Apple has announced the new M1 Pro and M1 Max variation of the Apple Silicon M1 Chip for the new 14′ and 16′ MacBook Pro.
The CPU in M1 Pro and M1 Max delivers up to 70 percent faster CPU performance than M1, so tasks like compiling projects in Xcode are faster than ever. 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
M1 Pro offers up to 200GB/s of memory bandwidth with support for up to 32GB of unified memory. 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.
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.
Wow, this is certainly more pro than the M1 was, though you do have to deal with the Mac Premium for the high end versions, especially the 64GB M1 Max, but I will talk about that in the next article on the new MacBooks. And if the stats they showed for DaVinci play out, not only will a non portable machine be very impressive (though likely expensive) the inclusion of ProRES accelerators is awesome (though also makes PCI slots seem less and less likely).