What’s inside the M1 Max?

Efficiency cores

The CPU of the M1 Max is made up of 10 cores; two efficiency cores and eight performance cores. When you’re browsing the web and don’t need a lot of CPU power, the M1 Max will use the efficiency cores to preserve battery life.

Performance cores

While the efficiency cores are used for low-power tasks, the CPU switches to the performance cores when you’re performing more intensive tasks, such as compiling code.

GPU

This is the GPU of the M1 Max. Coming in both 28-core and 32-core configurations, this part of the chip is much larger than the M1 Pro. It allows the M1 Max to offer more graphical performance.

Neural Engine

The 16-core Neural Engine handles the chip’s machine learning (ML) duties, including tasks such as computional photography. The Neural Engine in the M1 Max helps deliver 11.5x faster ML performance when tracking moving objects in Final Cut Pro.

System level cache

There are also four blocks of SLC (system level cache), and on the M1 Max there’s 48MB of it, which is a big leap over the original M1’s SLC capabilities.

Media engines

The M1 Max’s media engines handle video encoding and decoding duties (including ProRes and ProRes RAW content), while helping to maximise battery life.