How powerful do you think the 16 inch M1 MBP will be?

[mossme89]

The 13 inch M1 MBP keeps up with the 16 inch MBP in terms of processing which is nuts. This leads me to the question of how powerful the 16 inch version will likely be.

what I am unsure about is if Apple actually put their most powerful ARM chip in the 13 inch Air and Pros to try and drum up support and hype For their processors. They went full out with 8 core Airs and 13 inch models. So what can they do for the 16 inch?

 

[drxcm]

It will be quite powerful. Moreso than the current 16.
Time will tell exactly how much.

 

[dasjati]

I have the same question in my mind

But, no, I don't think that they put their most powerful chip in the base models.

My layperson speculation: They will put an M1 with more performance cores in it (aka "M1X", "M1T", "M1R" …). Single core performance would be the same, but multi core higher. They will also want to increase the graphics performance by a) putting more cores into the GPU on the chip or b) adding a separate "G1" GPU. Or maybe both happens and the G1 GPU ends up in the higher-end model.

The performance gap between the old Intel Macs and their new M1 counterparts is really wide. I have a hard time envisioning that they will be able to have quite the same performance leap with the higher end models. But who knows ...?

It's good to keep in the back of your head that this is the first generation of Apple's Mac chips. So I'm pretty sure that they will not be exactly where they want them to be in the future. They might be less diversified.

In the coming years the higher end Macs might be the first ones that get a new chip generation. But for now they probably only have this current first generation.

 

[ght56]

It's going to be so powerful that it will literally break the space-time continuum.

 

[jerryk]

The M1 is a starting point, not an ending point. There will be M2,....

 

[ArPe]

About 1.25 to 1.4 times faster the 13”. They will still want it to be cool with long battery life.

That means it could be the first laptop computer to hit about 2000 single core score, 10000 multi core score in Geekbench 5. That would be insane and make everyone very happy.

 

[bill-p]

Well, I don't think Apple will be able to improve single-core performance without increasing clock speed.

And increasing clock speed will make power consumption shoot up exponentially. If you want 1.4x more single core performance, the same chip will consume 2x the amount, so it'll already be at least 35W TDP for a measly 1.4x more performance than M1. Plus the chip may not be too stable then.

Increasing clock frequency is what Intel has done to their CPU for the past 6 years, without any other meaningful improvement. That's a horrible way to go about it.

If we're talking about meaningful improvements, like... say, GPU performance, then Apple can very easily make the GPU 24 cores at about 28W TDP. That makes the GPU a whopping 3x faster than the current M1. It'll be competitive against desktop GPUs then.

And if they make the CPU 16 cores, then we're looking at a 35W chip that essentially:

1. Has the same single-core performance as M1. Multi-core performance will shoot up to almost double the current score, making it about 14000 - 15000. That'll put it almost on par with the Ryzen 9 5950X.
2. GPU 3x faster than M1, so it'll be able to easily achieve 120fps+ in many games at 1080p. That puts it squarely in the same class as a desktop GPU.
3. 35W TDP means the chassis of the 16" MacBook can easily cool it. Note that the 16" MacBook can already sustain about 80W of thermal almost indefinitely.
4. Since it's just more cores, Apple can turn the unused cores off if they are not in use. Meaning... it'll have about the same efficiency as the current M1 for light tasks. With the 16" MacBook having a battery 67% larger than the 13", I'll guess... 30 hours of video playback battery, and 24 hours of web browsing. In regular use, it'll probably be pretty easy to reach 18 - 20 hours with that battery. I'm already getting 10 - 12 hours with my 13" Pro M1.
5. If Apple plans to make a 13" Pro M1 with 4 ports, then a 35W chip also makes more sense. It'll probably have a 16-core GPU only, and maybe only 12-core CPU. That should drop power consumption to a more manageable 25W for the 13" Pro M1. It'll be more powerful than M1, but it won't be unreasonable to cool.

So I think... realistically, we're looking at that level of performance for the next chip.

Note that even though "throwing more cores at the problem" seems "cheap", the thing is that under Rosetta 2, the M1 is only seen as a quad-core CPU (this is because the efficiency cores are paired up with the performance cores). That means a 12-core M1X will be seen has a hexacore, and a 16-core M1Z may only be seen as an octa-core CPU. So a 16-core M1Z is actually kinda "comparable" to the past Core i9 in Rosetta 2, except it'll be almost 2x faster CPU performance, and 1.5x faster GPU performance, with 4-5x better overall efficiency.

 

[dasjati]

Just yesterday I read that article on Ars Technica about the development process of the M1, and it seems clear that Apple thinks a separate GPU (like I talked about earlier) is the past. To integrate everything into one package as they do with the M1 is the future–even for the higher end (MBP, iMac). The Mac Pro will still be very different story.

But as @bill-p pointed out above: Even if they "only" add more performance and graphics cores, the higher end MBPs could be very nice devices!

I hope my good old MBP 15 will work long enough that I can get a MBP 14