The 16-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Max chip will have a High Power Mode

[midian182]

In brief: Apple spent a lot of time during its recent Unleashed event talking about the incredible power of its latest M1 Max-powered MacBook Pros. The company has now confirmed that in the 16-inch version of its laptop packing the chip, there will be a “High Power Mode” to get the absolute best performance from the SoC.

MacRumors contributor Steve Moser was the first to discover references to a High Power Mode in the beta of Apple’s upcoming Monterey OS. When enabled, the feature will “optimize performance to better support resource-intensive tasks” and “may result in louder fan noise.”

Found more information on the high power power mode in the macOS RC: “Your Mac will optimize performance to better support resource-intensive tasks. This may result in louder fan noise.” https://t.co/4q3zlbyLnf pic.twitter.com/0mKVekGa0M

— Steve Moser (@SteveMoser) October 19, 2021

Apple has now confirmed to MacRumors that High Power Mode will be part of Monterey, which is arriving alongside the new MacBook Pro 14- and 16-inch laptops. The feature will, however, only be present in the 16-inch model paired with an M1 Max chip—not the smaller laptop or any with an M1 Pro/M1. That combination starts at $3,499.00 and goes all the way to $6,099 when maxing out the specs.

Apple made some bold claims about the M1 Max’s performance during the Unleashed event, including it using 70 percent less power compared to Intel’s Core i7-11800H octa-core CPU while achieving 1.7x more performance. It’s also comparable to the highest-end GPU in the largest PC laptops yet consumes up to 100 watts less power. Whether High Power Mode is what enables these stats or if it adds even more performance to the M1 Max remains to be seen.

The M1 Max features the same 10-core CPU as the M1 Pro while upping the GPU core count to 32—four times more than the original M1. It boasts 57 billion transistors, making the SoC the biggest chip Apple has ever made.

You can watch all of Apple's Unleashed event right here.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/91890-16-inch-macbook-pro-m1-max-chip-have.html

 

[VitalyT]

Wake-up-the-dead mode, requires purchase of AirPods Max, to beat the noise.

 

[Dimitriid]

Now you know the reason Apple lately loves their meaningless graphs almost with no axis legends or easy to see points of solid data: Lies, lies and more f*cking lies, in this case a big one by omission: wouldn't be surprised if the magical 21 hours of battery on video playback gets reduced to 2 to 4 hours of actual work that involves the GPU because no: these chips are not magic, they're just ARM chips. We know how much power they use and we know how much power a modern GPU uses they're not going to just beat out Nvidia and AMD on their first try.

 

[VaRmeNsI]

Now you know the reason Apple lately loves their meaningless graphs almost with no axis legends or easy to see points of solid data: Lies, lies and more f*cking lies, in this case a big one by omission: wouldn't be surprised if the magical 21 hours of battery on video playback gets reduced to 2 to 4 hours of actual work that involves the GPU because no: these chips are not magic, they're just ARM chips. We know how much power they use and we know how much power a modern GPU uses they're not going to just beat out Nvidia and AMD on their first try.

They aren't entirely pointless if they're just good enough to part money from fools.

 

[Squid Surprise]

Now you know the reason Apple lately loves their meaningless graphs almost with no axis legends or easy to see points of solid data: Lies, lies and more f*cking lies, in this case a big one by omission: wouldn't be surprised if the magical 21 hours of battery on video playback gets reduced to 2 to 4 hours of actual work that involves the GPU because no: these chips are not magic, they're just ARM chips. We know how much power they use and we know how much power a modern GPU uses they're not going to just beat out Nvidia and AMD on their first try.

While I agree they aren't going to be beating Nvidia and AMD... this isn't their first try... they've been making their own CPUs for quite some time now...

 

[DZillaXx]

While I agree they aren't going to be beating Nvidia and AMD... this isn't their first try... they've been making their own CPUs for quite some time now...

Pretty sure he meant first try at a scaled up design.

Apple Clearly hasn't made a GPU or CPU on this scale before.

The MAX has a pretty decent GPU Core count, but I too don't think they are getting anything like Nvidia and AMD performance per Watt. If anything I think they are closer to Intel's upcoming GPU chips in regards to Performance per Watt. And Sadly I'm fully expecting the GPU in the MAX to be quite power limited, atleast in laptop form. As even Nvidia's GPU's in this range will use a fair amount of power. I fully expect the Macbook Pro with the M1 Max to target upto 120watts of power when plugged in.

The M1's Firestorm Cores while architecturally being little more efficient than AMD's Zen 3 at best, greatly benefits from node advantage as well as having high efficiency cores for most light task loads. That and overall hardware and software configurations. In Pure high workload performance, without accelerators just pure CPU brute force. We already seen from the M1 that it really still only competes with other lower powered Intel/Ryzen chips. But these are not workloads that most need, M1 excels in devices like the Macbook Air. Where web browsing is the most demanding workload.

ARM is not magic, nor is Apple's Chips. But they do show how far behind Intel has fallen, in the same way AMD has shown how far Intel has fallen behind. Intel and AMD both focus on where the money is, the Data Center. This has been evident for years now.

Apple's Mac Division is overall a pretty small fry, and the effort apple has been putting toward switching them over to ARM is in itself amazing. The M1 Pro and Max are going to be such low volume options, It's hard to see how they are saving money here.

AMD nor Intel have even cared to designed a cutting edge low power usage chip. There just isn't much money in that compared to Data centers wanting Huge scaled up designs.

 

[Guberian]

Running CSGO on my m1 macbook pro already causes it to act like a intel mac in terms of noise.

 

[Dimitriid]

Apple's Mac Division is overall a pretty small fry, and the effort apple has been putting toward switching them over to ARM is in itself amazing. The M1 Pro and Max are going to be such low volume options, It's hard to see how they are saving money here.

AMD nor Intel have even cared to designed a cutting edge low power usage chip. There just isn't much money in that compared to Data centers wanting Huge scaled up designs.

This part is key imo: if we look at the overall business strategy, their decision to switch to their own ARM based silicon doesn't necessarily follows an intrinsic need for more performance or even more efficiency. Primarily, the decision is born out of taking more strategic advantage of the enormous investment they have on their ARM silicon for their number 1 selling products, their bread and butter: iphones.

By being able to integrate the rest of their product stack on the same technology they put so much effort to develop for the phones they're able to basically make a lot more money than they would otherwise by just sourcing intel and AMD tech instead and that's why they're winning, even if it's seems like a lot of effort to reinvent a desktop OS to work well on ARM.

The rest as you and I have pointed out, is basically just marketing: they know the chips are efficient so they go ahead and milk that as much as possible but if their processor or gpu tech was truly revolutionary they would have started with the desktop version already beyond the very basic new imac and imac minis. It makes sense however, that they just take the strong points from their phones which is very good performance per watt, and use that to promote first their tablets and now their laptop products.

 

[bexwhitt]

As the notch will be in the top bar and the aspect ratio means in full screen video mostly they will be below it's less of an annoyance than on a phone. Expect lots of dart top bars on macs though.