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Apple has announced two new Arm SoCs for its upcoming MacBook Pro laptops. Both share the same CPU, but differ in GPU and RAM size.
The Apple M1 SoC for Macs has 8 CPU cores: 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. The newly announced M1 Pro and M1 Max have 10 cores: 8 performance cores and 2 efficiency cores. CPU performance (multi-threaded) is about 70% faster, at around a 30 Watt TDP (M1 Pro) instead of 15 Watts for the M1. The 16-core "neural engine" with 11 TOPS of machine learning performance is unchanged from the M1.
While the M1 has an (up to) 8-core GPU with 2.6 TFLOPS FP32 of performance, the M1 Pro doubles that to 16 cores and 5.2 TFLOPS, and the M1 Max doubles it again to 32 cores and 10.4 TFLOPS. The M1 Pro is comparable to an Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti discrete laptop GPU, while the M1 Max is comparable to an RTX 3080 laptop GPU. These levels of performance are achieved at around 30 Watts for the M1 Pro and 60 Watts for the M1 Max, compared to around 100-160 Watts for laptops with discrete graphics.
The M1 Pro has around 33.7 billion transistors fabbed on TSMC "5nm" in a 245 mm2 die space, while the M1 Max has 57 billion transistors at 432 mm2. The M1 Pro will include up to 32 GB of LPDDR5 RAM, and the M1 Max will include up to 64 GB.
Also at Wccftech.
See also: Apple Announces The M1 Pro / M1 Max, Asahi Linux Starts Eyeing Their Bring-Up
Previously: Apple Has Built its Own Mac Graphics Processors
Apple Claims that its M1 SoC for ARM-Based Macs Uses the World's Fastest CPU Core
Your New Apple Computer Isn't Yours
Why is Apple's M1 Chip So Fast?
ARM-Based Mac Pro Could Have 32+ Cores
Booting Linux and Sideloading Apps on M1 Macs
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 19 2021, @01:48AM (5 children)
TSMC fabbed chips?
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday October 19 2021, @02:13AM (4 children)
Yes.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by EEMac on Tuesday October 19 2021, @02:27AM (3 children)
I predict Apple will run into a limit here fairly quickly. Putting *everything* on one chip gives them amazing performance right now. But manufacturers split functions up between chips and use smaller transistor counts for many, many solid reasons.
2026, come back to fact-check me! If I'm wrong, good for Apple.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday October 19 2021, @02:35AM
I think Intel's upcoming combination of chiplet (or "tile") technologies are designed to split everything up and join them together with minimal efficiency losses or latency issues.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-teases-14th-gen-meteor-lake-cpus-tile-design-192-eus [tomshardware.com]
For right now, Apple has created what looks like the ultimate APU or SoC. At least for laptops. Hopefully this kicks everyone in the ass and spurs improvements. I think a lot of people would like a "super APU" with High Bandwidth Memory.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 19 2021, @02:37AM
They've been doing it for a long time. Even back in the 80s, they had used custom chips instead of stringing up bunch of off-the-shelf chips to reduce the chip counts and to lower manufacturing costs (and probably other reasons, too).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @08:22PM
I really do not get the hoopla about this new chip.
It is pretty much the same setup as AMD makes for Sony and Microsoft games consoles.
Only people that should be going gaga are the Apple fanatics that have been living under a fruit shaped rock for decades, and do not have the first clue about the wider technology world.
But because those invariably include big name journalists etc, Apple changes are big changes even if the rest of the world have been doing it for some time already.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 19 2021, @03:20AM (2 children)
me thinks the real astonishment needs to fall to TSMC being able to "print ~57'000'000'000” or so transistors flawlessly @ 5nano meters (thats alot of zeros AFTER the ".")
let's hope this engineering wizardry will solve world hunger, global warming, cure cancer and covid-19 thru 25 and also bring down the prices of gtx3080 to a affordable level :)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bussdriver on Tuesday October 19 2021, @03:15PM (1 child)
Political problems can't be solved by tech... that is until Terminators are built.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 19 2021, @06:47PM
Terminators - Finally a technical solution to a political problem.