Apple Announces M1 Pro and M1 Max With Support For Up to 64GB Unified Memory, Multi-Monitor Support, More

BY Rajesh Pandey

Published 18 Oct 2021

Apple today announced its newest Apple Silicon chips, the M1 Pro and M1 Max. The M1 Pro is based on the 5nm fabrication process and packs 33.7 billion transistors.

The memory bandwidth has been increased to 200GB/s, with up to 32GB unified memory support. The 10-core CPU inside the M1 Pro is 70 percent faster than the M1, with the 16-core GPU offering 2x faster performance than the first Apple Silicon.

“M1 has transformed our most popular systems with incredible performance, custom technologies, and industry-leading power efficiency. No one has ever applied a system-on-a-chip design to a pro system until today with M1 Pro and M1 Max. With massive gains in CPU and GPU performance, up to six times the memory bandwidth, a new media engine with ProRes accelerators, and other advanced technologies, M1 Pro and M1 Max take Apple silicon even further, and are unlike anything else in a pro notebook.” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies.

M1 Pro

The new chip can also natively encode/decode ProRes to offer even better video editing performance.

Unlike the M1 chip, the M1 Pro supports multiple displays, additional Thunderbolt controllers to deliver additional bandwidth, and more.

M1 Max

Additionally, Apple also announced the M1 Max packing a whopping 57 billion transistors with a bandwidth of 400GB/s and support for up to 64GB unified memory. It is up to 2x times faster than the M1 Pro, with the 32-core GPU 4x times faster than the M1.

Apple claims the M1 Max offers the best performance-per-watt and consumes 70 percent less power than Intel chips to deliver even better performance.

Apple has also optimised macOS for Apple Silicon, with ML performance 3x times faster than Intel-based Macs. The company claimed that over 10,000 universal Apple Silicon-optimised apps are now available on the Mac App Store.

The new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips will be available inside the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro.