Apple's M1 Pro, M1 Max SoCs Investigated: New Performance and Efficiency Heights
by Andrei Frumusanu on October 25, 2021 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- Apple
- MacBook
- Apple M1 Pro
- Apple M1 Max
CPU ST Performance: Not Much Change from M1
Apple didn’t talk much about core performance of the new M1 Pro and Max, and this is likely because it hasn’t really changed all that much compared to the M1. We’re still seeing the same Firestrom performance cores, and they’re still clocked at 3.23GHz. The new chip has more caches, and more DRAM bandwidth, but under ST scenarios we’re not expecting large differences.
When we first tested the M1 last year, we had compiled SPEC under Apple’s Xcode compiler, and we lacked a Fortran compiler. We’ve moved onto a vanilla LLVM11 toolchain and making use of GFortran (GCC11) for the numbers published here, allowing us more apple-to-apples comparisons. The figures don’t change much for the C/C++ workloads, but we get a more complete set of figures for the suite due to the Fortran workloads. We keep flags very simple at just “-Ofast” and nothing else.
In SPECint2017, the differences to the M1 are small. 523.xalancbmk is showcasing a large performance improvement, however I don’t think this is due to changes on the chip, but rather a change in Apple’s memory allocator in macOS 12. Unfortunately, we no longer have an M1 device available to us, so these are still older figures from earlier in the year on macOS 11.
Against the competition, the M1 Max either has a significant performance lead, or is able to at least reach parity with the best AMD and Intel have to offer. The chip however doesn’t change the landscape all too much.
SPECfp2017 also doesn’t change dramatically, 549.fotonik3d does score quite a bit better than the M1, which could be tied to the more available DRAM bandwidth as this workloads puts extreme stress on the memory subsystem, but otherwise the scores change quite little compared to the M1, which is still on average quite ahead of the laptop competition.
The M1 Max lands as the top performing laptop chip in SPECint2017, just shy of being the best CPU overall which still goes to the 5950X, but is able to take and maintain the crown from the M1 in the FP suite.
Overall, the new M1 Max doesn’t deliver any large surprises on single-threaded performance metrics, which is also something we didn’t expect the chip to achieve.
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daveinpublic - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
Agreed. How can we keep Apple from getting a win on this chip design? Oh, we'll say they're gaming the benchmarks!wr3@k0n - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
Thats literally what this article shows. Did you even read the article?michael2k - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
Yes. It sounds like you didn't read the article.Gaming anything means tailoring your software or hardware to succeed at benchmarks to the detriment of performance.
Quoting the article, that directly contradicts you:
For the true professionals out there – the people using cameras that cost as much as a MacBook Pro and software packages that are only slightly cheaper – the M1 Pro and M1 Max should prove very welcome. There is a massive amount of pixel pushing power available in these SoCs, so long as you have the workload required to put it to good use.
sirmo - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
I don't see anything dumb about the comment you're responding to. Also why so defensive?blanarahul - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
Look, those who want Windows will buy Windows laptops, those who want Macs will buy Macbooks. Those who don't care about either also are likely to not give a shit about performance and will do whatever is convenient for them.ThreeDee912 - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
Cheating? When was this?sirmo - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
When they had PowerPC processors before they switched to x86techconc - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
@sirmo, What is your specific example of Apple cheating on a benchmark? Please support the claim you've made with evidence.sirmo - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
I only said when not what.sirmo - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
But I found a news story on it: https://www.theregister.com/2003/06/24/apple_accus...