Apple announces M1 Pro and M1 Max

Lakados

[H]F Junkie
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M1 Pro
2x memory interface (200 Gbps)
32 GB Mem
5nm 33.7 B transistors (2x M1)
70% faster than M1 for CPU
2x faster GPU performance than M1
Built-in hardware acceleration for most of the prefered Pro features
more USB & Thunderbolt bandwidth

M1 Max
2x Memory interface than M1 Pro
64GB Mem
57B Transistors
4x GPU over M1
Media Engine for faster Video/Audio encoding
 
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They are saying that with the upcoming updates to MacOS, the new M1 chips are 3-20x faster than the fastest MBP Intel i9 variants.
Lots of new announcements about the ARM native builds for a wack load of popular production apps and optimizations for the M1 architectures for their feature sets.
 
I bought one of the M1 Airs to play around with and its surprisingly fast. But the main thing is the crazy good battery life. No other laptop I've used / using on the PC side are remotely close.

While gaming still isn't a thing on Macs - pretty much everything else app-wise is faster than on any of my PCs, including my fastest desltop gaming rig.
 
M1 Max looks pretty wild. So is the price though. I am happy with my M1 MBA, if anything I may upgrade to 16GB M1 and stick with it long term.
 
So they have a ps5 in their mac pro's now. Suckers aren't very cheap though.
 
I seriously have a headache from the marketing mumbojumbo. "X% greater than this! Y times greater than that!"

it could be great but the presentation style hurts my soul.

Still waiting for MacBookWheel.
 
M1 Max looks pretty wild. So is the price though. I am happy with my M1 MBA, if anything I may upgrade to 16GB M1 and stick with it long term.
I have one in my iPad Pro, and its a little beast.
 
Might get one eventually and put Linux on it (or run it in a VM). Would be a decent little mobile gaming rig even if it can't run crysis (remastered). :p
 
They have really beefed up the GPU. Will be interesting to see some real world benches.

The prospect of desktop ARM macs is starting to seem more and more like a win for Apple. Wonder how much longer the wait for that will be. All the shortages have pushed that back... probably for the best for Apple though. I imagine now the optimization for their ARM arch will push even more into the lucrative professional software.
 
Maybe gaming will finally come to the Mac. Honestly Apple is doing crazy things with these chips. I tried out WoW on the M1 since it’s one of the only native M1 games from a big game dev and it easily can be set to 7 and can still run on maxed graphical settings. These new chips look like they doodoo all over the M1. Macs are definitely capable of higher end gaming now and I hope devs jump on board.
 
They have really beefed up the GPU. Will be interesting to see some real world benches.

The prospect of desktop ARM macs is starting to seem more and more like a win for Apple. Wonder how much longer the wait for that will be. All the shortages have pushed that back... probably for the best for Apple though. I imagine now the optimization for their ARM arch will push even more into the lucrative professional software.
Real-world the base M1 GPU performs between a 1650 TI and a 1660, so if their 4x performance claim is accurate on the Max chip then they are pushing towards the 3070. Now the question is how they cherry-picked those results and how much of that is based on software optimizations in Max OS as I doubt they based those results on gaming FPS and more on render times and other workloads the MPB's are generally used for. But even it if is only true for edge cases, it looks to be a very beefy chip for a laptop, I have no doubt that at that price point they are giving Intel, AMD, and Nvidia a hard time for their equivalent GPU/CPU performance (for work-related tasks). Gaming benchmarks would still be very fun to see.
 
M1 Pro
2x memory interface (200 Gbps)
32 GB Mem
5nm 33.7 B transistors (2x M1)
70% faster than M1 for CPU
2x faster GPU performance than M1
Built-in hardware acceleration for most of the prefered Pro features
more USB & Thunderbolt bandwidth

M1 Max
2x Memory interface than M1 Pro
64GB Mem
57B Transistors
4x GPU over M1
Media Engine for faster Video/Audio encoding
They are saying that with the upcoming updates to MacOS, the new M1 chips are 3-20x faster than the fastest MBP Intel i9 variants.
Lots of new announcements about the ARM native builds for a wack load of popular production apps and optimizations for the M1 architectures for their feature sets.


I wonder how they are measuring the performance for those claims.

Certainly this is not in per thread general purpose CPU computing?

We are talking things mixed in done on special purpose FPGA/ASIC chips, right?

I am very much anti special-purpose chips as an alternative to CPU's, as it is a huge affront to computing freedom. I mean, its highly effective in certain applications (like video encoding) but I can also buy a PCIe video encoding accelerator board if I really wanted to.
 
I wonder how they are measuring the performance for those claims.

Certainly this is not in per thread general purpose CPU computing?

We are talking things mixed in done on special purpose FPGA/ASIC chips, right?
No clue their presentation was very light on actual information on how their performance was measured. Knowing Apple probably straight-up stuff like "This task took X minutes on the best of the old MBP's but it takes Y on the new one", for work-related stuff at the end of the day it doesn't really matter how much of that task was done on the performance cores, or efficiency cores, or how much was tackled by the Media Encoders or blah blah blah cores. What matters is it took 9h to encode this video on my old one but only 1.5h on the new one. For PC's or gaming devices, you better believe I'm going to care about the nitty-gritty details of who what where when why, and how, but 99% of the Mac's I bring in end up being single-purpose machines so the only measurement that matters is the end result.
 
I'm not a Mac guy but I'm looking forward to full reviews. Do we have two wait till they start shipping next week or does some NDA expire before then?
 
I think I’ll wait another generation or two before I retire the M1 air. I would be interested in new model Mini with a newer soc than the gen 1 M1.

There are plenty of reasons to pile on Apple, but they un-deniably have pushed the ARM architecture into mainstream home computer use. Yes I know there have been prior attempts, but Apple made this happen. And it performs.
 
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I'm not a Mac guy but I'm looking forward to full reviews. Do we have two wait till they start shipping next week or does some NDA expire before then?
Apple doesn't really send out test systems so the only way to get one to review is to order it up and give it a go. SO once they start shipping we should start seeing reviews creep in.
 
<popcorn>

I love that Apple is upsetting the, erm, well, apple cart a little on the cpu front. Yes, let's all look at claims, where they apply, be skeptical. But they absolutely want to take everyone's lunch money, and have a team which has been delivering year-on-year.

Also, wow, 57B is a lot of transistors. Sometimes the scale of things really hits me. The first CPU I spent a lot of time wrangling had ~3500.
 
There are plenty of reasons to pile on Apple, but they in deniably have pushed the ARM architecture into mainstream home computer use. Yes I know there have been prior attempts, but Apple made this happen. And it performs.

But does it?

I'm not convinced we are actually seeing ARM perform.

I mean, Apples ARM implementation is certainly making everyone else who develops ARM CPUs look silly. The likes of Qualcomm and Samsung should be embarrassed. But I think the big desktop numbers they are touting are not ARM numbers at all. It sounds like we are seeing numbers from specialized on board FPGA/ASIC accelerators, which means, if you follow the happy path and use software and settings exactly the way Apple wants you to, then it really can shine, but if you do anything even slightly different which shifts the workload to the general purpose cores, you could wind up with something different all together.

To be clear, if you wanted to, you could tag on special purpose accelerators to an x86 CPU as well. There is nothing ARM-specific about this concept. In fact Apple does it themselves with their Afterburner addon boards on their x86 Mac Pro's. While there aren't as many of them these days as they have kind of fallen out of favor, you can still purchase PCIe accelerators for encoding video, as an example. What Apple is essentially doing is taking the concept they started with these $2,000 "Afterburner" addon boards for their Mac Pro's and integrating some of that functionality into the SoC of the M1 in order to make up for the relatively lower performing ARM cores.

What's almost more impressive is what they have done on the software side, to have MacOS intelligently figure out what goes on an accelerator and what goes on a general purpose CPU core.

It's tough to point to absolute specifics, because Apple only touts highly specialized tests that put them in the best possible light, and are light on technical details of how they reached those numbers, but if you look at Intel's counter claims, even a relatively modest Intel Laptop CPU runs circles around an M1 in general purpose workloads.

JT-image-1-1024x576.jpg


And this might work for some people. There are some people who really only care about a narrow specific set of performance metrics because that is the type of work they do. It's not - however - for me, and I'd argue probably not for most people if Intel's numbers are any indication.

This is really what I dislike about Apple and hvae for decades. The our way or the highway approach. The special purpose / walled garden / closed nature of it all, where as the benefit of a computer is supposed to be that it is general purpose and can tackle a wide variety of software.
 
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I ordered the MBP 16" Max, 32gb, 1tb, base. $3400 with AC+. Be the last machine I buy for a long time, and with yearly AC+ the warranty can go as long as I'm willing to pay for it.

Delivery date is Oct. 25th-Nov. 7th I think it said.
 
This is really what I dislike about Apple and hvae for decades. The our way or the highway approach. The special purpose / walled garden / closed nature of it all, where as the benefit of a computer is supposed to be that it is general purpose and can tackle a wide variety of software.
Do you feel the systems will not handle general purpose workloads very well?
 
Do you feel the systems will not handle general purpose workloads very well?

I haven't seen many benchmarks unfortunately, because most people seem to focus on the "wow" numbers, like "wow that h.264 encode went fast!" and not on more general purpose stuff. Now Intels benchmarks are biased of course, but if their testing is any indication, then yes.

I would love to see some neutral objective general purpose benchmarks for comparison purposes.
 
Ordered a 14" MBP (M1 Pro/16GB/1TB) today. My first Mac since 2015. Super stoked!! :)
 
<popcorn>

I love that Apple is upsetting the, erm, well, apple cart a little on the cpu front. Yes, let's all look at claims, where they apply, be skeptical. But they absolutely want to take everyone's lunch money, and have a team which has been delivering year-on-year.

Also, wow, 57B is a lot of transistors. Sometimes the scale of things really hits me. The first CPU I spent a lot of time wrangling had ~3500.
I would offer that Apple made some BOLD claims about the M1. ANd it was, actually all true.
 
I would offer that Apple made some BOLD claims about the M1. ANd it was, actually all true.
I keep thinking of the very very old commercials about microwave ovens, where folks would say with arms crossed: "But can it brown?"
Even if not - can we agree, there's value to a microwave? Not how you'd make a steak for a new friend, but, maybe something you'd use every day for normal things.

This is not to discount the concerns for New Apple Magic - but it would seem to be very hard to argue against:
1) They made and are still extending a highly performant CPU.
2) They seem to understand the heavy-lifting cases of their clients, and will throw dedicated silicon at it as needed.

These are good things.
And of course, free market. If they make something you don't want, don't buy it. I have no macs personally, but have many friends who do - and love them, and they really do well for their needs.

I hope there is room for many things, including and maybe even especially "disruptive" forces.
 
As someone who has had a wonderful experience with their M1 Macbook pro, I just ordered a maxed out 14in. This is what I've been waiting for, it is going to absolutely shred on heavy I/O scientific software (gnuradio), video editing, photo editing/motion effects, and music creation.

My biggest frustration is that this thing won't run linux. If this ran linux I could justify paying $10k for it.
 
This looks amazing... for those who want a Mac. I'm not sure it'll drive me to switch just yet but I'm getting there...
 
I’m quite excited and ordered the 64GB M1 Max although I expect the 32GB model would have been sufficient for me. I have to admit, my TR3 3960X desktop has struggled at times editing ProRes 8k30 video (with a RTX3080!) and I’m really curious how well the new MBP will hold up under the same use case (in Premiere). I‘l know in a few weeks!

Gosh, how I wish Unreal Engine ran under MacOS natively, or that I lived in a universe in which DirectX frameworks existed on Apple silicon platforms, because I’d love to be playing Far Cry 6 on this laptop :). Alas, at least for gaming, Windows and x85 aren’t going anywhere for me anytime soon….
 
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