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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unclevagz - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
Is the M1 Max here being tested on the so called "high power" mode?Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
No.unclevagz - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
Is the high power mode a selectable option on your review unit?Ryan Smith - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
It's selectable on the 16-inch models. However it's not needed for anything short of the heaviest combined CPU + GPU workloads. Any pure CPU or GPU workload doesn't come close to the thermal limits of the machine. And even a moderate mixed workload like Premiere Pro didn't benefit from High Power mode.It has a reason to exist, but that reason is close to rendering a video overnight - as in a very hard and very sustained total system workload.
unclevagz - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
So from your comment, I take it that the high power mode doesn't do anything to performance except allow the fans to kick in more aggressively rather than clock down the CPU/GPU in thermally limited scenarios?hmw - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
Ryan, Andrei - so would the high power mode be something that prevents throttling or frequency downshifting when running sustained CPU + GPU workloads that might otherwise cause the machine to throttle or run over the combined limit (example > 120W ) ? If so, makes sense - it's just adjusting the power profile much like in Windows ...Just trying to decide between the lighter 14" and the heavier 16", seems like both models score equally well on the benchmarks otherwise ...
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
" so would the high power mode be something that prevents throttling or frequency downshifting when running sustained CPU + GPU workloads that might otherwise cause the machine to throttle or run over the combined limit (example > 120W ) ? "Correct.
But being aware of the throttling issues on the Touch Bar 15/16 Inch MBPs, I should emphasize that we're not seeing throttling to begin with. Even "typical" heavy workloads like games aren't having problems. HP mode exists because there are edge cases, but unlike past MBPs, it seems you have to really work at it to find them.
BillBear - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
I would expect "high power" mode to just be "crank the fans up and leave them up" mode.For instance, that MSI GE76 Raider with a GTX 3080 has such a mode:
>The downside of the extreme performance mode though is noise, with the system peaking around 55 dB(A) measured one inch over the trackpad. If you are going to run at maximum, you would really need closed-back earphones to try and remove some of the noise.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16928/the-msi-ge76-...
Tyrone91 - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
No Cinebench R23? Those R23 MT scores seem much closer to the Intel/AMD laptop chips.sirmo - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
The only useful test I wanted to see. What's weird is it's present in the power consumption chart. So why not post the results?