As we will show in this article, the 1st generation of Apple Silicon powered Macs were impressive, but Apple always made it clear that they were entry-level machines. Now that we have started to see what the 2nd generation Apple Silicon computers for professionals can do, there is no doubt in our minds that they are awesome.
A Brief History Of Apple Silicon To Date
At the virtual WWDC conference in June 2020, Apple announced their plan to move away from using Intel processors and to develop their own Arm-based System on a Chip, which brings together the central Processor unit (CPU), Graphics Processor Unit (GPU) and Random Access Memory (RAM all onto one chip which has huge performance benefits and something Apple has been doing on the mobile devices for some time, which became known as Apple Silicon. The plan included moving every Mac model over from Intel to Apple Silicon in 2 years.
The first Apple Silicon production models were announced in November 2020, when Apple released 3 entry-level, 1st-gen machines, a MacBook Air, a 13-ich MacBook Pro and a Mac mini. All 3 1st-gen Apple Macs came equipped with the same 8-core M1 chip that also offered an integrated GPU and integrated unified memory, which means that the memory (what we used to call RAM) is shared between the CPU and GPU cores, Apple explains…
“[It] means that the GPU and CPU are working over the same memory. Graphics resources, such as textures, images and geometry data, can be shared between the CPU and GPU efficiently, with no overhead, as there's no need to copy data across a PCIe bus.”
This means that although the performance is improved over discrete GPUs, the shared memory may throttle some graphically intense applications.
The base MacBook Air shipped with an M1 chip with a 7-core GPU, with an option to select an 8 core GPU with the MacBook Pro and Mac mini both having the M1 chip with an 8-core GPU, with options to select 8GB of unified memory or 16GB. But by the very nature that it is all on the one chip these machines were inherently not upgradable later on.
Just as in Apple’s last processor transition, because it was not possible to have every piece of software that can run on a Mac coded for the Apple Silicon chips, Apple developed Rosetta 2 which enabled Intel coded software to run on Apple Silicon without any recoding with Rosetta 2 doing the translation on installation and when necessary Rosetta 2 able to translate code on the fly when using Just In Time and JAVA code.
To help us understand the way Apple Silicon would change everything, we asked a developer to help us to explain the impact of Apple Silicon on the Pro Audio sector. We ordered an M1 MacBook Pro wth 16GB of unfied memory to better understand what it could and couldn’t do.
Apple M1 Tested On Logic Pro
Just over a week after Apple announced the 3 new M1 powered Mac computers we published our first test, using Apple’s Logic Pro X, Apple MacBook Pro 13" M1 Audio Power Test - Logic Pro With Space Designer, which like all Apple’s own software, ran natively on the Apple Silicon chips from day 1. We needed an audio benchmark test and Producer and engineer Alan Branch (U2, Primal Scream and a multitude of other acts) messaged us ‘Simple Logic Pro CPU test’.
“Make a new 44.1/48 project with a single audio track & short audio region, insert as many Space Designers as possible then duplicate the track. The key question is how many total Space Designers can it run?"
Even better Alan sent us the project to try. You can download it here and try it for yourself. We got our first indication of what the new Apple Silicon chips could do with the new MacBook Pro M1 able to run over twice as many Space Designers as a fully loaded Intel MacBook Pro i9!
You can learn more about our Logic Pro X test in this article Apple MacBook Pro 13" M1 Audio Power Test - Logic Pro With Space Designer.
Apple M1 Tested On Pro Tools
Over the last few years, we've run our Pro Tools power test benchmark session, which although not completely perfect, has become the benchmark we use to see how different computers perform when put under strain on a Pro Tools session.
At the time, neither the computer nor the macOS were approved for use with Pro Tools so we were pushing our luck. However, when we ran the test, we are flabbergasted at the performance we got from Pro Tools running on an unsupported OS, via Rosetta 2 and on a chip, it's not designed for. It even outperformed several higher powered machines, including the Mac Pro 6,1 and the iMac Pro.
Another important point to make for those working in audio, especially same room studios, the M1 Mac wasn’t affected by heat. In our power tests both with Pro Tools and Logic Pro, the temperature of the M1 Mac even under heavy load seldom exceeded 28 degrees C. Conversely on both the MacBook Pro i9 and Mac mini 2018, it wasn't long before the temperature was in the 90s and the fan was generating enough power to take off.
You can learn more about our Pro Tools test in this article Apple MacBook Pro 13" M1 Audio Power Test - Pro Tools.
Apple M1 Tested On Studio One
Lastly, we turned our attention to Studio One from PreSonus. For this, we were not aware of any Studio One benchmark test for power so we created our own, which you can download from here.
The summary of this test is that M1 Mac was able to handle 86 tracks, compared to the MacBook Pro 16" 2019, which could only handle 43 tracks before it became unstable. Remember that at the time, like Pro Tools, Studio One was not supported to run on an M1 Mac or to run on macOS Big Sur either.
Another thing to note, again as has been the case in all our other tests, is that both heat and fan noise were worlds apart. The Intel Mac was running at 99 degrees C when pushed hard, with the fan running hard enough that the machine was likely to take off. The M1 powered Apple Mac didn't rise above 28 degrees C, again the fan was silent and the machine was slightly warm.
You can learn more about our Pro Tools test in this article Apple MacBook Pro M1 Audio Power Test - Studio One.
Why The Apple M1 Chip Is So Fast?
To better understand what was going on here, with the help of developer Erik Engheim, we dug deep into how revolutionary the new Apple Silicon architecture was. For example how the SoC helps…
“For a long time, budget computer systems have had the CPU and GPU integrated into the same chip (same silicon die). In the past saying ‘integrated graphics’ was essentially the same as saying ‘slow graphics’. These were slow for several reasons:
Separate areas of this memory got reserved for the CPU and GPU. If the CPU had a chunk of data it wanted the GPU to use, it couldn’t say “here have some of my memory.” No, the CPU had to explicitly copy the whole chunk of data over the memory area controlled by the GPU.”
To learn more about the M1 Chip architecture check out our article Why The Apple M1 Chip Is So Fast - A Developer Explains.
PreSonus Studio One 5.24 With Apple Silicon Native Support Tested
In September 2021 PreSonus announced Studio One 5.4, which included a host of new features but also includes full native support for Apple Silicon powered Mac computers. We had a preview copy, which enabled us to undertake some tests to establish the difference Apple Silicon makes to a DAW previously coded for Intel.
We ran a demo session provided by PreSonus and see how much CPU usage it took to run this session. The headline was that running via Rosetta 2 on an M1 Mac the session used 27% of the CPU power, whereas when running natively, it used just 16%. The same session, on the same computer, the only difference was whether it was running natively or via Rosetta 2.
You can learn more about our tests and the new features in Studio One 5.4 in our article PreSonus Studio One 5.4 - Apple Silicon Native Gives Impressive Results.
Apple Announce New MacBook Pro Laptops With 2nd Generation Apple Silicon Chips
Then in October 2021, Apple announced 2 new MacBook Pro laptops powered by new second-generation M1 chips, the M1Pro and M1 Max.
With the new Apple Silicon M1 Pro, the CPU part is the same on both chips, with a 10-core processor made up of eight high-performance cores and two energy-efficient cores. The difference is in the GPU part of the SoC. The new 2nd-gen chip has 16 graphics cores. This compares to 8 CPU cores, four high-performance cores and four energy-efficient cores and only 8 graphics cores with 32GB of RAM. The 14-inch model has a screen resolution of 3024 x 1964 pixels and it can support up to 2 external displays as well as the built-in screen.
The second chip is the M1 Max, the CPU part is the same on both chips, with a 10-core processor made up of eight high-performance cores and two energy-efficient cores. The difference is in the GPU part of the SoC. The new 2nd-gen M1 Max chip has 32 graphics cores, whereas the M1 Pro comes with 16 graphics cores. The larger 16-inch model has a resolution of 3456 x 2234 pixels and can support up to 4 external displays as well as the built-in screen.
Compared to the fastest PC laptop Apple could find, the M1 Max uses 100W less power with similar performance with Machine Learning tasks between 3 and 20 times faster than before.
As expected MagSafe makes a welcome return to Apple’s laptops, following it making its iPhone debut with the iPhone 12 release last year. Also, there has been a boost to the charging speed too as the system sees the MagSafe connection as part of the Apple Ecosystem.
To learn more about the 2nd-gen Apple laptops check out our article Apple Announce New MacBook Pros With M1 Pro And M1 Max.
MacBook Pro 2021 - What Do We Think?
3 Production Expert team members, ordered these new Apple Silicon MacBook Pro computers on the day they were announced. Russ Hughes and James Richmond received theirs within 2 weeks. Here are the highlights of their first impressions of the new MacBook Pro…
James chose a 14-inch 10 core M1 Max processor, 64GB of unified memory, 2TB internal storage. This replaces a 2017 15” MacBook Pro with a 3.1 GHz and 16GB RAM. Back in November 2021, he said…
“I’ve installed Logic and Pro Tools and even my most processor-heavy sessions run perfectly. Processor usage is incredibly low. Fan noise is entirely absent. Heat, an issue with the previous Intel-based design, is non-existent. It has enough ports, sensibly adding HDMI and SD card support.”
Russ chose a 14-inch 10 core CPU and 32-core GPU M1 Max processor, 64GB of unified memory, 1TB internal storage, which replaces his 1st-gen MacBook Pro that we used for most of the first batch of M1 tests above. He said…
“It’s built like a pro machine, it looks and feels like the weighty older MacBook Pros we all loved so much, it’s moved away from Apple’s obsession with making everything thinner. This really is substance over style… yes from Apple.
I’ve made a short bullet list of the things that tick the boxes for me that are on these new MacBook Pros.
Modular connections for most ports, every port except HDMI and the SD card
Huge quiet fans - if you ever hear them!
Thunderbolts now has a bus per port - 40GB throughput directly to the SOC
Fast charging - 50% in 30 minutes
Headphone port is louder and you may not need an external headphone DAC
Magsafe means less chance of computer flying across room
The SD card slot for moving data on and off the Mac.
They are REALLY fast!
What do we want in a pro computer? Speed, quiet operation and connectivity. The MacBook Pro has all of these.”
Want to learn more about what James and Russ think of their new Apple Silicon powered MacBook Pro laptops, then check out our article MacBook Pro 2021 With M1 Max - Experts Give Their First Impressions.
Mike Thornton also placed an order on the day that Apple announced these new MacBook Pro laptops, but unfortunately delayed placing his order until he had completed the Production Expert coverage of the launch. That delay of a couple of hours cost him over 3 weeks delay in receiving his new MacBook Pro.
Mike chose a 16-inch 10 core CPU, 32-core CPU M1 Max processor with 64GB of unified memory, 1TB internal storage, which replaces his 2012 Intel-core i7 with 16GB of RAM.
“When it came to setting up my new M1 Max laptop, it was simplicity itself, right from the unboxing experience to switching it on for the first time to installing the software.
Although I was able to set up the new MBP to connect to my wi-fi, and even though there are more ports on it, 3 Thunderbolt 4 ports using USB-C, as well as an HDMI and SD card ports, there is no Ethernet port”.
We Test Our New 2nd-Gen MacBook Pro Computers
To start with Russ gave us a small taste of things to come, quickly creating a purely unscientific test session in Pro Tools of around 700 tracks using stock Avid plugins. This is a short video showing a large Pro Tools 2020.10 session running on the Apple MacBook Pro M1 Max 14". Buffer was set at 128 samples, the MacBook Pro has 64GB of unified memory. Pro Tools is running using Rosetta on macOS Monterey 12.0.1, an unsupported OS. Fan noise was non-existent.
Within a couple of days we had our next test ready. We can’t currently run the standard power test we normally use as some of the Avid plugins used in our standard Power Test are currently incompatible with macOS 12 Monterey, because the new Apple MacBook Pro ships with Monterey pre-installed, and cannot be rolled back.
Instead of just recording 16 tracks at a low buffer setting we decided to really tax the new MacBook Pro with a large session to see what would happen. The session has over 700 tracks, with instances of the Xpand virtual instrument. The session also uses numerous instances of Avid stock plugins including 14 instances of EQIII, 117 instances of Dyn 3, 1113 instances of Channel Strip, 1 instance of Dverb and 1 instance of Dither.
Note, this is another unscientific test with a number of things we need to declare...
Pro Tools isn’t yet supported to run natively on the new Apple Silicon SoC chips, which means this test has been undertaken with Pro Tools and all the plugins running Rosetta 2.
Pro Tools also isn’t yet supported in macOS 12 Monterey, on either Intel or Apple Silicon powered Macs.
We are recording and playing back the internal sound card and using Quicktime to capture the screen, which is why there is no audio on the video.
To record 16 new tracks we routed an existing track via an internal bus to capture the sound.
We recorded to the internal drive, which is not recommended by Avid. Instead, Avid recommends professionals record to an external high-performance drive.
Despite this being a very large session running on an unsupported OS and chip, it was rock solid even at the lowest buffer setting, there were no audio dropouts, crackles, or pops.
You can learn more about this test in our article Pro Tools Tested On MacBook Pro M1 Max With Staggering Results.
Studio One Tested Running Multiple Instances Of Omnisphere
One of the indications that Pro Tools is struggling is that things like the counter, metering and timeline cursors start to stutter. We observed none of these usual indications. This may be down to the new GPU power and memory sharing on the SoC using unified memory.
We were asked by a member of the community to test how many working instances of Omnisphere we could get to run in Studio One while it still passed audio. The results are mind blowing!
We had 150 instances running without issue. However the CPU usage meter was indicating overload, we reduced the instances to 142 to bring the visual metering down from 100%. Despite this being a very large session and the CPU meter running at 100% the session continued to work without issue. There were no audio dropouts, crackles, or pops and the MacBook Pro did not get hot enough for the fans to start working to a level where they were audible.
You can learn more about this test in our article Spectrasonics Omnisphere Tested On MacBook Pro M1 Max.
Apple Logic Pro On MacBook Pro M1 Pro Tested
How large a Logic Pro session can the new MacBook Pro M1 Pro handle? Spoiler alert, it’s over 650 tracks and 2500 plugins.
In these videos, YouTuber and Logic user JohnPaul sees how far he can push the MacBook Pro M1 Pro with a Logic Pro session and he talks about setting up the session to take advantage of the extra cores.
About John Paul
John describes himself as “A Musician and Loop Artist. I play live and I also have some music out there in the streaming world as well. I'm also a bit of a tech nerd so what I'm gonna show you on my channel is all about music tech and looping.”
The session John used was based on the Billie Eilish ‘Ocean Eyes’ demo project and used over 650 tracks and more than 2500 plugins. Unlike our tests, which use an M1 Max powered laptop with 64GB of unified memory, John’s test was undertaken on a 14-inch 10-core CPU, 16-core GPU with just 16GB of unified memory.
Post Production M1 Max Tests
Following on from our music-based tests, we were asked to undertake some post-production related tests by a number of community members summed up by this request from Pedro Lima…
“I suggest a test with a video file (perhaps DNxHD) on a multichannel session, like 5.1 and Atmos to emulate a post environment. I think that's another way to check performance in other aspects. I think...
Cheers!”
For our first post-production test of a 2nd-gen, Apple Silicon powered Mac computer, Mike compared it with his 2018 Intel-powered Mac mini to see how it measures up on a post-production session with a ProRes video playing.
One of the challenges, especially with post-production content is that so much of the content we work on, we cannot share here on Production Expert. Then Mike remembered that Netflix had released FREE Dolby Atmos Pro Tools Sessions Of Their Sol Levante Anime Production and decided to use this for our first post test.
Remember like our previous tests, this is Pro Tools 2021.10 running on an unapproved OS (macOS Monterey 12.0.1) on an, as yet, unapproved computer as Avid is yet to approve the Apple M1 Pro and M1 Max powered computers yet.
Also, we are running the session on the internal boot drive, rather than on a separate media drive, which is how the Mac mini system is configured.
We are only using the Avid Stock plugins as there are issues with some plugins, that will be resolved when iLok releases the next version of their software.
When we start the test, what you will be looking at is the MacBook Pro screen with the Big Counter and System Usage windows open on the right-hand side and then to keep things as simple as possible on the left-hand side you will be able to see the Big Counter and System Usage from the Mac mini.
There you have it. The session played without any issues right down to 32 samples of hardware buffer size, playing off the internal drive, which is not recommended by Avid and the video engine worked without any issues even though neither the OS nor the computer are approved by Avid yet. Whereas my Mac mini 2018 running macOS Mojave, an approved computer running an approved OS and the session is on a separate SSD media drive as recommended by Avid, could not play the session with Dynamic Plugin Processing disabled and when enabled could only play with the hardware buffer size set to at least 256 samples.
You can learn more about our first post-production test on an Apple Silicon M1 Max powered laptop in our article Pro Tools Post-Production Session Tested On Apple M1 Max.
In this second Post Production test using a new Apple Silicon 16-Inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Max SoC with 64GB of unified Memory, we investigated using the new Apple Silicon native HD driver with an HDX1 System and whether using Avid DNxHD or H264 video makes a difference with these new powerful laptops.
Although Official Support via Rosetta 2 for Pro Tools Software has been in place since Pro Tools 2021.6, the 2021.10 release of Pro Tools brought Native support for HDX and HD Native hardware with the release of Universal Binary HD Drivers bringing Apple Silicon support to previously incompatible HDX hardware.
This means that there is now a driver which can run on M1 Macs running Pro Tools via Rosetta. Unlike applications like Pro Tools, a driver can't run via Rosetta. Because of this HDX and HD Native users can now use their Avid hardware on an M1 Mac with Pro Tools running via Rosetta 2 and the driver running natively.
Avid also announced Apple Silicon support for the Avid Video Engine, which means that video can now be played on Apple Silicon-based machines, but please note that with Pro Tools 2021.10 video hardware is not supported at this time.
If you want to learn more about how to install the Avid HD Driver for Apple Silicon powered computers then check out our article Pro Tools HDX And Video Formats Tested On Apple M1 Max.
To undertake these tests we chose an old Avid Post Production demo, which is an excerpt from an Avid made spy spoof Agent Zero. The original session used 130 voices and after extensive experimentation, we found that duplicating audio tracks in this session to take the voice count up from 130 to 1500 voices and running it with a hardware buffer size of 64 samples took it close to the edge when using CoreAudio.
We also ran this 1500 voice session with 2 different video files, the DNxHD video was a 36MB per second file played at a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, whereas the H264 video was a 4.1MB per second file played at a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels.
What you will see in this second test is an excerpt from Avid’s Agent Zero session, with a grid of 4 System Usage windows.
Top left shows the performance of a session using an Avid DNxHD video using an HDX 1 system.
Bottom left is also the HDX 1 system but this time with an H264 MP4 video.
Top right shows the combination of a DNxHD video and using Apple CoreAudio.
Bottom right shows the performance using an H264 MP4 with Apple CoreAudio.
So let’s see what happened…
There is no doubt, using an HDX card, even while using the Hybrid Engine reduces the load on the computer.
The performance difference between using an H264 or an Avid DNxHD is less clear. Although having analysed the data closely, it would appear that the H264 video does put an extra load on the computer but it’s not as significant as we expected. It could be that the need to convert everything to Avid DNxHD may not be as necessary with the powerful graphics power and unified memory.
Whatever the reason, the power of this computer is phenomenal. 1500 voices and a video all playing from the internal drive is astounding.
To learn more about our second set of post-production tests of the new 2nd-gen Apple Silicon MacBook Pro laptops, check out our article Pro Tools HDX And Video Formats Tested On Apple M1 Max.
In Conclusion
In our view, the M1 Max powered Apple Silicon computers are ready for the professional in terms of performance and remember like all our tests, we have been using unsupported computers, running an unsupported OS and it still works incredibly well.
However, to be ready for the big time Pro Tools users need Avid to approve the 2nd-gen M1 computers and macOS Monterey but perhaps, more importantly, we also need all our plugins to work natively on Apple Silicon too.