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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zony249 - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
Same reason as why Andrei didn’t run only one of SPEC’s benchmarks, but rather ran all of them. When reviewing benchmarks, to compare the average performances of different CPU’s, you’ll have to average the performance in all benchmarks. However, if you only want to determine the cinebench performance, i.e you want to determine which CPU to get to run Cinema4D, then by all means, only look at how it performs in Cinebench.sirmo - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
I have found Cinebench to be a much better predictor of actual performance for workloads I care about than SPEC or Geekbench.I would like to see more benchmarks than just Cinebench, but Cinebench at least would be nice.
ikjadoon - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
Cheers for proving you have the mental stamina of a YouTube comment. Read a complete article for once in your life now, FFS.Cinebench is literally the first CPU performance benchmark AnandTech shows. CB23 is Cinebench R23. Let's wake up and smell the coffee *before* writing a comment.
I can't understand how anyone could simultaneously
1) understand the niche use of Cinebench scores in professional 3D modelling images, and also
2) lack the mental stamina to finish reading a seven-page article that's mostly charts and graphs
3) make the time to login to AnandTech to prove to everyone that they did not read the article
tipoo - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
Pretty amazing. Now I just wish Tim Apple would swing some of that Smaug hoard of cash around to get native first class game ports to macOS, as even with all this power in the chip the gaming results were the letdown. I know, you don't particularly buy one to game on, but if you needed it for video editing or another high performance compute job, it would be nice to have the option to do it better on the side.Blastdoor - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
I wonder if we're on the cusp of Apple doing whatever it takes to get more AAA games on the Mac. It might not have made a lot of sense for Apple to make a push with developers when a large fraction of Macs were sold with Intel's integrated graphics. But with the M1 as the performance baseline, maybe now it makes sense? If they're willing to spend billions on Apple TV+ (including a TV show about a game studio, for goodness sake), then why not spend to get games on the Mac?daveinpublic - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
Ya, seems like good timing for bringing AAA games into the fold. Could potentially port to Mac & iPad, even an iPhone version at the same time.lemurbutton - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
Finally, a M1 Pro/Max performance review without just running the really bad Cinebench.Good bye AMD/Intel.
pSupaNova - Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - link
Not at that Silicon Budget and price point.qqii - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
The seems to be a minor spelling mistake on page 2 (Huge Memory Bandwidth, but not for every Block):> Starting off with our memory latency tests, the new M1 Max *changers* system memory behaviour quite significantly compared to what we’ve seen on the M1.
qqii - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
Page 3:Starting off with device idle, the chip reports a package power of around 200mW when doing nothing but idling on a static *scree*.