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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michael2k - Thursday, October 28, 2021 - link
Power consumption scales linearly with clock speed.Clock speed, however, is constrained by voltage. That said, we already know that the M1M itself has a 3.2GHz clock while the GPU is only running at 1.296GHz. It is unknown if there is any reason other than power for the GPU to run so slowly. If they could double the GPU clock (and therefore double it's performance) without increasing it's voltage, it would only draw about 112W. If they let it run at 3.2GHz it would draw 138W.
Paired with the CPU drawing 40W the M1M would still be several times under the Mac Pro's current 902W. So that leaves open the possibility of a multiple chip solution (4 M1P still only draws 712W if the GPU is clocked to 3.2GHz) as well as clocking up slightly to 3.5GHz, assuming no need to increase voltage. Bumping up to 3.5GHz would still only consume 778W while giving us almost 11x the GPU power of the current M1P, which would be 11x the performance of the 3080 found in the GE76 Raider
Also, you bring up AMD/Intel/NVIDIA at 5nm, without also considering that when Apple stops locking up 5nm it's because they will be at 4nm and 3nm.
uningenieromas - Thursday, October 28, 2021 - link
You would think that if Apple's silicon engineers are so freakin' good, they could basically work wherever they want...and, yep, they chose Apple. There might be a reason for that?varase - Wednesday, November 3, 2021 - link
We're glad you shared your religious epiphany with the rest of us 😳.Romulo Pulcinelli Benedetti - Sunday, May 22, 2022 - link
Sure, Intel and AMD would take all the hard work to advance humanity toward Apple level chips if Apple was not there, believe in this...Alej - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
The native ARM Mac scarcity I don’t fully get, a lot of games get ported to the switch which is already ARM. And if they are using Vulkan as the graphics API then there’s already MoltenVK to translate it to Metal, which even if not perfect and won’t use the 100% of available tricks and optimizations, it would run well enough.Wrs - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
@Alej It's a numbers and IDE game. 90 million Switches sold, all purely for gaming, supported by a company that exclusively does games. 20 million Macs sold yearly, most not for gaming in the least, built by a company not focused on gaming for that platform. iPhones are partially used for gaming, however, and sell many times the volume of the Switch, so as expected there's a strong gaming ecosystem.Kangal - Friday, October 29, 2021 - link
Apple is happy where they are.However, if Apple were a little faster/wiser, they would've made the switch from Intel Macs to M1 Macs back in 2018 using the TSMC 7nm node, their Tempest/Vortex CPUs and their A12-GPU. They wouldn't be too far removed from the performance of the M1, M1P, M1X if scaled similarly.
And even more interesting, what if Apple released a great Home Console?
Something that is more compact than the Xbox Series S, yet more powerful than the Xbox Series X. That would leave both Microsoft and Sony scrambling. They could've designed a very ergonomic controller with much less latency, and they could've enticed all these AAA-developers to their platform (Metal v2 / Swift v4). It would be gaming-centric, with out-of-box support for iOS games/apps, and even a limited-time support (Rosetta v2) for legacy OS X Applications. They wouldn't be able to subsidies the pricing like Sony, but could basically front the costs from their own pocket to bring it to a palatable RRP. After 2 years, then they would be able to turn a profit from its hardware sales and software sales.
I'm sure they could have been a hit. And it would then pivot to make MacBook Pro's more friendly for media consumption, and developer-supported. Strengthening their entire ecosystem, and leveraging their unique position in software and hardware to remain competitive.
kwohlt - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
I think it is just you. Imagine a hypothetical ultra thin, fanless laptop that offered 20 hours of battery under load and could play games at desktop 3080 levels...Would you wish this laptop was louder, hotter, and had worse battery?No of course not. Consuming less power and generating less heat, while offering similar or better performance has always been the goal of computing. It's this trend that allows us to daily carry computing power that was once the size of a refrigerator in our pockets and on our wrists.
Wrs - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link
No, but I might wish it could scale upward to a desktop/console for way more performance than a 3080. :) That would also be an indictment of how poorly the 3080 is designed or fabricated, or how old it is.Now, if in the future silicon gets usurped by a technology that does not scale up in power density, then I could be forced to say yes.
turbine101 - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
Why would developers waste there time on a device which will have barely any sales?The M1 Mac Max costs $6knzd. That's just crazy, even the most devout Apple enthusiasts cannot justify this. And Mac is far less usable than IOS.