Apple's latest M1 chips differ in some notable ways. Here's what's inside when you buy a new MacBook Pro. 

Apple announced two additional high-powered members of its M1 indigenous processor series at its autumn Unleashed event in late October, which debut in its gleaming new MacBook Pro 14 and MacBook Pro 16 computers. While the Apple M1 Pro and M1 Max offer a new level of performance in Apple laptops, they also signal another step ahead in Apple's two-year strategy to phase out Intel's competitive chips. 

The new chips came just in time for Intel's 12th-generation Alder Lake desktop CPUs to be released this week, which feature a similar architecture — including both high-performance and low-power cores, a concept adopted from phone processors to improve speed and battery life. 

When Intel releases mobile versions of the 12th-gen CPUs in early 2022 and Apple overhauls its iMac 27-inch (and potentially Mac Pro) with top-of-the-line M1s, both rumored for mid-2022, the actual battle between laptop performance will heat up. Today, comparing Intel's desktop CPUs to Apple's mobile processors isn't fair.

Apple's alternatives, on the other hand, are certain to perplex many. Because of changes in the amount of CPU and GPU cores that come under the same model designation, the three separate lines of M1 chips really break down into numerous alternative versions with which you may construct a system. 

In terms of peak performance, the M1 Max and M1 Pro clearly differ, with the M1 Max doubling some key contributors to theoretical performance, notably the number of hardware ProRes accelerators, which is critical for pro video editing and doubled bandwidth for some internal interfaces, such as the memory-processor interface. However, in real-world applications, those won't always result in double performance. 

Discrete graphics functionality is not mentioned in any of the M1 implementations so far. Apple claims that the M1 Max offers the greatest RAM accessible to a mobile GPU, up to 64GB, and has improved the possible integrated GPU performance.

Keep in mind that Apple's unified memory design means that the GPU and CPU share memory, which is beneficial for performance since it allows both processing and graphics activities to exchange data more quickly. In contrast, Intel's UMA limits the amount of memory that an integrated GPU can access, while discrete GPUs' PCIe-based Resizable BAR only lets the CPU access visual memory, not the other way around.

However, if you have programs that need both the CPU and the GPU at the same time, such as complicated 3D simulations, you may still run into problems.