Today, Apple went highly aggressive. What we should also do is discuss what Apple is doing, and how it hit on some big industry trends during its anno

Apple Ignites the Industry with the M1 Pro and M1 Max

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2021-10-20 20:00:05

Today, Apple went highly aggressive. What we should also do is discuss what Apple is doing, and how it hit on some big industry trends during its announcement. For those who have not heard, Apple announced the Apple M1 Pro and Apple M1 Max, two updates to its M1 silicon line as a midpoint in a two-year transition.

For the highlights, here are the big items on the Apple M1 Pro and M1 Max that show the key features. First the M1 Pro. One will notice some big feature upgrades over the Apple M1. Specifically, we get two external displays, a bigger CPU/ GPU, twice the memory, and ProRes encode/decode. We also get twice the memory bandwidth.

Stepping up to the Apple M1 Max, we get a similar CPU complex, but twice the memory and memory bandwidth, more display support, and more media engine performance.

Let us get into a few of the details. First, we have a 10 core CPU that has eight high-performance cores and two efficient cores for a total of 28MB of L2 cache. We are seeing Intel also move in this direction with its Intel Golden Cove and Gracemont cores for Alder Lake. The basic realization is that offloading tasks to lower-power cores is more efficient since there is so much going on in a system and not everything needs a high-performance core.