With the launch of the new Macs, Apple has surprised many users with its new M1 chip. The fact of uniting the CPU, the GPU and the Neural Engine under an ARM architecture has improved the consumption but above all the power, leaving Intel totally in evidence. The first benchmarks are already being made public and this time the GPUs have been analyzed obtaining a surprising result, taking the starting point as a reference.
The GPU of the M1 chip surprises in this comparison
Tom’s Hardware has performed these tests using the GFXBench 5.0 tool. Apple’s Metal API was run to perform these tests and the results are more than good. In short, the M1 chip has outperformed dedicated GeForce GTX 1050 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 560 graphics cards . The results show that the GPU built into the M1 chip has outperformed all other dedicated GPUs.
In the following table you can see the different tests carried out and when measuring the number of FPS in all cases an advantage has been obtained. The only difference is seen in the ‘Aztec Ruins High Tier’ replay test where the Radeon RX 560 is outperformed by a few FPS. This shows that the rendering capabilities have exceeded all expectations.
It must be borne in mind when making these comparisons that both the Nvidia and AMD GPUs are already somewhat old, from 3 years ago, and are not the top of the range of the company. But this does not detract from the credibility of the study since we talk that the GPU of the new 13 ″ MacBook Pro with M1 chip is integrated and not dedicated. This has important implications since the size of the chip is not the same and neither is the consumption of resources.
The two graphics cards with which they have been compared have a consumption of 75W something that obviously the battery of a laptop could not assimilate in the long term. With the size of the M1 chip and its consumption, it is undoubtedly splendid. Especially from the starting point with the GPU integrated in old Macs with Intel technology, now it has been possible to have a good result in these new computers.
Today the design of the GPU of Apple’s M1 chip is a real mystery . They have not wanted to reveal how they have achieved such a milestone in technology and that it is a simple beginning for everything that is to come in the next generations. The only thing that they have made public is that it has eight cores that can handle 25,000 threads simultaneously, something essential to be able to render properly. In addition, the performance has also been encrypted at 2.6 teraflops which is undoubtedly a value that may escape the understanding of many users.
The CPU has also been put to the test
If we talk about the CPU, the first benchmarks in Cinebench R23 have also left a good taste in the mouth. With this software a performance test has been performed for a longer period of time. The score obtained in multi-core has been 7508 and in the case of speaking in single-core it is 1498. In this case, if compared with the CPU manufactured by Intel of the eleventh generation, practically the same performance is obtained.
If compared to other computers, it should be noted that it has obtained a lower score than that collected in a 16 ″ MacBook Pro from 2019. Specifically, 8818 points were collected, with this having the highest possible configuration. Obviously in these cases we must also take into account the price difference that exists between a Mac with the maximum processor and a Mac with an M1 chip.
