Apple's M1 Max GPU is at least 3x faster than M1, Metal benchmark shows
Supposed M1 Max benchmark results reveal the chip's GPU is at least three times faster than the first-generation M1 included in 2020's 13-inch MacBook Pro.
An unconfirmed Geekbench post on Wednesday shows an M1 Max with 64GB of unified memory clocking a Metal score of 68870. That result compares to an average score of roughly 21800 for the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 chip.
The M1 Max also smashes Metal scores logged for AMD's Radeon Pro 5600M, the most performant GPU offered with last year's 16-inch MacBook Pro, outpacing the former MacBook torch bearer by 62%, according to Geekbench.
It is not clear what M1 Max configuration is represented in the Geekbench Compute post, but Apple during its "Unleashed" event on Monday touted maximum performance on par with the discrete GPU in a high-end PC laptop. Apple offers the M1 Max in 24- and 32-core GPU configurations, both of which can be accompanied by up to 64GB of unified RAM.
As noted by developer Steve Troughton-Smith, the score posted today falls short of the more than 90000 points achieved by the laptop version of Nvidia's class-leading RTX 3080, suggesting they belong to an M1 Max with 24-core GPU.
Today's Metal score arrives two days after the first single- and multi-core CPU score hit the Geekbench Browser, which illustrated a 50% increase over the 8-core M1. Subsequent tests have been posted and corroborate the initial results.
The M1 Max joins the M1 Pro as Apple's new "pro" level silicon designs. The M1 Pro features an 8- or 10-core CPU and a 14- or 16-core GPU, while the M1 Max comes with a 10-core CPU and a 24- or 32-core GPU. Most configurations are available on both 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
Read on AppleInsider
An unconfirmed Geekbench post on Wednesday shows an M1 Max with 64GB of unified memory clocking a Metal score of 68870. That result compares to an average score of roughly 21800 for the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 chip.
The M1 Max also smashes Metal scores logged for AMD's Radeon Pro 5600M, the most performant GPU offered with last year's 16-inch MacBook Pro, outpacing the former MacBook torch bearer by 62%, according to Geekbench.
It is not clear what M1 Max configuration is represented in the Geekbench Compute post, but Apple during its "Unleashed" event on Monday touted maximum performance on par with the discrete GPU in a high-end PC laptop. Apple offers the M1 Max in 24- and 32-core GPU configurations, both of which can be accompanied by up to 64GB of unified RAM.
As noted by developer Steve Troughton-Smith, the score posted today falls short of the more than 90000 points achieved by the laptop version of Nvidia's class-leading RTX 3080, suggesting they belong to an M1 Max with 24-core GPU.
Today's Metal score arrives two days after the first single- and multi-core CPU score hit the Geekbench Browser, which illustrated a 50% increase over the 8-core M1. Subsequent tests have been posted and corroborate the initial results.
The M1 Max joins the M1 Pro as Apple's new "pro" level silicon designs. The M1 Pro features an 8- or 10-core CPU and a 14- or 16-core GPU, while the M1 Max comes with a 10-core CPU and a 24- or 32-core GPU. Most configurations are available on both 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
The same is for Apple with Text Compression.
Metal is GPU not CPU.
These new chips are better at multi-core for both CPU and GPU.
The Macbook Pro with M1 Max 32 core scored ~60,000 in OpenCL (3) on Geekbench. The ~68,000 Metal score above is likely the 32 core version as well.
The RTX 3080 scores much higher than 90,000. A 130W version of the RTX 3080 in a laptop scores ~120,000 in OpenCL (4) on Geekbench.
Apple used a 165W version of the RTX 3080 in their comparison:
Apple stopped supporting and optimizing OpenCL (and OpenGL) on Macs a few years ago when they started designing their own GPU's optimized for their Metal APIs. I'm not sure those are good benchmark comparisons unless you're comparing "like" systems.
it’s very impressive how Apple designed the chip to be scalable in this way.
my guess is the 24-core will still the other 8 cores but they’ll be disabled.
A more regular OpenCL score should be around 19,500, and that means a ratio of 3.08 vs the M1 Max score,
Also, M1 Pro OpenCL score is 38,400, and that means a ratio of 2.
These two results makes it extremely unlikely that the M1 Max score is for a 32-core GPU.
Also...
There's a MacBook Pro 16-core that scored ~38,000 in OpenCL...
8 - 18,000
16 - 38,000
32 - 60,000
Something is way off with that last score...
8 -> 16, 100% gain
16 -> 32, 50% gain
Me thinks that's a 24-core Max, not a 32-core.
Some have suggested that Geekbench is not showing proper statistics...
Every M1 MacBookAir shows 8 compute units, even though there are models with only 7 units.
Every M1/Pro/Max shows maximum GPU frequency being 1000MHz, we know it's 1278MHz for the M1, and is supposedly a little higher for Pro and Max.
So that 32 compute units might not be accurate.
Too bad not many people are traveling these days. The thing I hear over and over again (and in my own case) is that these new MacBook Pros would be instant buys except that there is no need for them currently.