It’s hard to say we knew we were going to be surprised. But with Apple we always know that there are surprises in the middle of the orgy of superlatives always used to describe its new products. As expected, we have the new Apple M1 Pro SoC and its vitamin variant, the Apple M1 Max.
The Apple M1 Pro SoC
This base has 33.7 billion transistors. In detail it is an SoC using a 10-core processor divided into 8 high-performance cores and 2 efficient cores that promise to double the performance of the Intel Core i9 used in the previous generation of MacBook Pro. You will have understood, the real novelty is on the graphics part which has 16 cores (2048 execution units) allowing to draw by not less than 5,2 TFLOP of power . Apple announces that this graphic part allows it to reach the level of a GeForce RTX 3050 Ti while consuming 70% less energy.
The Apple M1 Max SoC
This SoC has 57 billion transistors, its CPU part seems the same with 10 cores, but perhaps at higher speeds. On the side of the graphic cores, we multiply by two to obtain 32 cores (4096 execution units) offering a performance of 10.4 TFLOP (compared to 9.2 TFLOP of a PlayStation 5 as Apple recalls). This SoC doubles its maximum capacity of LPDDR5 Ram offering up to 64 GB and with a bandwidth up to 400 GB/s.
As usual, we will have to judge the real performance of these new chips. The announced figures are clearly impressive but Apple is always in the habit of using this hype to mark the spirits. So we’ll wait for the IRL confrontation. Nevertheless, we can only notice that the Apple brand is making its way, in a relentless way in its will of autonomy and independence of its hardware.
Ammmaaazing” prices
The 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at 2,249 euros (M1 Pro with 8-core CPU, 14-core GPU, 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD). The muscular 16″ version with M1 Max (10 cores + 32 cores + 32 GB RAM + 1 TB SSD) starts at 3,849 euros.
