The Morning After: Running every test you could think of on Apple’s M1 Ultra chip
We’ve tested a lot of Macs (and even iPads) running on Apple’s M1 chip. But now we have the M1 Ultra and power to burn. As a quick reminder, the M1 Ultra fuses two M1 Max chips together to give you a processor with 20 CPU cores and 64 GPU cores — yikes. That comes with up to 128GB of RAM, ensuring it’s one of the fastest processors ever in Engadget’s offices — or at least WFH offices and spare rooms.
Engadget’s Chris Schodt, our Upscaled series host, assembled a list from readers and YouTube viewers aimed at pushing the new chip as hard as we could. Think Adobe Lightroom and Premiere Pro, Davinci Resolve and Fusion, 3D modeling in Blender, machine learning tests like TensorFlow and Pytorch, and some gaming. Of course.
However, Apple’s M1 ecosystem still feels, at times, unfinished — Chris experienced a few strange bugs, and software compatibility can still be an issue. Check out his full test over on the latest episode of Upscaled.
— Mat Smith
