leader in Mobile Gaming Revenue. So the classic pattern here would be for them to leverage themselves from the leader in the low-end market into a leader in the high-end market.And with their first attempt at a gaming class machine, they came out with something in the first quartile. Next year, when the M2 Pro and Max, my guess is that they will be accelerating faster then their competition as their development and design processes have been designed to out compete mobile competitors, not desktop competitors like Intel and NVidia.