Last year, Apple announced a major update for its high-end MacBook Pros, with the new machines featuring a complete redesign, larger mini-LED displays with ProMotion, an HDMI port and SD card slot, full-sized function keys, and more. The new machines contain one of two all-new scaled-up variants of the M1 System on Chip (SoC), the M1 Pro or the M1 Max.
Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos.
When choosing your MacBook Pro configuration, should you choose the M1 Pro or M1 Max? Despite both being powerful Apple silicon chips with some overlap, they do have different capabilities. Our guide helps to answer the question of how to decide which of these two chipsets for the high-end MacBook Pro is best for you.
Comparing the M1 Pro and M1 Max
The M1 Pro and M1 Max feature the same basic architecture based on the M1 chip, resulting in the same core functionality. Apple lists these identical features of the two SoCs:
Similarities
- Up to 10-core CPU with eight performance cores and two efficiency cores
- 16-core Neural Engine
- Media engine for hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC, ProRes, and ProRes RAW
- Video decode engine
Apple's breakdown shows that the two chips share most of their basic features, but they have several differing capabilities.
Differences
M1 Pro
- Up to 16-core GPU
- 200GB/s memory bandwidth
- Support for up to 32GB of unified memory
- ProRes encode and decode engine
- Video encode engine
M1 Max
Up to 32-core GPU- 400GB/s memory bandwidth
- Support for up to 64GB of unified memory
- Two ProRes encode and decode engines
- Two video encode engines
Real-World Performance
Our in-depth tests of the entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro chip and the high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Max chip shows what you're getting with the upgrade to the M1 Max.
Priced at $1,999, the base 14-inch MacBook Pro features an M1 Pro chip with an 8-core CPU, a 14-core GPU, 16GB unified memory, and a 512GB SSD. The $3,499 high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro we compared it to has an M1 Max chip with 10-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 32GB unified memory, and 1TB SSD. The two machines represent the most affordable and the most expensive stock MacBook Pro models that don't take into account upgrade options.
In our testing, the M1 Max unsurprisingly outperformed the lower-end M1 Pro chip, but what was a bit of a surprise was how well even the base M1 Pro chip did in our tests.
Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos.
In Final Cut Pro, a video export test saw the M1 Max machine export a 6-minute 4K video in one minute and 49 seconds, a task that took the M1 Pro 2 minute and 55 seconds. When it comes to 8K RAW footage, both machines were able to handle the load. The M1 Max MacBook Pro performed close to flawlessly, while the M1 Pro had a few issues with dropped frames and stuttering, but was ultimately able to keep up.
For comparison's sake, the 2017 Mac Pro that we have is not able to handle 8K footage as well as the base model 14-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Pro chip. The M1 Max ultimately did better with our Final Cut Pro testing because of the 32 GPU cores, but the M1 Pro machine offered impressive performance.
In a Blender test, a complicated image of a classroom was rendered in just 8 minutes and 23 seconds on the M1 Max MacBook Pro, a process that took the M1 Pro MacBook Pro 10 minutes and 58 seconds.
We tested the memory in both machines by opening up a series of apps that one might use in a video editing workflow, like Final Cut Pro, Lightroom, Chrome, Safari, Music, and a few others, and there were zero performance hiccups across either MacBook Pro model. Intel machines with 16GB RAM often see issues with this same setup, so again, even the low-end MacBook Pro is doing well here. Both the 512GB SSD in the base model and the 1TB SSD in the 16-inch MacBook Pro performed about the same, with a 128GB file transferri... Click here to read rest of article
Article Link: M1 Pro vs. M1 Max Buyer's Guide
- Article Link
- https://www.macrumors.com/guide/m1-pro-vs-m1-max/
Last edited:
