Apple's M1 Max Benchmarked in Adobe Premiere Pro: A Mixed Bag

Apple's M1 Max Benchmarked in Adobe Premiere Pro: A Mixed Bag(tomshardware.com)

7 points by soylentnewsorg 4 years ago | 3 comments

This is very much clickbait, somehow the author of that article expected that a mobile 65W SoC could come close to discrete NVidia or AMD desktop GPUs that consume 100s of Watts. I don't think Apple is going to use the M1 Max/Pro SoCs as a basis for "Pro" desktop systems.

From the article:

"The new M1 Max SoC can also compete very well against standalone mobile GPUs, namely the GeForce RTX 3060 and RTX 3080 (which seems strangely slow in this benchmark), in Premier Pro while consuming much less power. But Apple's new integrated GPU cannot get close to performance levels offered by desktop discrete graphics cards, something that Apple needs for its Mac Pro workstations."

soylentnewsorg 4 years ago | |

The reason he compares it to desktops, is because the only thing in the performance test that's comparable, is the desktops. The M1 system tested had double the RAM of the Intel systems. For processing video, RAM makes a huge difference. If your editor can store all the decompressed clips and cache in RAM, your performance increases exponentially. In addition, the "live playback" score is weighed heavily for some reason, when that's an easy test all systems can perform fine, and is not timed.

It's not clickbait, because the article literally tells you both the positives and negatives, as well as titling it "mixed bag" instead of "apple loses." We call this a balanced review.

But I get it. Anything that's not "m1 is revolutionary" is clickbait to the apple crowd.

soylentnewsorg 4 years ago |

"While performance of the new M1 Max-based MacBook Pro in Adobe Premiere Pro looks very good compared to the previous-generation MBP with discrete graphics, it doesn't look that good compared to x86 workstation platforms with standalone graphics processors."

This is the big takeaway. All of Apple's comparisons are to their own previous hardware, which was about a year behind the competition. In addition, if you look at Geekbench scores of the M1 Max, those include a lot of tests that use the GPU. When the tests are run against the competition, they are artificially lowered by running the test on the default low power integrated graphics, instead of specifying the discreet GPU.

In reality, the M1 is not a pro laptop as the industry defines "pro." It is only a pro laptop compared to Apple's other offerings, and competes with mid-tier laptops from everyone else.