[AnandTech] Apple's M1 Pro, M1 Max SoCs Investigated

[WhoDecidedThat]

Link - https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/

CPU Performance - M1 Max (and Pro) is a Monster

We also ran the chip with just the 8 performance cores active, as expected, the scores are a little lower at -7-9%, the 2 E-cores here represent a much smaller percentage of the total MT performance than on the M1.

On the SPECint work suite, the M1 Max lies +37% ahead of the best competition, it’s a very clear win here and given the power levels and TDPs, the performance per watt advantages is clear. The M1 Max is also able to outperform desktop chips such as the 11900K, or AMD’s 5800X.

In the SPECfp suite, the M1 Max is in its own category of silicon with no comparison in the market. It completely demolishes any laptop contender, showcasing 2.2x performance of the second-best laptop chip. The M1 Max even manages to outperform the 16-core 5950X – a chip whose package power is at 142W, with rest of system even quite above that. It’s an absolutely absurd comparison and a situation we haven’t seen the likes of.

In ST workloads, performance/W difference here is around 2.5x to 3x in favour of Apple’s silicon.

In MT workloads, the perf/W differences here are 4-6x in favour of the M1 Max, all whilst posting significantly better performance, meaning the perf/W at ISO-perf would be even higher than this.

The 11980HK isn’t a very efficient chip, as we had noted it back in our May review, and AMD’s chips should fare quite a bit better in a comparison, however the Apple Silicon is likely still ahead by extremely comfortable margins.

The chips here aren’t only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you’d have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max – it’s just generally absurd.

GPU Performance

Summary - Apple has the therotical processing power but gaming performance is quite poor and not competitive at this juncture.

Games are still in a very weird place for macOS and the ecosystem, maybe it’s a chicken-and-egg situation, maybe gaming is still something of a niche that will take a long time to see make use of the performance the new chips are able to provide in terms of GPU. What’s clearer, is that the new GPU does allow immense leaps in performance for content creation and productivity workloads which rely on GPU acceleration.

Andndtech does have fanboyism towards Apple, but I believe that in this case, the numbers don't lie. Bravo Apple (ft. TSMC) for engineering such a processor!

Personally what I find absolutely incredible is that Apple with its 8 cores can go toe to toe with the 8 core 5800X without Hyper Threading and with much lower power consumption. Though to be fair, Apple does have the advantage of being a full node ahead (5nm) of AMD (7nm).

Also please note that M1 Max and M1 Pro should have identical CPU performance.

 

[Vya Domus]

Andndtech does have fanboyism towards Apple, but I believe that in this case, the numbers don't lie. Bravo Apple (ft. TSMC) for engineering such a processor!

At least he admits most of the tests are memory bound and that the performance comes from simply having a huge amount of memory bandwidth, if it wasn't for that there wouldn't be much to write home about, in relation to M1 I mean.

 

[R0H1T]

Andndtech does have fanboyism towards Apple

It generally doesn't but there's probably a couple of writers who (still) act like that!

Also look at this

Looking at some of those power charts apples claims do seem to be rather dubious*

*With a lot of asterisks in there!

 

[ThaiTaffy]

Considering the r&d budget of the 3 companies I would say AMD has done pretty well for the past few years I can't wait to see what happens when they are all on the same node.

 

[sepheronx]

 

[IceShroom]

One thing though, The reviews are comparing different OS and API. And we already know on same platform different API on same platform gives different result.