Hey guys it’s Vadim with Max Tech and over the last couple of days, benchmarks for Apple’s brand
new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips have been LEAKED.. And at first glance, they kind of look a bit
disappointing because they don’t seem to match up to our initial estimates and predictions.
So in this video, I’m gonna go through all of the leaked benchmarks, including ones for BOTH the
M1 Pro and the M1 Max chips and I’m gonna compare them to other Mac and Windows PC systems, but then
I’m also gonna look at some more realistic leaked tests that show the true power of these chips!
So getting right into the leaked Geekbench 5 benchmarks,
let’s start with the CPU side before we get into the GPU!
As you can see, we have some slight variation in the scores,
with the highest one giving us an astounding 1,783 single-core and 12,693 multi-core points.
Now that score is definitely not what we expected because I personally predicted around 14,000
to 14,500 multi-core points, but then again, Apple did confirm that the M1 Pro has a CPU
that’s 70% faster, which almost perfectly lines up to the leaked scores we’re seeing here.
Now the big question is why we’re not getting an almost
doubling in the performance like we think we should be, but before I dig deep into that,
I wanna compare these leaked scores to other systems.
We actually have a 12-core XEON Mac Pro in the office which was able to score 12,518
multi-core points, so the new M1 Pro and Max chips
actually outperform it with just 8 high-performance cores instead of 12!
But making things EVEN crazier, we measured the peak wattage of the Mac Pro
while running Geekbench 5, and it had a staggering 218 Watts at one point in the test,
and according to Apple’s own charts, the new chips are limited to 30 watts of power.
So if you translate the scores into performance per watt metrics,
these new MacBook Pros are giving us over 7x more performance per watt, which is mind-blowing!
Now comparing the leaked score to the previous fully specced out 16” MacBook Pro,
the new one is literally almost twice as fast!
One of my Twitter followers shared this image of a bunch of Intel
and AMD server chips, and as you can see,
the new M1 Mac chips are faster than almost all of them, including the 32-core AMD Epyc 7542!
Another Twitter follower Johnny McClung who has his own youtube channel shared the scores
of his 16-core Xeon Mac Pro, and it was just barely faster than Apple’s new 10-core chip.
And finally, comparing it to the best x86 laptop chip out there, the Intel i9-11980HK,
Apple’s new chip is MUCH faster!
So even though we’re not getting the performance we expected,
these new MacBook Pros are still the fastest laptops ever made!
But nevertheless, the truth is that Apple is still limiting these chips with a maximum of
30w of power, and we know that it’s not due to thermal throttling because Geekbench 5 is
a quick test that never lets CPUs really heat up, so it’s gotta be a hard 30w cap by Apple.
So why would they do this? Well, for two different reasons.
One reason is because of Amdahl’s law, which basically means that you
get diminishing returns when adding more cores for running programs with parallel processing.
And the other reason is probably because Apple showed that the 32-core M1 Max GPU
uses 60W in their comparison charts to other Windows GPUs, so if you add that 60 watts from
the GPU to the 30 watts from the CPU, you get a total of 90W of power usage if you’re fully maxing
out both of them at the same time, which isn’t likely to happen, but it might for some workloads!
And if you consider the fact that the best power adapter available with the
14” MacBook Pro is a 96W charger, that would only leave 6 watts of extra power
for the rest of the system if you were theoretically maxing out both the cpu and gpu.
So Apple likely put a 96W total power cap
on the entire system to ensure that the battery won’t drain
while you’re charging it, so now the 30W power limit on the CPU starts to make perfect sense!
Now before I get into all of the GPU benchmark leaks, the story for the CPU doesn’t end just yet.
The Apple developer Steve Moser was looking through the beta of macOS Monterey,
and he found a brand new High Power Mode setting, which is the opposite of low power mode.
Steve ended up finding this very interesting text from Apple themselves: “Your Mac will optimize
performance to better support resource-intensive tasks. This may result in louder fan noise.”
However, the caveat is that this mode is ONLY available on the 16” MacBook Pro,
and ONLY if you have the M1 Max chip, which is very interesting because the
14” can also be configured with the same full-specced out M1 Max chip!
So what we have to figure out is what is so special about the 16” Model?
Well, the 16” is obviously much larger in terms of the chassis,
as well as being thicker, even though it packs the same chip configurations,
which means that the 16” has more internal space to work with, and yes, the 100Wh battery
takes up more space than the 70Wh one in the 14”, but there’s still some left over room.
So our theory is that the 16” with the M1 Max chip actually comes with
a slightly better cooling system! … and if you need some proof for that theory.. Here you go!
If you look at the tech specs on the 16” MacBook Pro,
the model with the M1 Max chip is actually heavier than the one with the regular M1 Pro chip,
so you might think the difference is explained by the larger chip.
However.. If you look at the 14” model’s tech specs, there is no difference in weight between
the two chips, so what if you truly do get a better cooling system on the 16” with the M1 Max?
Now, another theory for this 16” model exclusively getting High Power mode
is actually due to the power adapter!
Since the 14” can only have up to a 96W power adapter,
what if Apple won’t allow the mode on that machine because of the hard 96W cap,
but they will on the 16” because it comes with an 140W power adapter which can recharge faster!
Who knows, but either way, the point I’m trying to make is that there’s a chance we could see
better scores with High Power mode enabled if those leaked benchmarks weren’t using it.
But what I can assure you is that we will for sure test out this new High Power Mode
when we get our 8 different MacBook Pro configurations in the office, so be sure
to SUBSCRIBE RIGHT NOW so you don’t miss out, and by the way, we just launched our brand new
M1 Max Tech t-shirt design which you can find in the merch shelf below, as well as this Sharpie
edition design that I’m wearing right now. And be sure to use the promo code M1Pro to get 20% off!
Now getting into the leaked graphics benchmark scores, the highest one we saw was 68,870 points
from that 32-core M1 Max GPU using the optimized Metal framework.
Now that seems extremely disappointing
because I was personally expecting around 80 to 90,000 graphics points in this test!
So in reality, this leaked score doesn’t seem that much faster than the 42,510
that the previous fastest Intel MacBook Pro’s 5600M GPU scores.
And it’s nowhere near the performance of the fastest laptop GPU which is the
3080 Mobile which Apple compared the M1 Max chip to in one of their comparison charts!
But in reality, Apple’s new chips pack a ton of unique and record-breaking hardware components
inside of them including an absolutely insane 32 channels of memory and a very impressive 400 GB/s
of memory bandwidth, so these RAW GPU benchmarks don’t show you the whole truth.
So before I get into how this 32-core GPU performs in the real world, including some more
leaked benchmarks, I wanna get into the lower-end 16-core GPU in the less expensive M1 Pro chip.
We got a leaked Geekbench 5 metal score of 41,914, which is actually super impressive
and it’s just barely shy of our performance expectations, being almost exactly 2x faster
than the M1’s 8-core GPU, which would mean it’s getting perfect scaling!
However, the really weird thing is that this leaked score is actually LOWER
than last year’s top-of-the-line 5600M GPU.
And this is what FINALLY brings us to real-world
leaked tests that show a totally different picture.
In GFXBench, you can now see that the 16-core M1 Pro outperforms the 5600M in basically every
test that we see here, and some of these are by huge margins, like as much as 50% faster,
which proves that the Geekbench 5 benchmark isn’t showing us the full truth.
And even in Apple’s own testing, like 3D rendering using Maxon Cinema 4D with Redshift,
Apple shows the 16-core M1 Pro being a staggering 2.5x faster than the 5600M!
And yes, Apple’s notes show that the 5600M was FULLY LOADED,
even with 64GB of RAM and an 8TB SSD.
Now you may have noticed that on that same 3D rendering chart from Apple,
the M1 Max only gives you 4x more performance instead of the expect 5x if it scaled perfectly,
so Apple is admitted that yes, the 32-core GPU has diminishing returns compared to the 16-core..
But don’t worry, because that leaked 68,870 Geekbench score isn’t telling you the truth,
because we just got a set of leaked GFXBench benchmarks and as you can see,
there are MANY tests where this new 32-core M1 Max GPU is actually outperforming
the 3080 Mobile laptop GPU because these tests are taking FULL advantage of the M1 Max chip package!
So in reality, don’t trust those disappointing-looking Geekbench scores
because it performs MUCH better in real-world use cases.
So with all of that said, we can see that you’re not getting as much bang for your
buck with the M1 Max, but that has honestly always been the case with graphics cards,
and it’s exactly what’s expected, so if you want the best value, get the M1 Pro,
but if you want the absolute most graphics power you can get, go for the 32-core M1 Max!
Hopefully you enjoyed this video, and if you did, go ahead and click that circle above
to subscribe for more videos like this one and definitely check out our buyers’ guide
right over there. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you in the next video!