Last week, as planned, the Cupertino-based company announced the renewal of the range iMac with new colors, the Mac Mini and the MacBook Pro. All of these models include Apple’s new M4 processor with ARM architecture, the same architecture used by Apple processors. Qualcomm.
Although the community of users who use Macs is much smaller than those behind Windows, Apple spares no effort when designing them to offer maximum performance, with the M4 Max being the latest example.
Apple M4 Max: the most powerful processor on the market
Apple’s announcement with the launch of its first processor with ARM architecture M1 in 2020, marked a change in architecture going from x86 to ARM, a change that has not been seen in Windows PCs until 2024 with the new Qualcomm processors.
Although it is true that there were already Qualcomm processors with this architecture on the market, the performance they offered was very poor and could not be compared with the alternatives from Intel and amd of the market.
With the launch of the M4 Max, Apple has demonstrated its extensive experience in developing processors and once again surpasses both Intel and AMD.
The most powerful variant of Apple’s M4 Max processor features 16 cores of CPU (12 high performance + 4 efficiency), has 40 GPU cores and supports up to 128 GB of unified memory shared between the processor and the graphics card.
The processors with which the performance of the new Apple M4 Max has been compared are:
- Intel Core Ultra 9 285K
- AMD Ryzen 9 9950X
- Snapdragon X Elite with 12 cores
Apple’s M4 Max processor has 19% better performance in the single-core test than Intel Core Ultra 9 285Kwhile the test with several cores the improvement reaches 16%.
As for the AMD Ryzen 9 9950Xthe M4 offers 18% more performance in the single-core test and 25% in the multi-core test.
He Snapdragon X Elite Qualcomm with 12 cores, falls far below the performance of both the Intel and Apple processors and even below the M3 Max.
Apple’s new processor not only offers better performance than the two highest-end processors from both Intel and AMD, but it also does so with much lower consumption.
Improvements compared to the M3 Max
If you have an Apple computer managed by the Apple M3 Max, you should know that, unlike what you might think at first, the performance improvement is impressive, since the M4 Max in the single-core test scored 4,060 points, which represents a 30% improvement compared to its predecessor. In the multi-core test, the improvement is 27%.
M4 Max price
Apple only offers the M4 Max processor within the MacBook Pro range. The cheapest entry model with 14 CPU cores and 32 GPU cores of this laptop is 3,849 euros and includes 36 GB of unified memory and 1 TB of SSD storage.
If we opt for the most expensive model, the one with 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores and accompanied by 128 GB of unified memory and 8 TB of storage, the price rises to 8,104 euros.
