Apple M1 Pro vs M1 Max

MaxMSPadvanced
Wil's icon

Wil

It is very difficult to run any tests on these machines. Hoping I can find some snippets of information.

My research and test results:

1. I live in Korea - the earliest delivery dates for lowest 16" M1 Max is the second week of March extending to April as you go up.

2. As far the16" M1 Pro, the only one available for pickup in the entire country is the lowest one - 16GPU, 16GB ram - 1TB storage.

3. So I took some of my work and went to one of the stores to test it.

I downloaded Max on the 16" M1 Pro (lowest model) at the Apple store but they wouldn't let me install it in the Applications folder, so I had to run it off of the .dmg file and subsequently could not install Spat5.

--2 large patches results - just turning the patches on and off on 2 different computers.

Patch 1 test - without going into details of the patch, my 15" MacBook Pro 2017 i7 jit.world runs around 30fps in this particular patch. When I turn on Spat5 surround (only 20 channels) fps drops to 20fps.

The M1 Pro that I tested at the store (lowest model) hits 120fps easily (couldn't test Spat5).

Patch 2 test - this patch chains together 3 mc.poly~ each with 47 voices. One is doing pitch shifting, Second is a simple tapin/tapout feedback loop, Third is some chained LFO's and waveshaping.

There are also 48 Spat5 channels with 4th order 3D processing (although I could not run the test with Spat5)

my MacBook Pro 2017 i7 CPU runs at 70 - 100% with vector sizes set to 2048.

The M1 Pro (lowest model) CPU is running around 30% with vector size set at 32.

Conclusion:
That M1 Pro seems pretty good, It feels pretty good as well and the 30% CPU was solid - not jumping around like on my i7 - between 70 -100%,

On my i7 I can kind of notice that Spat5 is using GPU, not sure why, wish I could have tested the M1 Pro,

Very soon I am going to want create MORE mc.poly~ and spread them over hundreds of Spat5 channels.

Here are my questions:
Has anyone real world tested the M1 Max in these types of scenarios?

Is there a BIG difference between the M1 Pro and M1 Max for processing Audio - and especially the heavy lifting like multiple pitch shifting, multiple VST, multiple wave shaping, multiple automated frequency sweeping (the frequency sweeping killed the piece I wrote last fall - had stop using it, more than 2 of these at a time locked it up)?


And since I couldn't test it, does anyone know if there will be a big difference in Spat5 between 32GPU and 64GPU, or does it even matter at all?

Thanks -