Apple on Monday unveiled the new M1 Pro and M1 Max silicon chips, which are two to four times more powerful than the M1 and use less power than most PC laptop silicon.
New Apple MacBook Pro M1 Pro & M1 Max – Official Trailer
Monday’s Apple keynote gave us our first look at the new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors, with the latter earning the (self-proclaimed) title of Apple’s biggest, most powerful chip yet. Both aim to deliver significantly more performance compared to the current M1 models by scaling up the processing architecture. They also claim to deliver nearly twice the performance of some PC laptop chips while consuming up to 70% less power.
The M1 Pro utilizes a 16-core GPU with 32GB of unified memory, offering up to 200GB per second of memory bandwidth and up to twice the GPU performance of current M1 chips. The M1 Max, as you might expect from the name, offers even more of both. Specifically, the M1 Max utilizes a 32-core GPU with up to 400GB per second of memory bandwidth and four times the GPU performance of current M1 processors. Both chips appear to be more power hungry than currently available M1 models, but appear to be less taxing when compared to most PC laptop counterparts.
According to Apple, most official and third-party apps are already designed to work with the M1 chip, so you shouldn’t have any issues upgrading to the M1 Pro or M1 Max. The software you use should continue to run just fine, or even better thanks to the improved performance. If not, there’s always Rosetta 2, which helps apps that are still optimized for Intel silicon run on the new Macs.