OutdoorAppDeveloper

Laptop GPU performance scores should be viewed with suspicion regardless of whether you are looking at a laptop with a RTX 3080 or a M1 Max. Apple highlighted the issue in their presentation. That heavy, hot, oversized $5000 Windows laptop with a top end desktop GPU may run fast when plugged into a wall socket (sometimes with two separate power supplies taking up two outlets) but on battery it runs extremely slowly and not for long. Being able to use the M1 Max at full speed for hours on battery while still getting near desktop performance is a game changer for mobile pros.

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.

For someone who walks frequently on the side of local roads, the lack of noise canceling is a major feature. You need to hear what is around you including oncoming traffic, dangerous wild life and aggressive pets. These are rare occurrences but when they happen a few seconds of warning will make the difference.

The M1 Pro and M1 Max are extremely impressive processors. Not only are the CPUs among the best in computer the market, the GPUs are the best in the laptop market for most tasks of professional users. A minor concern is that the Apple Silicon GPUs currently lack hardware ray tracing which is at least five times faster than software ray tracing on a GPU. Apple is likely working on hardware ray tracing as evidenced by the design of the SDK they released this year which closely matches that of NVIDIA's. Hopefully it will appear in the M2. The one area where the M1 Pro and Max are way ahead of anything else is in the fact that they are integrated GPUs with discrete GPU performance and also their power demand and heat generation are far lower. Not only does this mean that the best laptop you can buy today at any price is now a MacBook Pro it also means that there is considerable performance head room for the Mac Pro to use with a full powered M2 Pro Max GPU. That one could very well be the most disruptive processor to hit the market. It will be interesting to see how NVIDIA and AMD rise to the challenge.

Also note the 64 GB of vRam is unheard of in the GPU industry for pro consumer products. For some tasks, the new MacBook Pros will be the best graphics processor on the market. Better even than desktop computers.

The new Intel chip had better not have x86 instructions. x86 offers zero advantage these days when developers compile their code and the correct instructions are automatically created for whatever architecture is in use. x86 is all downside now. It is baggage from an ancient past. It is a large part of the reasons why Intel CPUs are bigger, slower and run hotter than Apple Silicon.

Apple Computer: Nice products but you wouldn't want to work there.