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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darwinosx - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
Everything you said is wrong.C@illou - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
Slight correction, Vulkan works great on windows (and also works on Linux, but that counts the same as "SteamOS"), that makes it the most compatible API.xeridea - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
Vulkan runs on everything.Qozmo - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
Worth mentioning that MoltenVK exists officially from Khronos Group which layers Vulcan on top of the MetalAPI enabling Vulcan apps to run on MacOS/iOSWrs - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
Is it just me or does that make no economic sense? When I’m AAA gaming (flashy visuals, complex scenes, high fps) I don’t feel as if I’m looking for light and cool or portable. I’d be on a desk flinging a mouse, or wielding a controller in front of a TV.michael2k - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
Maybe it isn't clear, but 'light and cool' means there is lots of headroom for overclocking. From the third page:Power Behaviour: No Real TDP, but Wide Range
Apple doesn’t advertise any TDP for the chips of the devices – it’s our understanding that simply doesn’t exist, and the only limitation to the power draw of the chips and laptops are simply thermals. As long as temperature is kept in check, the silicon will not throttle or not limit itself in terms of power draw.
You can imagine that in a desktop, with far better cooling and far more available power, that the M1P/M1M might grow well beyond the 92W of observed package power. The Mac Pro with 28 cores and 2 GPUs today will allow the CPU to consume 902W, there is a lot of space for performance to grow!
So imagine 10x more performance from a desktop Mac with 10 M1P in some kind of fabric (100 cores and 320 GPUs!) or a much smaller number of M1P, maybe 4 (40 cores and 128 GPUs) with each allowed to consume 2.5x as much power
sean8102 - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
Problem is developer support. It seems there are only 2 "AAA" macOS AND ARM native games.https://www.applegamingwiki.com/wiki/M1_native_com...
That has to improve A LOT for getting a ARM Mac for gaming to make any sense. Otherwise you're always taking the performance hit of Rosetta 2. Plus not many AAA games are releasing for macOS since they announced the switch to ARM.
The chips are amazing in terms of performance and efficiency, but getting a mac esp a ARM based one for gaming wouldn't make much sense. At least for now and not unless developer support improves A LOT.
AshlayW - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
Clock speeds do not scale with power consumption and Firestorm cores are not designed to reach high clock speeds, these cores would likely not break 3.5 if overclocked (wide, dense design for perf/W). AMD / Intel / NVIDIA's 5nm-class processors will put Apple back in its place for people wanting to NOT be locked into a walled garden from a company adamant on crushing consumer rights. It's just a shame that Apple's silicon engineers are so freakin' good, they're working for the wrong company (and hurting human progress by putting the best wafers/chips in Apple products).valuearb - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
Lol apple is responsible for more human progress than all the other PC makers combined.MooseNSquirrel - Friday, October 29, 2021 - link
Only if your metric is marketing based.