Apple Inc. held a new fall conference. At this event, in addition to releasing the new generation of TWS headphones AirPods3 and 16/14-inch MacBook Pro, Apple also reintroduced two chips – M1 Pro and M1 Max. They are upgraded versions of Apple’s M1 chip released in November 2020, with greater improvements over the M1 The chips have undergone a major upgrade in terms of memory support and graphics processing power.
In the CPU section, both the M1 Pro and M1 Max feature a 10-core CPU with eight high-performance HXs and two high-performance HXs, which is said to have a 70% performance boost compared to the M1. In terms of memory, the M1 Pro ZG can support 32GB of memory, and the M1 Max can support 64GB of memory. In addition, the M1 Pro uses a ZG16-core GPU, which provides twice the graphics performance of the M1, and the M1 Max uses a ZG32-core GPU, which provides four times the performance of the M1. Apple specifically mentions that discrete graphics cards consume a lot of power and add to the noise of the entire machine, while the M1 Max’s GPU provides the same performance while consuming 70% less power.
However, M1 Pro and M1 Max do not use a more advanced process, the same as M1 is still 5nm process. The process upgrade may be adopted in the next generation M2 chip. Apple may launch the next generation M2 chip next year.
In November 2020 Apple released its own chip M1 chip, which is used in some Mac and iPad devices. This year’s fall new product launch again pushed the same upgraded version, showing that Apple’s self-research the series of chips increasingly solid. However, Intel CEO Kissinger said recently that he still hopes to win back Apple as a customer.
“Apple’s chip is doing very well, so what I want to do is to design a chip more YX than Apple. Over time, I hope to win back that part of their business as well as many others.” Kissinger said. Kissinger also said the other option is for Apple to turn over its self-designed chips to Intel for OEM. Apple’s Mac lineup has been using chips made by Intel since 2005, but Apple began switching to using chips designed in-house last year.