The Apple M1 made the Mac range impressive. But the efforts didn’t stop there. This Monday (18), the Apple Silicon platform gained two powerful members: chips M1 Pro And M1 Maximum Both are aimed at professional activities and, therefore, equip the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Apple M1 Pro
With 33.7 billion transistors and a 5-nanometer manufacturing process, the Apple M1 Pro features up to ten CPU cores – two energy-efficient and eight high-performance – and up to 16 GPU cores.
It is a major increase. The first M1 has eight CPU cores, four of which are performance oriented; the other four prioritize efficiency. Furthermore, the chip has seven or eight GPU cores.
For this reason, compared to the M1, the Pro version can offer up to 70% more CPU performance. This aspect is complemented by a memory bandwidth of up to 200 GB / s (gigabytes per second) and support for up to 32 GB of RAM (LPDDR5).
Graphics performance is just as or more remarkable: in its full version, the M1 Pro’s GPU is up to twice as fast as its predecessor, has 2,048 execution units, and can handle up to 5.2 teraflops per second.
Apple M1 Max
The Pro version has almost twice as many transistors as the first M1, but the Apple M1 Max manages to be even more “monstrous” in this sense: the manufacturing technology remains at 5 nanometers, but 57 billion transistors appear here.
This is the most powerful chip Apple has ever developed. Not surprisingly, the company claims that the Max version is up to four times faster than the first M1.
Although the CPU configuration remains eight-core, the M1 Max carries up to 32 GPU cores and achieves 4,096 execution units. Graphics performance can reach 10.4 teraflops.
The memory bandwidth also doubles: it is 400 GB / s. Furthermore, the chip can work with up to 64GB of RAM.
performance, many performance
To give you an idea of what these numbers mean, Apple says that a 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro chip can be up to 2.5 times faster than a MacBook Pro with a Radeon Pro 5600M GPU. Already a unit with M1 Max can have four times the graphics performance compared to the same graphics chip from AMD.
According to Apple, a Mac with M1 Max can support four external displays at the same time without any problems – the Pro version supports up to two external displays at the same time.
The energy performance is also impressive. An example: An Apple test indicates that the M1 Pro can have graphics performance equivalent to the GeForce RTX 3050 GPU, but consuming 70% less power. The M1 Max can reach a notebook GeForce RTX 3080, but requiring 100 W less.
It is also worth noting that both chips carry relevant complementary features, such as support for ProRes (video compression format for high-quality playback) and the presence of the Neural Engine artificial intelligence engine in a 16-core configuration.