Estimating M1X Performance

Comparing the performance of A14 and M1 we can have a good guess of M1X performance.

Extrapolating multi-core performance on Apple Silicon is slightly difficult because the cores are asymmetric. Intel chips have always used the same core design but with the ability to throttle up the clock frequency by a wide margin to either optimise for efficient or optimise for performance.

Apple Silicon on the other hand builds two very different cores — one good at performance and one good at being efficient. Then they include a good mix of the two kinds of cores in their devices.

The Apple Watch and HomePod mini just use those high-efficiency cores while expanded versions of these chips for iPad Pros have traditionally included a higher number of high-performance cores.

Here is a breakdown of these core counts:

• S5 — two high-efficiency cores
• A14 — two high performance and two high-efficiency cores (4200)
• M1 — four high performance and four high-performance cores (7300)
• M1X — rumored to have eight high performance and four high-efficiency cores

I have marked the multi-core benchmarks for the two chips that we know of. Now let’s find the individual contributions of the two kinds of cores.

2x + 4y = 4200 and 4x + 4y = 7300, which gives x as 1550 and y as 275.

With this knowledge, the M1X with a total of 12 cores should have a multi-core performance benchmark of 13,500! That puts it comfortably above most Mac Pros and all iMac Pro configurations.

Remember, this chip is expected to ship in entry-level iMacs and the 16" MacBook Pro. Hence in the price range of $1500–$2500, Apple is going to give us the performance of $5K–$10K machines!