Shortly after the launch of Apple's Mac Studio, we saw a bunch of M1 Ultra chip benchmarks. These range from comparisons with the 28-core Intel Mac Pro to a comprehensive set of Macworld tests. This new set of tests is not only designed to see how the M1 Ultra and M1 Max compare in real-world use but also to perform tasks specifically recommended by Pro users of professional applications…
Background
With the launch of the Mac Studio, Apple also released a new Apple Silicon chip, the M1 Ultra. This is effectively two M1 Max chips in one. Our first glimpse of how powerful the M1 Ultra chip is when Geekbench tests show it's more powerful than the highest-spec CPU available in the Intel Mac Pro.
"The 28-core Intel Xeon W-3275M processor is the best processor in the Mac Pro, with a multi-core score of 19951. This means the M1 Ultra is about 20% faster than the most expensive CPU available for the Intel Mac Pro."
Macworld ran a very comprehensive set of benchmarks, which showed that the advantages of high-end chips vary widely, with ProRes videographers seeing the biggest improvements.
"If you're interested in video codecs like ProRes and H.265, having double the accelerators in Ultra is a huge performance boost. If you care about photo editors, single-core performance on both models Pretty much the same, which means there are cheaper versions to choose from. However, if you do need to do heavier photo work, the Ultra's higher memory limit can come in handy. Again, recognize what your workflow requires, and then do make appropriate choices.”
M1 Ultra Actual Use Benchmarks
What Engadget does is try to make its own tests as realistic as possible. To ensure this, it asks readers what demanding tasks they perform most often so that it can benchmark the M1 Max and M1 Ultra specifically for high-end PCs when it comes to real-world usage examples.
"The M1 Ultra fuses two M1 Max chips together to provide a processor with 20 CPU cores and 64 GPU cores, and up to 128GB of RAM, it's one of the fastest processors we've tested.
We asked what tests you'd like to run on the M1 Ultra, and we've put together a lot of lists, including Adobe Lightroom and Premiere Pro, Davinci Resolve and Fusion, Blender 3D modeling, and machine learning tests like TensorFlow and Pytorch, and even some games. "
It concluded that, yes, the M1 Ultra is indeed twice as fast as the M1 Max when it comes to CPU-intensive tasks. For heavy use of the GPU, the improvement is less dramatic, but still generally in the 40%-80% improvement range.
Unsurprisingly, it echoes Macworld's conclusion that heavy-duty video rendering is where the M1 Ultra really shines.
“The M1 Ultra performs best when its hardware accelerators can kick in. These are the parts of the chip that are built to accelerate specific tasks, namely video rendering and AI processing. In a test that processed ten 8K video clips at a time, the M1 Ultra performed well at It did the job in just 29 seconds with its accelerator able to help. It was about twice as fast as the PC tested, which has a 16-core AMD 5950X processor and an Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti graphics card.”
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