Apple M1 Pro vs Apple M2 Max

Apple M1 Pro

The Apple M1 Pro is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the late 2021 MacBook Pro 14 and 16-inch models. It offers  all 10 cores available in the chip divided in eight performance cores (P-cores with 600 - 3220 MHz) and two power-efficiency cores (E-cores with 600 - 2064 MHz). There is no Turbo Boost for single cores or short burst periods. The cores are similar to the cores in the Apple M1. The entry level model offers only 8 cores.

The big cores (codename Firestorm) offer 192 KB instruction cache, 128 KB data cache, and 24 MB shared L2 cache (up from 12 MB in the M1). The four efficiency cores (codename Icestorm) are a lot smaller and offer only 128 KB instruction cache, 64 KB data cache, and 4 MB shared cache. CPU and GPU can both use the 24 MB SLC (System Level Cache). The efficiency cores (E cluster) clock with 600 - 2064 MHz, the performance cores (P cluster) with 600 - 3228 MHz.

The unified memory (16 or 32 GB LPDDR5-6400) next to the chip is connected by a 256 bit memory controller (200 GB/s bandwidth) and can be used by the GPU and CPU.

The integrated graphics card in the M1 Pro offers all 16 cores.

Furthermore, the SoC integrates a fast 16 core neural engine, a secure enclave (e.g., for encryption), a unified memory architecture, Thunderbolt 4 controller, an ISP, and media de- and encoders (including ProRes).

The M1 Pro is manufactured in 5 nm at TSMC and integrates 33.7 billion transistors. The peak power consumption of the chip was advertised around 30W for CPU intensive tasks. In the Prime95 benchmark the chip uses in our tests (with a MBP16) 33.6W package power and 31W for the CPU part. In idle the SoC only reports 1W package power.

Apple M2 Max

The Apple M2 Max is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the early 2023 MacBook Pro 14 and 16-inch models. It offers all 12 CPU cores available in the chip divided in eight performance cores (P-cores) and four power-efficiency cores (E-cores). The E-cores clock with up to 3.4 GHz, the P-Cores up to 3.7 GHz (mostly 3.3 GHz in multi-threaded workloads and 3.4 GHz in single threaded).

The big cores (codename Avalanche) offer 192 KB instruction cache, 128 KB data cache, and 36 MB shared L2 cache (up from 24 MB in the M1 Pro). The four efficiency cores (codename Blizzard) are a lot smaller and offer only 128 KB instruction cache, 64 KB data cache, and 4 MB shared cache. CPU and GPU can both use the 49 MB SLC (System Level Cache). 

The unified memory (32, 64, or 96 GB LPDDR5-6400) next to the chip is connected by a 512 Bit memory controller (400 GB/s bandwidth) and can be used by the GPU and CPU.

The CPU performance should be quite similar to the M2 Pro as only the higher memory bandwidth and bigger L3 cache could make a difference for some workloads.

The integrated graphics card in the M1 Max offers a 30-core GPU or a GPU with all 38 cores.

Furthermore, the SoC integrates a fast 16 core neural engine (faster than M1 Max), a secure enclave (e.g., for encryption), a unified memory architecture, Thunderbolt 4 controller, an ISP, and media de- and encoders (including ProRes).

The M2 Max is manufactured in 5 nm at TSMC (second generation) and integrates 40 billion transistors. The power consumption of the CPU part is up to 36 Watt according to powermetrics. When fully loading the CPU and GPU cores, the chip uses up to 89 Watt and the CPU part is limited to 25 Watt.