Apple M1 8-Core GPU vs Apple M1 Pro 16-Core GPU

Apple M1 8-Core GPU

The Apple M1 GPU is an integrated graphics card offering 8 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 is 2.6 teraflops and 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. According to internal tools, the M1 GPU uses under load approximately 10 Watt (11.5 Watt package power including the RAM).

Apple M1 Pro 16-Core GPU

The Apple M1 Pro 16-Core-GPU is an integrated graphics card by Apple offering all 16 cores in the M1 Pro Chip. The 2048 ALUs offer a theoretical performance of up to 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 (Valley) to 20.6 W (Eve Online) under full load.