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M1 Max Only Gets 39GB/s More Memory Bandwidth From the CPU Side than the M1 Pro
- Thread starter ryansebiz
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Why? The CPU side is the same in both chips. Did you miss the part about how it "overshadows any other design in the industry"? The real strength of the Max chip is on the GPU side.
As stated, it would be implied to be double: "it’s still quite far from the 409GB/s the chip is capable of. More importantly for the M1 Max, it’s only slightly higher than the 204GB/s limit of the M1 Pro,"
This is what I was watching for and others in /r/hardware also advised that 200GB/s would be plenty.
I honestly probably didn't need to go with the Max and figured this wouldn't make a big difference, but for $180 upgrade it got me some better graphics, a bigger cache, and if I ever dabble with Prores (though unlikely) it'll have a lot more oomph.
What sort of put me over the line was that I realized for $2800 vs $3000 or whatever, I'd be able to actually play a few games on this super expensive machine vs. the M1 Pro chip. The 24 core gpu seems to bump a numer of games closer to 60fps than the 16 core model.
Also since the APU is sort of the amazing part about this Apple silicon I thought it might be fun to get that upgrade for once. (though not the full 32 cores)
I honestly probably didn't need to go with the Max and figured this wouldn't make a big difference, but for $180 upgrade it got me some better graphics, a bigger cache, and if I ever dabble with Prores (though unlikely) it'll have a lot more oomph.
What sort of put me over the line was that I realized for $2800 vs $3000 or whatever, I'd be able to actually play a few games on this super expensive machine vs. the M1 Pro chip. The 24 core gpu seems to bump a numer of games closer to 60fps than the 16 core model.
Also since the APU is sort of the amazing part about this Apple silicon I thought it might be fun to get that upgrade for once. (though not the full 32 cores)
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How will this affect what you want to do? What kinds of tasks benefit from having enough bandwidth to read the entire contents of RAM on a 32GB into the CPU more than 8 times per second?
As they said, "...from a CPU-only workload perspective, it doesn’t appear to make sense to get the Max if one is focused just on CPU bandwidth."
The person I responded to asked for an answer, I provided it. Not here to get into a discussion on merits.
When the GPU and CPU are working at the same time, this would be beneficial (the same benefit one gets from a discrete GPU having its own dedicated memory bandwidth, but without the downside of that memory being electrically distant.)
The $200 extra for 20% more top-end CPU bandwidth plus some more GPU performance doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
That wasn’t what most people were talking about earlier.
AnandTech's Deep Dive Into M1 Pro and M1 Max Highlights Performance and Efficiency Improvements
We've heard Apple's overview of the the M1 Pro and M1 Max Apple silicon chips and we've seen benchmarks of the CPU and GPUs, but...
www.macrumors.com
I wonder what a CPU-only workload looks like. Are there compute intensive applications that really only use the CPU that would even justify the M1 Pro, never mind the M1 Max? I'm thinking the plain old M1 is going to be fine for anything not really pushing the limits--in fact it's better because it's more efficient. For content creation or engineering and science, you're going to be using the GPU and/or neural engine as well.