Follow the headline link to read the Anandtech take on CPU performance and power efficiency. I’ve never doubted that in those categories, the M1 chips would win, hands down.
What really interests me is the GPU performance. The original M1 stands toe-to-toe with traditional laptop GPUs, but falls well behind a PC desktop with a discrete GPU. Not a slam on the M1. That’s just to be expected with an integrated GPU.
But this from Anandtech:
Apple’s GPU performance is claimed to vastly outclass any previous generation competitor integrated graphics performance, so the company opted to make direct comparisons to medium-end discrete laptop graphics. In this case, pitting the M1 Pro against a GeForce RTX 3050 Ti 4GB, with the Apple chip achieving similar performance at 70% less power.
And:
While the M1 Pro catches up and outpaces the laptop competition in terms of performance, the M1 Max is aiming at delivering something never-before seen: supercharging the GPU to a total of 32 cores. Essentially it’s no longer an SoC with an integrated GPU, rather it’s a GPU with an SoC around it.
And:
In terms of performance, Apple is battling it out with the very best available in the market, comparing the performance of the M1 Max to that of a mobile GeForce RTX 3080, at 100W less power (60W vs 160W). Apple also includes a 100W TDP variant of the RTX 3080 for comparison, here, outperforming the NVIDIA discrete GPU, while still using 40% less power.
This is no small thing. If Apple is able to go head-to-head with a traditional, discrete PC GPU in terms of performance, that does change things. GPU performance, especially for gaming, is the reason we still have a desktop PC in our house. Though a fast GPU does not trivialize porting and running PC games on a Mac (perhaps via Rosetta 2 or via an M1 port), it is a necessary first step.
And we’ll soon know how true those performance claims are as the graphics benchmarks start rolling in. From this first such report:
The M1 Max looked pretty good beside the GeForce RTX 3080 Mobile or Radeon RX 6800M. Apple’s chip outperformed Nvidia and AMD’s GPUs in some workloads and stayed within a small margin in others. The M1 Max’s power efficiency was the most impressive feat, considering that the GeForce RTX 3080 Mobile and Radeon RX 6800M conform to TDP ratings of 160W and 145W, respectively.
Looking forward to more benchmark results, and hearing from experts on any caveats. But so far, so good.
