Hey guys it’s Vadim with Max Tech, and as you guys already know,
Apple broke the tech side of the internet with their new 14 and 16” MacBook Pros
with their controversial thicc boi redesign and of course, the NOTCH that NOBODY was expecting!
But in reality, the real shocker comes down to Apple’s new M1 Pro
and M1 Max chips which are blowing the minds of basically everyone in
the engineering world and the tech space in general for various different reasons,
which I’m gonna dive deep into in this video which is 100% focused on the new chips!
So what I’m gonna do is explain EVERYTHING you need to know about
these new chips, including how they work and what makes them so special compared to
any other computer chip on the market, so without further ado, let’s start with the basics.
The M1 Pro chip is basically a suped-up version of the M1 chip from last year,
packing in twice the number of performance cores and GPU cores while ditching two of the
efficiency cores, giving us a 10-core CPU and 16-core GPU on the M1 Pro!
And speaking of those cores, other sources like the AAPL tree on Twitter,
who by the way wrote this wonderful article,
have confirmed that the new chips are in fact based directly on the cores from the M1 chip.
And if that sounds obvious, I previously speculated that Apple would base these cores
on the new ones in the iPhone 13’s A15 chip,
since basically all of the cores are faster across the board!
But as you can see, Apple rated the M1 Pro’s GPU cores at 5.2 Teraflops of performance, which
is exactly double the performance of the M1’s 2.6Tflops, confirming that they’re the same cores.
On top of that, I speculated that Apple would pack in the A15 chip’s faster Neural Engine that
can run over 15 trillion operations per second, but nope, Apple showed that the one in the M1 Pro
is using the M1 chip’s Neural Engine with 11 TFLOPS of performance.
So this basically confirms a few of the other details about the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips,
we now know that they’re not built on the latest 5nm+ process node from TSMC, and we also know
that the video encoders and decoders are most likely identical to the ones in the M1 chip.
But thankfully, Apple did toss in some brand new ProRes encoders and decoders, which is by the way
a WORLD FIRST from Apple. No other computer on the market can do this,
not even the Mac Pro with the afterburner card since it can only decode ProRes.
Going back to the chip, it of course packs dedicated Thunderbolt 4 controls right inside
of the chip package, as well as many other things like the Secure Enclave for security, an
Image signal processor for the webcam, dedicated caches, machine learning accelerators and more!
But digging deeper into the M1 Pro chip, let’s refer to Anandtech’s article on this topic,
when Andrey provided a labeled graphics of the chip itself.
Here, he pointed out that Apple is now using two blocks of SLC cache which serves the entire chip
to amplify bandwidth, reduce latency and improve power efficiency.
And apparently, this new chip looks like it’s using double the amount of SLC cache,
32MB compared to 16 on the M1 chip.
Now as far as the RAM, Apple is using unified memory which is what makes
these chips extremely special, so let me explain how it works!
Traditional RAM that you find in many x86-based computers
is always separated from the main CPU and GPU chips, which adds extra latency since data
that needs processing has to travel through electrical channels in the main logic board.
So to perform a graphically-based task, the CPU has to copy data to the RAM,
and then that data gets copied to the GPU for processing, and once it’s finished,
the data gets copied to the RAM again, and then copied from the RAM to CPU
so that it can do it’s part of processing, before repeating the cycle over and over again.
But with Apple’s chips, the memory is built directly into the main chip package,
and since it’s unified memory, both the CPU and GPU can access and work
on the data at the same time without having to copy it back and forth,
and with GREATLY reduced latency since it’s all right there in one package!
So as you can see in this representation of the M1 Pro chip, you have a dedicated RAM chip
on each side of the M1 Pro, and each RAM chip also has it’s own dedicated 128-bit memory bus
for that data to travel through, which effectively means that the M1 Pro has a 256-bit memory bus,
which allows up to 200GB/s of memory bandwidth which is extremely impressive!
And based on Andrei’s calculations,
this means that the RAM in the M1 Pro is most likely LPDDR5 RAM that runs at up to around
6400 MHz, which is MUCH faster than the 4266 MHz RAM in the original M1.
And making it even better, the way Apple set it all up means that the RAM operates through 16
channels, 8 channels on the left side and 8 on the right side,
which is something that’s completely unheard of in the computer world.
So before I explain why this is SUCH a huge deal, I want to ask you guys to hit
that subscribe button to help us reach 1 million subs before the end of the year,
and be sure to use the M1Pro promo code to get 20% off on ALL of our merch including
our new M1 Pro/Max Sharpie edition shirt down in the merch shelf below!
Getting back to those crazy 16 channels of RAM,
the beautiful thing is that you get the full 16 channels regardless of whether you choose
the 16GB or 32GB RAM option since both versions still use a full RAM chip on
each side of the M1 Pro, the difference is in the use of either 8 or 16GB RAM chips.
But now, let me explain why having 16-channel memory is SO impressive!
Every single CPU that Intel currently sells
uses dual-channel memory, yes, that’s 2 channels compared to 16 on the M1 Pro!
So this means that the current 2020 27” iMac uses dual-channel memory.
The 2017 iMac Pro that I wrote this script on uses quad-channel memory
because of the pro-grade XEON Chip.
And our $15,000 Mac Pro actually uses six-channel memory!
And to show you why having more channels is so important,
here’s a chart showing the photo editing performance using Lightroom classic!
As you can see, the performance improves based on the number of memory channels in the system,
and we KNOW this for sure because the iMac Pro is actually faster than
the regular iMac which doesn’t make sense because the regular iMac has
DOUBLE the amount of RAM and it has faster CPU performance than the iMac Pro!
But because of the dual-channel memory limitation,
it actually ends up being slower in this RAW photo exporting test.
And to explain this as practically as possible,
you can think of a memory channel as a highway connecting the RAM to the CPU.
With only two highways, there is a gonna be a lot of traffic when
moving a lot of vehicles, or data, back and forth.
That’s why moving up to 4 highways or channels on the iMac Pro
improved performance despite actually having a slower CPU since it freed up all of that traffic..
and then, of course, it got even better with the Mac Pro’s 6 channel memory.
So now.. You can understand why having 16 channels
on the M1 Pro chip is such a big deal, and it’s definitely got the performance to make
use of those channels since it’s actually FASTER than the 12-core XEON in our Mac Pro!
But wait.. There’s more! And get ready for this because I’m about to blow your mind!
Everything I just mentioned was for the base M1 Pro chip,
so now let’s venture into the more expensive M1 Max!
This chip is MUCH larger as you can see in this image,
being roughly 75% bigger than the M1 Pro, and 3.5x bigger than the original M1 chip!
What this chip does is it basically DOUBLES up on many of the components found in the M1 Pro,
including double the GPU cores to make a 32-core GPU, double the SLC cache to make 64MB of cache
which can be used by the entire chip, DOUBLE the number of RAM chips as you can see in this
graphi.. and DOUBLE the number of memory buses to support those RAM chips.. making for an incredible
512-bit memory interface which gives the chip up to 400GB/s of memory bandwidth.
And the craziest thing of all is that the number of memory channels is once again DOUBLED, yes, the
M1 Max chip, regardless of number of RAM or GPU cores that you pay for, has 32-channel memory!!!
If that didn’t blow your mind,
I don’t know what else will because what Apple has achieved is literally an engineering masterpiece,
since even the latest EPYC server chips from AMD are still limited to eight memory channels.
And to put the final cherry on top, because of the unified memory architecture,
the RAM is fully accessible by the GPU.. meaning that if you bought the model with 64GB of RAM,
you essentially have up to 64GB of VRAM for the GPU to make use of!
This makes the M1 Max the world’s first chip or GPU to come on the market with more than 48GB
of accessible VRAM, beating out Nvidia’s Quadro RTX 8000 GPU which sells for $5,500 by itself!
But to give you a more realistic comparison, the previous top of the line 16” MacBook Pro with
the 5600M GPU came with only 8GB of VRAM, and the current BEST GPU in any Windows laptop is the 3080
Mobile with up to 16GB of VRAM, so you can see why 64GB of VRAM on the M1 Max chip is mind-blowing!
So with that said, hopefully, you learned something new about
these new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips, and if I just convinced you to order one,
you can find links to the best deals on the new 14 and 16” MacBook Pros down in the description
below, and if you enjoyed the video, click that circle above to subscribe because we ordered 8
of these to test out and make videos on! Thanks for watching and we’ll see you in the next one!