On the GPU side we have a 16-core design in the M1 Pro, which goes up to 32 cores in the M1 Max (which is offered in a more expensive version of the same laptop).

The Firestorm cores are clocked up to 3.2 GHz and the Icestorm cores hit 2.1 GHz, though this depends on the amount of load in the system and all-core workloads drop those clocks by a few hundred MHz. At the heart of this processor are a maximum of 10 CPU cores, split into 8 high performance Firestorm cores and 2 efficient Icestorm cores in a hybrid design. That doesn't mean it's better, it just goes about things in a different way. The Apple M1 Pro is a very different SoC design to the chips we normally review because it uses the Arm architecture family instead of x86. With hype there's often overhype and certainly a lot of fanboyism, including taking Apple's in-house benchmarks as gospel, so we'll see how warranted all of that is today. This is going to be interesting because it's fair to say there's a lot of hype around Apple M1 silicon and its supposed desktop-destroying performance. we mean running a wide range of real-world multi-platform applications and comparing performance across the best laptop chips available today, all run under fair and equivalent conditions. In fact, we won't be running Geekbench at all. And by properly comparing, we don't mean running Geekbench and calling it a day. So this review is all about benchmarking the new M1 Pro and properly comparing it to the best x86-based CPUs we have today from AMD and Intel. A few weeks ago we bought a new Apple MacBook Pro 16 powered by the M1 Pro SoC, and have been putting it through its paces ever since. Today we're taking our benchmarking to places it's never been before with an in-depth look at an Apple Silicon product.

Apple photos review