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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mjptango - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link
What I would like to see is a sustained benchmark comparison.What I mean is to run a CPU or GPU intensive test over an extended period of time to see the thermal throttling effect.
Clearly with a more power efficient SOC, the M1 family should demonstrate considerable advantage over other mobile impmentations.
My Intel Mac heats up once the GPU kicks in and I would be sure that if an RTX-3080 is exercised long enough its performance will drop much sooner than an M1 system.
So it would be very valuable to know these numbers because when we work, we don't just work for minute or so, but process files over the course of an hour
Whiteknight2020 - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link
On a screen the size of a magazine, with a keyboard 3 inches away from it. Ergonomic not. This obsession with laptops with tiny displays and ergonomics which cause long term physical harm is just getting silly.OreoCookie - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link
My first computer (an Amiga 500) had a 14" CRT and a 12~13" usable screen area. My iPad Pro has more screen space than that. Ditto for my first PC. Only in the late 1990s did I get a used 19" trinitron CRT that had about 18" usable space. That isn't so different from my 16" MacBook Pro in terms of size, although the latter has much more screen estate in practice. It covers my field of view without having to swivel my head. Laptops are fine.Don't get me wrong, I still like external monitors, but laptops these days are great to get work done.
Whiteknight2020 - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link
Specifically US developers, the rest of the world, not so much. And with no x86 virtualization layer the new M1 Mac's are even less enticing, can't run a full VMware/K8s stack so you need two machines.Focher - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link
Funny how for the last year, developers have been going bonkers about their M1 MacBooks being superior to equivalent x86 hardware.razer555 - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link
The GPU performance for gaming is very disappointing. Rosetta 2 translate only CPU and it doesn't affect the GPU performance. Apple said 32 cores is quite equal to mobile RTX 3080 and yet, it performs less than mobile RTX 3060. I dont think the optimization is a problem. The raw performance lacks the gaming performance so far.Focher - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link
It's almost like Apple has never cared about gaming on the Mac and engineered the hardware for entirely different purposes - which it totally excels at.Vitor - Thursday, October 28, 2021 - link
It is not disappointing since it hasnt been even tried. You can say emulating x86 games is disappointing. But a game fully optimized for this system would be able to get 1440p 100fps no problem I bet.Lock12 - Thursday, October 28, 2021 - link
Why didn't the table show the power consumption in the game Shadow ofthe Tomb Raider?aparangement - Thursday, October 28, 2021 - link
Hi Andrei, thanks a lot for the review.About the memory bandwidth, I am wondering if the numbers are comparable with those in the STREAM-Triad benchmark, like we see in the epyc 7003 review?
e.g. https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16529/STREAM_tri...
If so that's very impressive, M1 max actually outperforms the a 2-way x86 workstation.