APPLE MACBOOK VIDEO EDITING FULL
While this is advertised prominently on their product page for the MacBook Pros, Apple doesn't bother differentiating the actual product name beyond M1 Pro.įor our testing we purchased a 16-inch MacBook Pro with the full M1 Pro configuration. The top-level design packs the full 10-core CPU and 16-core GPU, but the base design cuts that down to just 8 CPU cores and 14 GPU cores. Both the top level cache and memory controllers are doubled on the M1 Max design to feed the larger GPU.Īpple has taken the Nvidia approach to naming the M1 Pro by launching two configurations under basically the same name. There's also lots of L2 cache and 24 MB of top level cache on the M1 Pro. Connected to the CPU and GPU in a unified design is a 256-bit wide LPDDR5 memory bus providing slightly over 200 GB/s, you can think of this like if an x86 design included quad-channel memory instead of dual-channel, it's certainly a lot of memory bandwidth and much more than you'd get in similar products from Intel or AMD. On the GPU side we have a 16-core design in the M1 Pro, which goes up to 32 cores in the M1 Max (which is offered in a more expensive version of the same laptop). The Firestorm cores are clocked up to 3.2 GHz and the Icestorm cores hit 2.1 GHz, though this depends on the amount of load in the system and all-core workloads drop those clocks by a few hundred MHz. At the heart of this processor are a maximum of 10 CPU cores, split into 8 high performance Firestorm cores and 2 efficient Icestorm cores in a hybrid design. That doesn't mean it's better, it just goes about things in a different way. The Apple M1 Pro is a very different SoC design to the chips we normally review because it uses the Arm architecture family instead of x86. With hype there's often overhype and certainly a lot of fanboyism, including taking Apple's in-house benchmarks as gospel, so we'll see how warranted all of that is today. This is going to be interesting because it's fair to say there's a lot of hype around Apple M1 silicon and its supposed desktop-destroying performance. we mean running a wide range of real-world multi-platform applications and comparing performance across the best laptop chips available today, all run under fair and equivalent conditions. In fact, we won't be running Geekbench at all. And by properly comparing, we don't mean running Geekbench and calling it a day.
So this review is all about benchmarking the new M1 Pro and properly comparing it to the best x86-based CPUs we have today from AMD and Intel. A few weeks ago we bought a new Apple MacBook Pro 16 powered by the M1 Pro SoC, and have been putting it through its paces ever since. Today we're taking our benchmarking to places it's never been before with an in-depth look at an Apple Silicon product.