Apple recently introduced the M1 Max and M1 Pro SoC chips for upcoming Macbook models. Based on the specs the new upgrades are powerful enough to shame existing competitors in the market. As per the official announcement, the new Macbook Pro 2021 will feature a new chip up to a 10-Core CPU. Up to 32 Core GPU and 64GB of Memory, clubbed together on the same chipset. This definitely sounds interesting and quite powerful. To drive out actual conclusion how powerful the new Macbook will be based on its competitors in the parallel universe. For example Nvidia RTX 3080 or the big fat RTX 3090 graphics card. Whatever is discussed here is based on more than assumption than on actual testing.
M1 Max vs RTX 3080
M1 Max will feature two variations, one with 10 Core CPU & 24 Core GPU. The second one with 10 Core CPU & 32 Core GPU. 32GB and 64GB unified memory options are also available. Based on some benchmarking reports M1 Max 24 Core GPU can deliver 7 to 7.8 TF while 32 Core can burn up to 10.4TF. These are not exact results as more testing is underway. But it is really surprising to see such raw GPU power compiled into a thin model.
RTX 3080 Ti is capable of drawing power up to 30 to 34 TFlops. This gives an approx estimate that M1 Max is not near enough to beat RTX 3080 or the Ti model. It is a vague comparison but it does help us to analyze what Apple is planning out in the coming future. They are already on the path of making their models strong enough to take down the more extreme hardware on the market inside a small form. Both M1 Max and RTX 3080 are two different categories to compare, yet the power, the tech they utilize to deliver results are nearly similar. M1 Max is designed to deliver up to 400GB/s of memory bandwidth, twice than M1 Pro. This plays a vital role in the overall performance of the system.
RTX 3080 Ti is capable enough to beat the performance of PS5. But not alone, it requires a really powerful processor and overall hardware setup. PS5 features a 3.5Ghz AMD Ryzen Zen 8 Cores processor. It has an RTX GPU that can deliver up to 10.3TFlops. It will be right to say that M1 Max is a chip near enough to compete with PS5 in terms of performance. PS5 features 16GB RAM and an 825GB SSD. In short new Macbook Pro running on M1 Max chip can deliver similar performance to PS5 or beat it with a small margin in terms of output. But when we talk about dedicated hardware like RTX 3080, it is three times more powerful than M1 Max.
What are TFlops?
To measure the power or performance of a processor we use the term GHz (Gigahertz). For testing out Graphic Card performance TFlops (Tera Flops) is used. To give you a clear idea refer to the below definition. It will give you a general overview of how these two measuring units are different and how it’s calculated.
- Gigahertz: GHz is a unit to measure cycles per second. Where Hertz or Hz is is cycle per second. 1 Mhz is 1,000,000 Hz and 1 GHz is 1000 Mhz.
- TFlops: Flops stands for floating-point operations per second. If a GPU has a power of 6 TFlops it means it can handle 6 trillion floating-point calculations every second.
