Apple Silicons: M1 VS. M1 Pro VS. M1 Max

Apple's event in October 2021 just confirms people's rumors about the new MacBook Pro and the new Apple silicon Mac. But unexpectedly, Apple released two silicons at once - M1 Pro and M1 Max, as the successors of the first-generation M1chip debuted in late 2020. For your information, in March 2022, Apple released its M1 Ultra chip.

There is no doubt that M1 Pro and M1 Max will bring faster speed and better performance than M1. In this post, I am going to compare these three Apple silicons from multiple dimensions so that you can have a comprehensive and deep understanding of the differences between them.

CPU

Apple M1 chip has 8 cores, including 4 high-performance cores and 4 high-efficiency cores. The newly released M1 Pro has 8 or 10 cores, and M1 Max has 10 cores, including 8 high-performance cores and 2 high-efficiency cores.

With more cores, the M1 Pro chip and M1 Max chip can crush everyday jobs at a scary fast speed that is up to 70% faster than M1. Meanwhile, Apple greatly decreases the power consumption of the new chips, using up to 70% less power when achieving the PC chip's peak performance.

GPU

Compared with the previous generation, Apple doubles the CPU cores on the M1 Pro chip with 14 or 16 GPU cores. And the M1 Max chip integrates 24 or 32 GPU cores. With such a powerful GPU, the new chips will bring you incredible graphics performance. It supports more graphics-intensive projects than ever and provides faster 4k and 8k render speeds.

M1 Pro with a 16-core GPU is up to 2x faster than M1, and M1 Max with a 32-core GPU is up to 4x faster graphics performance than M1. Meanwhile, new chips can deliver more performance while using less power even compared with the highest-end discrete GPU in the largest PC laptops, or the GPU in a high-end compact PC pro laptop.

RAM

The maximum RAM support on the M1 is 16 GB, the M1 Pro is 32 GB, and the M1 Max is 64GB. The increased memory means the laptop could let the CPU and GPU access more data at the same time, which will bring you a smoother and faster experience.

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Media Engines

The second generation of Apple silicon adds media engines for the first time. M1 Pro chip has one video decode engine, one video encode engine, and one ProRes encode/decode engine. M1 Max chip has one video decode engine, two video encode engines, and two ProRes encode/decode engines.

Equipped with industry-leading media engines, it accelerates the speed of video processing with less power consumption. And it scales up the performance to a new level with ProRes, one of the highest quality formats in professional video production. You can play multiple streams of 4k and 8K ProRes videos on your MacBook Pro.

Other notable improvements

Besides, the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips contain other advanced technologies to make a complete and professional system. The powerful display engine can drive multiple external displays, Thunderbolt 4 controllers provide more I/O bandwidth, and the memory bandwidth is 200GB/s on M1 Pro, and 400GB/s on M1 Max. A longer battery life with M1 Pro and M1 Max chip for their high performance and low power consumption.

How to get M1 Pro and M1 Max

Given that Apple M1 Pro and M1 Max are designed for MacBook Pro, you can only get these chips by purchasing the new MacBook Pro released on October 18th, 2021. You can freely choose to equip your pro notebook with an M1 Pro chip or M1 Max chip, a different CPU, GPU, and unified memory.

All of the new MacBook Pros will begin to ship out on October, 26th. You can order the new MacBook Pro on Apple's website. And it takes 4-5 weeks to arrive. The entry-level model of the 14-inch MacBook Pro costs $1999 with an 8-core CPU, 14-core GPU, 16GB unified memory, and 512GB SSD storage. The high-end model of the 16-inch MacBook Pro costs $6099 with a 10-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 64 GB unified memory, and 8TB SSD storage.