Apple launches M1 Pro, M1 Max chips with improved performance

According to the firm, the GPU in M1 Pro is up to 2x faster than M1, while M1 Max is up to an astonishing 4x faster than M1, allowing pro users to fly through the most demanding graphics workflows.

"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," Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of Hardware Technologies, said in a statement.

The M1 Pro and M1 Max introduce a system-on-a-chip (SoC) architecture to pro systems for the first time.

The M1 Pro has an up-to-16-core GPU that is up to 2x faster than M1 and up to 7x faster than the integrated graphics on the latest 8-core PC laptop chip.

It offers up to 200GB/s of memory bandwidth with support for up to 32GB of unified memory.

The M1 Max delivers up to 400GB/s of memory bandwidth - 2x that of M1 Pro and nearly 6x that of M1 - and support for up to 64GB of unified memory.

They also feature enhanced media engines with dedicated ProRes accelerators specifically for pro video processing. 

The M1 Pro and M1 Max are by far the most powerful chips Apple has ever built.

M1 Pro also includes dedicated acceleration for the ProRes professional video codec, allowing playback of multiple streams of high-quality 4K and 8K ProRes video while using very little power. M1 Max goes even further, delivering up to 2x faster video  encoding than M1 Pro, and features two ProRes accelerators.