Pitching a laptop chip, with CPU and GPU cores that share the memory, against a 300-watt graphics card that costs almost £6k/$6k. That can only turn out badly right? For the expensive graphics card!
You may be frightened by the cost, especially for the M1 Max model, but the purchase of a 14in or 16in MacBook Pro could actually be viewed as a bargain. The 32 graphics cores do a very good job, according to benchmarks.
Chief developer of Affinity Photo Andy Sommerfeld has run tests on the new MacBooks Pro and compared benchmarks of his application when run on Apple’s new machines with those of the almost £6k/$6k high-end graphics card AMD Radeon Pro W6900X, which was built into a 12-core Mac Pro. Apple offers this card as a build-to-order option for the Mac Pro which adds an extra charge of £5,600/$5,600 to the cost of the £5,499/$5,999 machine. Apple also sells the module separately for £6k/$6k.
The #M1Max is the fastest GPU we have ever measured in the @affinitybyserif Photo benchmark. It outperforms the W6900X – a $6000, 300W desktop part – because it has immense compute performance, immense on-chip bandwidth and immediate transfer of data on and off the GPU (UMA). pic.twitter.com/iPg3L56y2u
— Andy Somerfield (@andysomerfield) October 25, 2021
His benchmarks suggest that the more affordable MacBook Pro can beat the high-end desktop with its 300-watt GPU.
The M1 Max offers three advantages: high computing performance, high internal bandwidth and fast transfer from and to the GPU. Thus, Apple’s new SoC is the fastest GPU ever measured with the @affinitybyserif Photo Benchmark.
New core chips from Intel can keep up
However, Winfuture reports on CPU benchmarks that Intel’s new Alder Lake chip, the i9-12900HK, is just ahead of the M1 Pro and Max in the tests of a pre-series model, which are equipped with a total of ten processor cores (eight for high performance, two for efficiency).
Bare Feats has also published a set of tests of the M1 Max MacBook Pro that show that the MacBook Pro with M1 Max can beat Apple’s high end desktop. More here: M1 Max beats Mac Pro benchmarks again.
Read more about the 14in MacBook Pro and 16in MacBook Pro.
This article originally appeared on Macwelt. Translation by Karen Haslam.
Author: Peter Müller, Contributing Editor
Peter has been with Macwelt since 1998 and writes about everything that has an Apple on it. His knowledge about Apple is second to none. Ask him anything; he will know it.