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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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.