While it’s only been about six months since Apple introduced the M1 Pro and M1 Max SoCs that would power the 16-inch and 14-inch MacBook Pro, the architecture within those chips can trace its roots back another full year to the dawn of Apple Silicon in the Mac mini’s M1 processor. This is when Cupertino left behind Intel and its x86 processors to roll its own Mac-focused chips, based on its legacy of high-performance mobile SoCs that had been found in the iPhone and iPad line-ups. By and large, it delivered outstanding performance in both single-threaded and multi-threaded loads, especially when considering overall system power draw.
We closed out our MacBook Pro review with a warning: Alder Lake mobile processors were coming soon. The desktop version had already blasted through our benchmark sweet, notching a number of clear victories, and we had a pretty good idea that Intel could do the same thing in the mobile space. In fact, that definitely came to pass as laptops with 12th-gen Core processors generally offer outstanding performance. Chipzilla proved it could get its hybrid architecture to scale down to much lower power envelopes, and that put a lot of pressure on Apple.
Enter The Mac Studio
Back in March, the company surprised the world with the announcement of the Mac Studio, a small but mighty desktop for pro content creators and those who, like me, daydream of being pros. It comes in a couple of configurations, all more or less based on the M1 Max SoC. The base model is pretty similar to high-end MacBooks, but the M1 Ultra also made its debut. Built from a pair of M1 Max chips tethered together by a high-speed interconnect, this processor represents Apple’s current cutting edge processing platform.
Read more at HotHardware.com