Apple M1 7-Core GPU vs Qualcomm SD X Adreno X1-45 1.7 TFLOPS vs Apple M1 Pro 14-Core GPU

Apple M1 7-Core GPU

The Apple M1 GPU is an integrated graphics card offering 7 cores (1 deactivated core in the entry MacBook Air) designed by Apple and integrated in the Apple M1 SoC. According to Apple it is faster and more energy efficient as competing products (like the Tiger Lake Xe GPU). The peak performance of the high end variant with 8 cores is 2.6 teraflops, therefore the 7 core version should offer around 2.3 teraflops. Thanks to the unified memory architecture it should have fast access to the RAM.

The Apple M1 is manufactured in the modern 5nm process at TSMC and should offer an excellent energy efficiency.

Qualcomm SD X Adreno X1-45 1.7 TFLOPS

The 1.7 TFLOPS Adreno X1-45 is an integrated graphics adapter that the Snapdragon X Plus 8-core X1P-42-100 SoC features. Compared to the faster 3.8 TFLOPS and 4.6 TFLOPS X1-85 iGPUs, this little guy does not just run at lower clock speeds but also has fewer unified shaders at its disposal, with 768 being the most likely number. The 2.1 TFLOPS X1-45 variant on the other hand only differs in clock speeds.

Architecture

The underlying architecture is reportedly (ChipsAndCheese) in many respects the same as what was used in the Adreno 730, rendering the iGPU DirectX 12-compatible but not DirectX 12 Ultimate-compatible. Ray tracing is only supported via Vulcan 1.3. The highest OpenGL version supported is ES 3.2. The iGPU enjoys access to fast enough RAM but has comparatively small and slow caches to work with. AVC, HEVC and AV1 video codecs can be both hardware-decoded and hardware-encoded; with VP9, only decoding is possible.

The highest monitor resolution supported is UHD 2160p rather than SUHD 4320p.

Performance

A lot depends on the power targets of a specific system, just like it is with AMD, Intel and Nvidia products. That being said, the 1.7 TFLOPS model is on par with the GeForce GTX 950M and significantly behind the Iris Xe Graphics G7 (80 EUs) in synthetic benchmarks. Games put it really close to the GeForce MX350 which is a lot better; still, this kind of performance is only just sufficient for pre-2020 games and resolutions such as HD 720p.

It is also worth mentioning that Qualcomm's graphics drivers aren't quite as polished as what AMD, Intel and especially Nvidia have to offer, leading to severe visual artefacts in certain games. A lot of games won't start at all.

Power consumption

Snapdragon X Plus 8-core chips normally consume no more than 30 W, including the on-package RAM. This makes it highly unlikely that the iGPU will ever get to eat more than 20 W.

Since TSMC's N4P process is employed, it's safe to say power efficiency is going to be better than average with this iGPU, as of late 2024. It's still far behind Apple's M-series chips of course as our in-depth analysis article shows.

Apple M1 Pro 14-Core GPU

The Apple M1 Pro 14-Core-GPU is an integrated graphics card by Apple offering 14 of the 16 cores in the M1 Pro Chip. The 1792 ALUs offer a theoretical performance of up to 4.6 Teraflops (16 core variant with 2048 ALUs offers 5.3 Teraflops). 

The graphics card has no dedicated graphics memory but can use the fast LPDDR5-6400 unified memory with a 256 bit bus (up to 200 GBit/s).

The GPU clocks between 389 and 1296 MHz and offers no short term boost (389, 486, 648, 778, 972, 1296 MHz steps according to Powermetrics). The GPU is intended to use Apple Metal 2 API and could still be based on the older PowerVR architectures (last used in the Apple A10).

The Apple M1 Pro is manufactured in the modern 5nm process at TSMC and offers an excellent energy efficiency. According to the internal sensors, the GPU uses 15 Watt under full load.