• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Apple M1 Pro and M1 Max

Soldato
Joined
28 May 2007
Posts
18,241
You can get a 5800H/3070 for well under £1500 when the Legion 5 Pro is in stock so 3K seems a poor price comparison.

Regardless an Macbook Pro isn't a viable gaming system anyway.

The RTX 3080m Max-P looks to be the closest performing chip to the Apple
M1 max.
 
Caporegime
Joined
8 Jan 2004
Posts
32,018
Location
Rutland
The RTX 3080m Max-P looks to be the closest performing chip to the Apple
M1 max.

That's a lot of GPU power if true. I'm really impressed with what Apple has achieved with their silicon don't get me wrong. I just don't think gaming is a realistic use case with this hardware as things stand and it won't really disrupt the gaming laptop market unless something big is announced on the native gaming front.
 
Soldato
Joined
28 May 2007
Posts
18,241
For me the Windows gaming* laptop with discrete graphics are bit of a non starter unless I can get many hours of work out of them unpowered. Price is less of a consideration, I’m more concerned about carting around a dead brick with me. Apple are offering usable performance. Nvidia are offing a hot running brick with very limited processor time that isn’t any faster even when powered from the wall.
 
Soldato
Joined
28 May 2007
Posts
18,241
That's a lot of GPU power if true. I'm really impressed with what Apple has achieved with their silicon don't get me wrong. I just don't think gaming is a realistic use case with this hardware as things stand and it won't really disrupt the gaming laptop market unless something big is announced on the native gaming front.

We’ll have to see how gaming shapes up, but the demand for gaming with this level of GPU performance and power use on offer will be high. Wether that demand ends up getting filled by bootlegged or official Windows or IOS will be interesting to watch.

It seems very clear cut that sales of gaming laptops are heading to Apple now.
 
Associate
Joined
31 Dec 2010
Posts
2,434
Location
Sussex
Did a little more digging on the GPU performance and it seem Apple M1 was compared to a RTX 3070m Max-P and RTX3080m Max-Q. The RTX3080m Max-P seems about 8-10% faster but pulls 150 watts.
The plain M1 already was pretty unbeatable while running (actually emulating) games:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3
E4krZiJ.png
M1 Max could be around four times faster than that, so possibly twice the speed of a 1660Ti which would put it around a desktop 3070 / 6700 all at around 60W.

Yes, Apple threw a lot of transistors at this but that isn't to distract from what they have achieved. Ditto throwing money at problem; Intel threw tons of money at modem/coms/Itantium/Larrabee/AVX512 etc and had little to show for it.
 
Caporegime
Joined
8 Jan 2004
Posts
32,018
Location
Rutland
It seems very clear cut that sales of gaming laptops are heading to Apple now.

That seems a real stretch of the imagination for all the reasons already mentioned :confused:

You can't play more than a handful of proper games on this currently. You'd be bonkers to go Apple for a gaming laptop as things stand even acknowledging their silicon is impressive.
 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
28 May 2007
Posts
18,241
Anyone think Apple called this the M1 Max on purpose?
That seems a real stretch of the imagination for all the reasons already mentioned :confused:

You can't play more than a handful of proper games on this currently. You'd be bonkers to go Apple for a gaming laptop as things stand even acknowledging their silicon is impressive.

Mos people want the performance. But you can play games on them. For all the reasons listed.
 
Soldato
Joined
28 May 2007
Posts
18,241
Yeah, Finally, maybe.... ;)

AMD have been dragging their heals over APU’s. I know they must have had a lot to work on, but maybe APU’s will get pushed up the performance ladder as CPU and GPU’s are at the top.

I would be up for an in house AMD ultrabook akin to this Mac.
 
Caporegime
Joined
8 Jan 2004
Posts
32,018
Location
Rutland
Mos people want the performance. But you can play games on them. For all the reasons listed.

What games are there?

Native - limited catalogue on steam with most running through Rosetta, Civ 6 and a load Indie titles. iOS titles now supported.

Parallels - patchy coverage but some games work quite well, lots of performance issues, anything with anti-cheat is broken, DX12 isn't supported from what I can see

Am I missing something? This doesn't sound like gaming nirvana that's going to win over gamers.
 
Last edited:
Soldato
OP
Joined
6 Oct 2009
Posts
3,998
Location
London
What games are there?

Native - Valve catalogue, Civ 6 and a load Indie titles. iOS titles now supported.

Parallels - patchy coverage but some games work quite well, lots of performance issues, anything with anti-cheat is broken, DX12 isn't supported from what I can see

Am I missing something? This doesn't sound like gaming nirvana that's going to win over gamers.

That guy is very misguided. You're 100% right, the idea that you're gonna run Windows games on these through virtualisation, after emulation, is just wrong, it's not possible in any way, shape or form. He's confused about the potential that these chips have at being used for gaming, that people are accurately pointing at, with the idea that it's a gaming supermachine right now.

So the new M1 Max is like PS5 APU performance?

Good, hopefully this will spur AMD to make them available to Desktop, or even Laptop's. and they wont cost £5000.

I'd love to see that as well, but clearly they're in no rush to do it given that there's no real competitor (and these laptops won't concern AMD a lot), and AMD can basically sell every chip they can make right now anyway.

There are technical limitations as well, generally modern GPU architectures require a huge memory bandwidth, and with APUs you can't get it from typical system memory anyway. And they can't make the memory as wide as Apple did with these chips on their consumer platforms. That's why PS5/XSeriesX have GDDR6 ram rather than DDR4.
 
Soldato
Joined
9 Nov 2009
Posts
24,824
Location
Planet Earth
@CAT-THE-FIFTH Unless we expect Apple to pack ~230 billion transistors into a single monolithic chip, these will be chiplets or even multi-CPU designs. Or Maybe just splitting CPU and GPU into separate chips (finally), they have to take RAM off-package anyway to be able to offer 1TB+ ram for the Mac Pro.

They might just be using multiple M1 Max SOCs together? It will be interested to see the power penalty from the I/O links they need to use. AFAIK,Fujitsu spent a good amount of time tweaking that for the A64FX.
 
Soldato
Joined
28 May 2007
Posts
18,241
They might just be using multiple M1 Max SOCs together? It will be interested to see the power penalty from the I/O links they need to use. AFAIK,Fujitsu spent a good amount of time tweaking that for the A64FX.

I don’t see why Apple would use a dual chip. They could save some manufacturing costs, but compared to the cost of the system it’s probably insignificant.
 
Soldato
Joined
6 Feb 2019
Posts
17,565
So the new M1 Max is like PS5 APU performance?

Good, hopefully this will spur AMD to make them available to Desktop, or even Laptop's. and they wont cost £5000.


Sort of. It does seem on paper like it is a match for the PS5's GPU.

But the max's CPU blows the PS5 away (the M1 MAX CPU is double the performance of the PS5 CPU)

And you forget that the PS5 APU uses 250w while gaming. You want to put a 250w AMD APU into a slim and light laptop and pretend its comparable to a 60w Apple SOC laptop?

One of these laptops is gonna last 2 hours on battery and the other 8 hours, the one that lasts 8 hours will also have higher performance because it doesn't thermal throttle or power throttle on battery vs plugged in. Not to mention the major CPU disparity between the two.
 
Last edited:
Soldato
OP
Joined
6 Oct 2009
Posts
3,998
Location
London
I thought the poster sounded familiar:

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/gaming-laptop.18936713/#post-35073434

What gaming laptop? Macbook ofcourse!

Bit of a disconnect from reality going on.

Hahaha :cry:

They might just be using multiple M1 Max SOCs together? It will be interested to see the power penalty from the I/O links they need to use. AFAIK,Fujitsu spent a good amount of time tweaking that for the A64FX.

That's one way to do it. I think separating CPU and GPU is a simpler and more flexible solution, also allows them to have the machine with multiple GPUs easily.
 
Soldato
Joined
28 May 2007
Posts
18,241
Hahaha :cry:



That's one way to do it. I think separating CPU and GPU is a simpler and more flexible solution, also allows them to have the machine with multiple GPUs easily.

Apple have made those types of laptop look silly now. Clearly sales will be lost to Apple and prices need adjusting.

It’s a SOC design. I can’t see Apple building a CPU and separate GPU. Unless Apple have another strategy. I did hear the Apple workstation chip will be a little different from the mobile chip.
 
Back
Top Bottom