Apple recently announced M1 Pro and M1 Max, the next breakthrough chips for the Mac, at the Apple ‘Unleashed’ event. Scaling up M1’s transformational architecture, M1 Pro offers amazing performance with industry-leading power efficiency, while M1 Max takes these capabilities to new heights.
The CPU in M1 Pro and M1 Max delivers up to 70 per cent faster performance than M1, so tasks like compiling projects in Xcode are faster than ever. The GPU in M1 Pro is up to 2x faster than M1, while M1 Max is up to an astonishing 4x faster than M1, allowing pro users to fly through the most demanding graphics workflows.
M1 Pro and M1 Max introduce a system-on-a-chip (SoC) architecture to pro systems for the first time. The chips feature fast unified memory, industry-leading performance per watt, and incredible power efficiency, along with increased memory bandwidth and capacity. M1 Pro offers up to 200GB/s of memory bandwidth with support for up to 32GB of unified memory. M1 Max delivers up to 400GB/s of memory bandwidth — 2x that of M1 Pro and nearly 6x that of M1 — and support for up to 64GB of unified memory.
“M1 has transformed our most popular systems with incredible performance, custom technologies, and industry-leading power efficiency. No one has ever applied a system-on-a-chip design to a pro system until today with M1 Pro and M1 Max. With massive gains in CPU and GPU performance, up to six times the memory bandwidth, a new media engine with ProRes accelerators, and other advanced technologies, M1 Pro and M1 Max take Apple silicon even further and are unlike anything else in a pro notebook,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies.
Both M1 Pro and M1 Max are loaded with advanced custom technologies that help push pro workflows to the next level:
- A 16-core Neural Engine for on-device machine learning acceleration and improved camera performance.
- A new display engine drives multiple external displays.
- Additional integrated Thunderbolt 4 controllers provide even more I/O bandwidth.
- Apple’s custom image signal processor, along with the Neural Engine, uses computational video to enhance image quality for sharper video and more natural-looking skin tones on the built-in camera.
- Best-in-class security, including Apple’s latest Secure Enclave, hardware-verified secure boot, and runtime anti-exploitation technologies.
The combination of macOS with M1, M1 Pro, or M1 Max also delivers industry-leading security protections, including hardware-verified secure boot, runtime anti-exploitation technologies, and fast, in-line encryption for files. All of Apple’s Mac apps are optimized for — and run natively on — Apple silicon, and there are over 10,000 Universal apps and plug-ins available.
