From October 18, 2021 in the two new MacBook Pros, here the commercial "the beast"
Introduced in November 2020, Apple's M1 chip has proven to be incredibly powerful despite only being available on Apple's entry-level Macs: the 24-inch iMac, MacBook Air, Mac mini, and two MacBook Pros -models. Now attention is turning to the next generation of Apple's processors. With Apple's first CPU and GPU for Macs proving that the company knows exactly what it's doing, hopes for the successor are high. The new chips were dubbed the M1 Pro and M1 Max.
What has changed compared to its predecessor?
The Apple M1 chip, which like Apple's A14 bionic chip is manufactured using the five-nanometer process, has eight CPU cores that are divided into four performance (Firestorm) and four efficiency cores (Icestrom). In addition, the chip has a graphics unit (GPU) with up to eight cores that can run up to 25,000 threads simultaneously. In total, the M1 System-on-a-Chip (SoC) consists of 16 billion transistors.
The M1 Pro has 33.7 billion transistors — more than twice as many as on an M1. The chip can be configured with up to 32 GB of fast shared memory.
The M1 Max is the largest chip Apple has ever developed: 57 billion transistors and up to 64 GB of faster shared memory.
Processor
Both the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro come with the same 10-core processor, regardless of whether they have an M1 Pro or M1 Max. In fact, there is one exception: the entry-level MacBook Pro 14" only has 8 cores. In the 10-core version, there are eight high-performance cores and two high-efficiency cores. In contrast, the M1 offers four high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores.
Graphic
The GPU is where we find the real difference between M1 Pro and M1 Max. The M1 Pro offers an entry-level 14-core GPU or 16-core GPU. The GPU in the M1 Pro compared to the M1 is said to be 2x faster. The difference between the M1 Pro and an 8-core PC laptop chip of the latest generation is that the GPU is said to be up to 7x faster.
The M1 Max GPU goes up to 32 cores, but there's also a 24-core build-to-order option. For the 32-core option, graphics performance is said to be up to 4x faster than the M1. The M1 Pro also adds a ProRes accelerator to the media engine to speed up video processing. This also means it's possible to play multiple streams of high-quality 4K and 8K ProRes video with very little power consumption.
The M1 Max goes even further with two ProRes accelerators. They help deliver up to 2x faster video encoding than M1 Pro. As a result, Apple says professionals can use the M1 Max to edit up to 30 streams of 4K ProRes video or up to seven streams of 8K ProRes video in Final Cut Pro. That's more streams than a 28-core Mac Pro with Afterburner. As a result, Apple says the GPU can deliver performance comparable to a high-end GPU in a compact Pro PC laptop while using "up to 40 percent less power." Apple claims performance is similar to the high-end GPU in the largest PC laptops while consuming up to 100 watts less power.
RAM
There were concerns that there would be insufficient RAM, but this was unfounded. The 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro come with 16GB of unified memory that is upgradeable to 32GB. If you opt for the M1 Max chip, 64GB of RAM will be supported. For the M1 Pro, Apple claims to deliver up to 200GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is nearly triple the bandwidth of the M1. In contrast, the M1 Max offers up to 400 GB/s of memory bandwidth. That's 2x M1 Pro and almost 6x M1. Therefore, the max. 64 GB RAM is possible.
Conclusion:
Apple has kept its promise from 2020 (WWDC). The M1 was just the beginning of a SoC generation. The biggest advantage of these M1 processors lies in its design. Apple has managed to combine the main memory for the processor cores and for the graphics unit (GPU). Due to the enormous bus bandwidth, it is possible to share the main memory for the CPU as well as for the GPU. In this way, Apple can do without the extremely expensive GPU RAM of the commercial graphics card manufacturers from NVIDIA or ATI in its future Macs and with much less power consumption. We are only at the beginning of this transaction of the new M1 processors.
Today's M1 Max processor with 32 GPU delivers the same graphics performance as the iMac Pro 27", which is no longer available in the meantime! A new model will definitely follow. Apple promises spring 2022. Will an M2 be installed there? We'll see On the occasion of the announcement on October 18, 2021 in the live stream, here is the Apple video on the new Apple MacBook Pro (2021).