[mrtksn]

The single core is second to Intel's best but the multicore is well below in the scale, comparable to Intel Xeon W-2191B or Intel Core i9-10920X, which are 18 and 12 core beasts with TDP of up to 165W.

Which means, at least for Geekbench, Apple M1 Max has a power comparable to a very powerful desktop workstation. But if you need the absolute best of the best on multicore you can get double the performance with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X at 280W TDP!

Can you imagine if Apple released some beast with similar TDP? 300W Apple M1 Unleashed, the trashcan design re-imagined, with 10X power of M1 Max if can preserve similar performance per watt. That would be 5X over the best of the best.

If Apple made an iMac Pro with similar TDP to the Intel one, and keeps the performance per watt, that would mean multicore score of about 60K, which is twice of the best processor there is in the X86 World.

I suspect, these scores don't tell the full story since the Apple SoC has specialised units for processing certain kind of data and they have direct access to the data in the memory and as a result it could be unmatched by anything but at the same time it can be comically slow for some other type of processes where X86 shines.

[sudhirj]

John Siracusa had a diagram linked here that shows the die for M1 Max, and says the ultimate desktop version is basically 4 M1 Max packages. If true, that’s a 40 core CPU 128 core GPU beast, and then we can compare to the desktop 280W Ryzens.

[moreira]

Interestingly, the M1 Max is only a 10 core (of which only 8 are high performance). I wonder what it will look like when it’s a 20-core, or even a 64-core like the Threadripper. Imagine a 64-core M1 on an iMac or Mac Pro.

We’re in for some fun times.

[spacedcowboy]

John Siracusa - no the chart isn't real, but maybe qualify that with "yet"...

https://twitter.com/siracusa/status/1450202454067400711

[kzrdude]

Hm, related to that reply https://twitter.com/lukeburrage/status/1450216654202343425

Is this a yield trick, that one is the "chopped" part of another? So they'll bin failed M1Max ones as M1Pro, if possible?

[GeekyBear]

Bloomberg's Gurman certainly has shown that he has reliable sources inside Apple over the years.

>Codenamed Jade 2C-Die and Jade 4C-Die, a redesigned Mac Pro is planned to come in 20 or 40 computing core variations, made up of 16 high-performance or 32 high-performance cores and four or eight high-efficiency cores. The chips would also include either 64 core or 128 core options for graphics.

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/05/18/bloomberg-mac-pro-32-hi...

So right in line with the notion of the Mac Pro getting an SOC that has the resources of either 2 or 4 M1 Pros glued together.