Monday’s Apple keynote gave us our first look at the new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors, with the latter earning the (self-given) title of Apple’s largest and most powerful chip to date. Both are meant to provide significantly more performance compared to the current M1 models by scaling up the processing architecture. They also claim to provide almost twice the performance of some PC laptop chips while using up to 70% less power. The M1 Pro utilizes a 16 core GPU with 32GB of unified memory, offering up to 200GB per second of memory bandwidth and up to double the GPU performance of current M1 chips. The M1 Max, as you’d expect from the name, provides even more of each. Specifically, the M1 Max uses a 32 core GPU with up to 400GB per second of memory bandwidth and four times the GPU performance of current M1 processors. Both chips look to use more power than the M1 models currently available, but end up being less of a drain compared to most PC laptop counterparts. According to Apple, most official and third party apps are already designed to work with the M1 chip, so there should be no problems if you upgrade to the M1 Pro or M1 Max. The software you’ve ben using should continue to work just fine—or work even better thanks to the improved performance. If not, there’s still Rosetta 2, which helps apps that are still optimized for Intel silicon to work on the new Macs. Both the M1 Pro and M1 Max will be available in the new MacBook Pro 14-inch and 16-inch models, which can be ordered today and release next week.
