The new M1  MacBook Pro 13-inch has a shared CPU/CPU memory architecture. Here we compare the speed of the Apple M1 GPU to some other Macs.

M1 Speedtest devices

deviceCPU MemoryGPU
MacBook Pro (2020)M1 Apple16 GBM1 Apple
MacBook Pro (2018)2,9 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i932 GB 2400 MHz DDR4Radeon Pro 560X 4 GB
Mac Pro (2019)3.2 GHz 16-Core Intel Xeon W96 GB 2933 MHz DDR4AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo 32 GB
MacBook Air (Early 2014)1,7 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i78 GB 1600 MHz DDR3Intel HD Graphics 5000 1536 MB

Computing the energy grid

The energy grid is computed by dividing the unit cell in 128x128x128 voxels, and for each voxel the potential energy is computing by looping over all atoms in the unit cell. The interactions is a simple Lennard-Jones potential using a cutoff of 12 Angstrom. This implies that, to satisfy the minimum image convention, that unit cells that are too small are automatically using super cells. The number of atoms denoted in the table are therefore of the super cell and not of the unit cell.

M1 Speedtest data (in milliseconds; smaller is better).

#atomsM1 AppleMacBook Pro 2018Mac Pro 2018Mac Air 2014
25651.782.240.6184.5
42466.792.843.7364.9
62473.2106.244.5358.6
66473.7104.139.5470.6
90486.1115.043.1569.4
2304182.7185.357.71091.8
3240230.4206.659.01210.5
4128307.6263.167.01588.2
MIL-101 (14416 atoms)989.6757.0228.65303.2
NU-1301 (50192 atoms)3286.52354.0397.911465.7

Times in milliseconds. Smaller is better.

M1 speed test energy grid

The results for the Apple M1 are excellent. They are on par with the Radeon Pro 560X and faster for up to about a thousand atoms. And all of this with a much lower battery cost. Note that the real power horse, the desktop Vega II duo is by far the fastest GPU. However, the future for the Apple M1 system-on-a-socket looks very bright.

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