M1 Max and M1 Pro Put MacBook Pro Memory Bandwidth and GPU Power in a New Class for Laptops

Apple's new MacBook Pro laptops, built around the M1 Max and M1 Pro chips, have started reaching customers who preordered them online. The first batch of stock sold out quickly, and for some configurations the shipping estimates now stretch into December. Anyone who held off ordering until the reviews came in is now looking at a wait.

The review BGR points to as the most useful for performance-minded buyers comes from AnandTech, which examined the CPU, memory, and GPU of the new chips and concentrated on the top-end M1 Max. BGR's own read of that analysis is that the laptops outperform rival Intel and AMD machines in most areas, beat desktop-grade PCs in some, and in certain tests approach server-class configurations.

Start with the CPU, which is the part that did not change much. AnandTech says Apple kept the design close to the original M1. Both new chips carry eight Firestorm performance cores and two Icestorm efficiency cores, with a peak clock of 3228 MHz that shifts depending on how many cores are working at once.

The memory is where the first big jump shows up. The M1 Pro uses a 256-bit LPDDR5 interface running at 6400MT/s, which works out to 204GB/s of bandwidth. The original M1 managed 68GB/s, and AnandTech notes that competing laptop platforms still rely on 128-bit interfaces. The M1 Max doubles the Pro's interface to 512 bits wide, which AnandTech describes as unheard of in an SoC and rare even among historical discrete GPU designs. That yields 408GB/s of bandwidth. A separate passage in the review puts the figure at 400GB/s, or technically 409.6GB/s, and compares it to what Nvidia's fastest laptop parts offer. That interface is four times the width of the original M1's 128-bit one. Scaling LPDDR this way has always been possible, the reviewers say, but nobody had done it in a consumer SoC.

The GPU is the second major upgrade, and the memory design feeds directly into it. In the GPU section, the AnandTech team writes that no PC processor has ever shipped with so powerful a GPU integrated into the main SoC. The review reports large gains for content creation and productivity workloads that rely on GPU acceleration.

There is one caveat. Gaming remains a weak spot for the MacBook Pro, though the review attributes that not to any shortage of GPU power but to the limited availability of games on macOS, which leaves Mac gamers at a disadvantage.

AnandTech's conclusion is emphatic. The M1 Pro and M1 Max, it says, change the narrative completely, and feel like SoCs designed with power users in mind. The reviewers say they expected large performance jumps but not some of the monstrous increases they measured. On memory, they say Apple scaled the subsystem to dimensions never seen before, producing results nobody considered possible in a laptop chip. By their account the chips beat any competing laptop and challenge the best desktops, and only server-class hardware could get ahead of the M1 Max, which they call generally absurd.

The review also argues that Apple knows who its typical MacBook Pro power users are and built the silicon around workloads where Macs excel. It cites the combination of raw performance, unique acceleration, and power efficiency as something no other platform currently offers, which in AnandTech's view makes the new MacBook Pros not just the best laptops but the best devices for those tasks. BGR adds that this makes life harder for Intel and its campaign against the MacBook.

For buyers, the practical question is twofold: which chip fits their workload, and whether gaming matters to them given the macOS software gap. Those who order now should expect some waits.