Apple M1 Pro and M1 Max

Grim5 · 19 Oct 2021 at 07:45

silvagti said:
Assuming performance scales doubling the number of performance cores would mean that these M1 Pro/Max Chip are potentially faster than any of Intel/AMDs top end x86 i7/9 and Ryzen 59xx series chips which is an impressive feat. Be interesting to see how the benchmarks play out in real world testing.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/2...-than-m1-in-supposed-benchmark?utm_medium=rss
"single-core score of 1749 and a multi-core score of 11542" (unconfirmed Geekbench 5)

Edit:

Maybe not quite as impressive as I'd expect based on Apple's claims but still seriously good for a mobile chip.

seriously good for mobile is an understatement

if you compare it you'll quickly see that the M1 max is faster than the 125w 11900k in multithread and the 105w 5800x. That's a 1.5cm slim laptop cpu beating 125w behemoth desktop CPUs that have the luxury of best in class cooling

jigger · 19 Oct 2021 at 10:57

Grim5 said:
seriously good for mobile is an understatement

if you compare it you'll quickly see that the M1 max is faster than the 125w 11900k in multithread and the 105w 5800x. That's a 1.5cm slim laptop cpu beating 125w behemoth desktop CPUs that have the luxury of best in class cooling

And looks to have 150 watt RTX3080m levels of graphics performance.

Apple have made a mockery of highend gaming laptops.

Minstadave · 19 Oct 2021 at 10:58

jigger said:
Apple have made a mockery of highend gaming laptops.

Apart from the fact there's little to no games in their ecosystem. That's not going to change with the current bar for entry being 2K+.

HACO · 19 Oct 2021 at 11:06

Minstadave said:
Apart from the fact there's little to no games in their ecosystem. That's not going to change with the current bar for entry being 2K+.

Yeah, what they've made a mockery of are high-end workstations with Quadro GPUs, e.g. Dell Precision, HP Elitebook, Lenovo P series.

HACO · 19 Oct 2021 at 11:10

From Mark Gurman, the Bloomberg guy that Apple always uses to leak info to media to build/manage expectations:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1450233957350576129

~40 CPU cores, ~128 GPU cores coming next for Mac Pro.

@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.

jigger · 19 Oct 2021 at 11:14

HACO said:
Yeah, what they've made a mockery of are high-end workstations with Quadro GPUs, e.g. Dell Precision, HP Elitebook, Lenovo P series.

They have, this laptop looks like it can straddle a lot of markets pretty well. Even at the ultra book level. The 32 and 64gb versions probably would do a decent impression of a Ryzen 59**X HEDT system.

Grim5 · 19 Oct 2021 at 11:44

Anthony likes it and he specifically mentions that it makes a mockery of laptops with Quadros

jigger · 19 Oct 2021 at 11:46

Minstadave said:
Apart from the fact there's little to no games in their ecosystem. That's not going to change with the current bar for entry being 2K+.

Apple have said they want a slice of the mobile graphics market and you can always run Windows on this.

Grim5 · 19 Oct 2021 at 11:47

HACO said:
From Mark Gurman, the Bloomberg guy that Apple always uses to leak info to media to build/manage expectations:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1450233957350576129

~40 CPU cores, ~128 GPU cores coming next for Mac Pro.

@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.

Since it wont be monolithic, they'll either be gluing 2 to 4 M1 MAX chips together with some interface? Or more likely, just be a custom board with multiple "sockets" - since most tasks mac users do are not latency sensitive, having physical seperate SOC's isn't a problem and gives you a huge boost in multitasking - imagine having 20 8k video timelines open at once to try and fill your 256GB of memory

HACO · 19 Oct 2021 at 11:47

jigger said:
Apple have said they want a slice of the mobile graphics market and you can always run Windows on this.

You can't run Windows games on ARM.

Grim5 said:
Since it wont be monolithic, they'll either be gluing 2 to 4 M1 MAX chips together with some interface? Or more likely, just be a custom board with multiple "sockets" - since most tasks mac users do are not latency sensitive, having physical seperate SOC's isn't a problem and gives you a huge boost in multitasking - imagine having 30 8k video timelines open at once to try and fill your 256GB of memory

I think splitting CPU and GPU is more likely and a cleaner design, with their own separate SRAMs and the unified DRAM located in between. But again, all of this is speculation. Only people inside Apple know how they're approaching this.

jigger · 19 Oct 2021 at 11:59

HACO said:
You can't run Windows games on ARM.

You can.

I think the case for a single chip design could be strong.

Apple have given us a glimpse into the future of what APU’s and what AMD can offer with DDR5, and where AMD are headed with AM5.

jigger · 19 Oct 2021 at 13:32

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.

Minstadave · 19 Oct 2021 at 13:44

jigger said:
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.

Without the software library and this pricing no one is going to look at Macs as a realistic prospect for gaming.

Apple aren't going to market the Macbook Pro as a gaming platform if you have to run Windows to access games.

silvagti · 19 Oct 2021 at 13:54

Minstadave said:
Without the software library and this pricing no one is going to look at Macs as a realistic prospect for gaming.

Apple aren't going to market the Macbook Pro as a gaming platform if you have to run Windows to access games.

True but I think what we might see are enhanced M1 pro/max ports of iOS games with upgraded visuals. Perhaps we'll start to see pc games developers take notice now that all Apple silicon MacBooks can offer decent GPU performance.

jigger · 19 Oct 2021 at 14:01

Minstadave said:
Without the software library and this pricing no one is going to look at Macs as a realistic prospect for gaming.

Apple aren't going to market the Macbook Pro as a gaming platform if you have to run Windows to access games.

Aren’t they?

People are paying £3k for a single gaming component. £1.8-3k for a full system seems reasonable.

Minstadave · 19 Oct 2021 at 14:07

jigger said:
Aren’t they?

People are paying £3k for a single gaming component. £1.8-3k for a full system seems reasonable.

I doubt it personally. Especially if you're stuck installing windows and having to run games through Rosetta 2 (if that even works with Windows).

I could understand Apple pushing native gaming but that will take time and investment to try and get going.

HACO · 19 Oct 2021 at 14:14

Minstadave said:
I doubt it personally. Especially if you're stuck installing windows and having to run games through Rosetta 2 (if that even works with Windows).

I could understand Apple pushing native gaming but that will take time and investment to try and get going.

Rosetta doesn't even exist on Windows. And there are no Apple GPU drivers for windows, Microsoft doesn't even sell Windows ARM licenses for MacBooks. Apple's focus on GPU power on macs is for compute for the time being. If/when they want to focus on gaming it will be on macOS, via metal, not on Windows.

jigger · 19 Oct 2021 at 14:15

Just had look at highend gaming windows laptops and ouch.

You’re looking at £3k for a system with an Intel i7 and RTX 3070m MAX-P with a whole 8gb of VRAM. I mean wow 8gb. A whole 8gb of VRAM lolz.

It’s 170 watt system, it’s not even mobile

Minstadave · 19 Oct 2021 at 14:18

jigger said:
Just had look at highend gaming windows laptops and ouch.

You’re looking at £3k for a system with an Intel i7 and RTX 3070m MAX-P with a whole 8gb of VRAM. I mean wow 8gb. A whole 8gb of VRAM lolz.

It’s 170 watt system, it’s not even mobile

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. It's hard to compare a similar spec though as Apple has impressively packed everything into a slim chassis and the screen doesn't really exist in the PC world. If gaming is your focus though you can get a decent (but bulkier system) for well under 3K.

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

jigger · 19 Oct 2021 at 14:22

HACO said:
Rosetta doesn't even exist on Windows. And there are no Apple GPU drivers for windows, Microsoft doesn't even sell Windows ARM licenses for MacBooks. Apple's focus on GPU power on macs is for compute for the time being. If/when they want to focus on gaming it will be on macOS, via metal, not on Windows.

Not sure on that I will find out soon. Going make a Windows partition on the drive and try Windows in a VM. No doubt will require some foolery.