Two New M1 Chips
Rumours of a more powerful M1 chip have been circulating since minutes after Apple showed off its original M1 Macs last year. We all knew that something more had to be coming, since Apple had left the higher-end machines in its lineup running older Intel silicon.
While we began to hear about Apple’s plans for a multicore CPU/GPU combo as far back as last December, we weren’t expecting Apple to actually come out with two distinct chips. Some reports had suggested 16-core and 32-core GPU variants, but there was every reason to believe that these would just be different configurations of a new “M1X.”
Instead, Apple decided to go with two distinct new chips: the M1 Pro and M1 Max. Both offer the same standard 10-core CPU, but they differ in GPU and memory configuration. The M1 Pro offers a 16-core CPU and up to 32GB of unified memory, while the M1 Max doubles both of those, topping out with a 32-core GPU and a 64GB capacity. The M1 Max also doubles the memory bandwidth and offers extra video encoding and decoding engines.