We’ve now tested every version of Apple’s M1 processor, from the first M1 chip in the 13-inch Macbook Pro to the M1 Ultra in the new Mac Studio, and the chip’s ability to scale performance is decent. incredible. The M1 Ultra fuses two M1 Max chips together to give you a processor with 20 CPU cores and 64 GPU cores, along with up to 128GB of RAM, and it’s one of the fastest processors we’ve ever tested.
We asked which tests you’d like to see on the M1 Ultra and gathered quite a list, including Adobe Lightroom and Premiere Pro, Davinci Resolve and Fusion, 3D modeling in Blender, machine learning tests like TensorFlow and Pytorch, and even some gaming .
Amazingly, the M1 Ultra really seems to be about twice as fast as the M1 Max in most applications. Whatever overhead is required to shuffle data around such a large chip, it rarely affects CPU performance. The GPU scaling doesn’t work very well. The M1 Ultra was typically 40-80% faster than the M1 Max, still fast, but not quite as impressive in scale as the CPU.
The M1 Ultra does best when its hardware accelerators can kick in. These are the parts of the chip that are built to speed up specific tasks, namely video rendering and AI processing. In a test that processed ten 8K video clips at once, the M1 Ultra did the job in just 29 seconds when its accelerators were able to help. This was about twice as fast as the PC we were testing, despite having a 16-core AMD 5950X processor and an Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti graphics card.
Apple’s M1 ecosystem sometimes feels unfinished. There were more strange bugs than I expected, and software compatibility can still be an issue, but it’s improving quickly. The M1 Ultra wasn’t always faster than my PC, but in some tests it was two or three times faster, and in only a few cases was it significantly slower. If you’re using Apple and need a high-end desktop, there’s really no decision, and for anyone looking for a workstation, the M1 Ultra Mac Studio is a contender.
Watch the video above for full details of our testing.
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