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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richardnpaul - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link
I'm not saying that it's not great and energy efficient marvel of technology (although you're forgetting that the compared part is Zen3 mobile 35W part which has 12MB rather than 32MB of L3 and that's partly because its a small die on 7nm).They mentioned Metal they mentioned how they can't get direct comparative results, this is one of the downsides of this, and the others from Apple, chip, great as it is it has drawbacks that hamper it which are nothing to to do with the architecture.
OreoCookie - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link
I don’t think I’m forgetting anything here. I am just saying that Anandtech should compare the M1 Max against actual products rather than speculate how it compares to future products like Alderlake or Zen 3 with V cache. Your claim was that the article “comes across as a fanboi article”, and I am just saying that they are just giving the chip a great review because in their low-level benchmarks it outclasses the competition in virtually every way. That’s not fanboi-ism, it is just rooted in fact.And yes, they explained the issue with APIs and the lack of optimization of games for the Mac. Given that Mac users either aren’t gamers or (if they are gamers) tend to not use their Macs for gaming, we can argue how important that drawback actually is. In more GPU compute-focussed benchmarks (e. g. by Affinity that make cross-platform creativity apps), the results of the GPU seem very impressive.
richardnpaul - Thursday, October 28, 2021 - link
My main disagreement was not them comparing with with Zen3, but more that I felt that they failed to adequately cover how the change would impact this use case scenario between M1 versions given that comparing Zen2 to Zen3 has been covered (and AMD have already said that the Vcache will mainly impact gaming and server workloads by around 15% on average) and shown in these specific use cases to have quite a large benefit and I'd just wanted that kind of abstract logical analysis of how the Max might be more positively positioned for this or these use cases above say the original M1. (I know that they mentioned in the article that they didn't have the M1 anymore and the actual AMD 5900HS device is dead which has severely impacted their testing here.I come to Anandtech specifically for the more indepth coverage that you don't get elsewhere and I come for all the hardware articles irrespective of brand because I'm interested in technology not brand names which is why I dislike articles that come across as biased (whilst it'll never be intentionally biased we're all human at the end of the day and it's hard not to let the excitement of novel tech cloud our judgement).
richardnpaul - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link
Also my comparison was AMD to AMD between generations and how it might apply to increasing the cache sizes of the M1 and the positive improvement it might have on performance in situations using the GPU such as gaming.Ppietra - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link
You are so focused on a fringe case that you don’t stop to think that "maybe" there are other things happening besides "gluing" a CPU and GPU on the same silicon, fighting for memory bandwidth. Unified memory architecture plus CPU and GPU sharing data over the system cache, has an impact on memory bandwidth needs.Besides this, looking at data that it is provided, we seem to be far from saturating memory bandwidth on a regular basis.
It would be interesting though to actually see how applications behave when truly optimised for this hardware and not just ported with some compatibility abstraction layer in the middle. Affinity Photo would probably be the best example.
richardnpaul - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link
This is exactly what I wanted coving in the article. If the GPU and CPU are hitting the memory subsystem they are going to be competing for cache hits. My point was that Zen3 (desktop) showed a large positive correlation between doubling the cache (or unifying it into a single blob in reality) and increased FPS in games and that that might also hold true for the increased cache on the M1 Pro and Max.Unfortunately testing this chip is hampered by decisions completely unrelated to the hardware itself, and that also applies to certain use cases.
it'll be more interesting to see testing the same games under Linux between an Nvidia/AMD/Intel based laptop as then the only differences should be the ISA; and immature drivers.
Ppietra - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link
"hitting the memory subsystem they are going to be competing for cache hits"CPU and GPU also have their own cache (CPU 24MB L2 total; GPU don’t know how much now) which is very substantial.
And I think you are not seeing the picture about CPU and GPU not having to duplicate resources, working on the same data in an enormous 48MB system cache (when using native APIs of course) before even needing to access RAM, reducing latency, etc. This can be very powerful. So no, I don’t assume that there will any significant impact because of some fringe case while ignoring the great benefits that it brings.
richardnpaul - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link
One person's fringe edge case is another person's primary use case.The 24/48MB is a shared cache between the CPU and GPU (and everything else that accesses main memory).
Ppietra - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link
no, it’s a fringe case period! You don’t see laptop processors with these amounts of L2 cache and system cache anywhere, not even close, and yet for some reason you feel that it would be at an disadvantage, failing to acknowledge the advantages of sharingrichardnpaul - Thursday, October 28, 2021 - link
What you call a fringe case I call 2.35m people. Okay, so it's probably on about 1.5 to 2% of Mac users; it's ~2.5% of Steam users.I know people who play games on Windows Machines because their GPUs in their Macs aren't good enough. Those people who are frustrated having to maintain a Windows machine just to play games. Those people will buy into an M1 Pro or Max just so they can be rid of the Windows system. It won't be their main concern, but then they're not going to be buying an M1 Pro/Max for the reason of rendering etc when they're a web developer, they're going to buy it so that they can dump the pain in the backside Windows gaming machine. Valve don't maintain their MacOS version of Steam for no good reason.