With the launch of the Pro MacBooks Apple released two new SoCs (M1 Pro & M1 Max) that deliver higher performance than the current M1 SoC. These new processors are product of Apple’s transition to custom in-house silicon that the company announced back in 2020.
These custom ARM based chipsets first debuted in the form of the extremely popular M1 alongside the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. The recently announced M1 Pro and M1 Max are a step further in the direction to going completely free from the slow Intel timeline.
Apple’s M1 series of Chips are based off the A series chips that the company uses in its iPhones. This allows the Mac systems to be extremely energy efficient while still being very powerful.
These Intel killers have separate high-performance and high efficiency cores, they also have a set of GPU cores and a dedicated neural engine for machine learning tasks. These also have various hardware accelerators giving the devices a major advantage in specific tasks. This philosophy of designing hardware for specific tasks has been proving to be superior to Intel’s method of designing cores that compute very type of task given to it.
The M1 was already an impressive piece for Apple’s first attempt at making a chip for Laptops and Desktops, and was already making Intel and AMD’s offerings look inferior. The M1 Pro and M1 Max take the entirety of the M1 chipset and almost doubles and at some tasks even quadruples what the already breathtaking M1 can do. The M1 Pro and Max are aimed at professionals and Apple seems to have taken care of every single issues they might have faced using the standard first gen silicon.
Choosing the right chip for you could be a bit confusing considering the fact that there are multiple variations in these chipsets carrying the same name. With different numbers of CPU and GPU cores Apple brought in variation but the way it is done could be a bit intimidating to the buyer. The M1 Pro for instance has two versions, one with 8 CPU cores and 14 GPU cores and one with 10 CPU cores and 16 GPU cores. The M1 Max has versions with 10 CPU cores and either 24 or 32 GPU cores.
| M1 | M1 Pro | M1 Max | |
| CPU Cores | 8 | 8 or 10 | 10 |
| Performance Cores | 4 | 6 or 8 | 8 |
| High Efficiency Cores | 4 | 2 | 2 |
| GPU Cores | 7 or 8 | 14 or 16 | 24 or 32 |
| Neural Engine Cores | 16 | 16 | 16 |
| Maximum Memory Supported | 16GB | 32GB | 64GB |
| Peak Memory Bandwidth | 68.25 GB/s | 200 GB/s | 400GB/s |
| ProRes Accelerator | N/A | 1 | 2 |
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