Apple M1 Max 24-Core GPU vs Intel Arc A770 vs Intel Arc A770M

Apple M1 Max 24-Core GPU

The Apple M1 Max 24-Core-GPU is an integrated graphics card by Apple offering 24 of the 32 cores in the M1 Max Chip. The 3,072 ALUs offer a theoretical performance of up to 8 Teraflops. 

The graphics card has no dedicated graphics memory but can use the fast LPDDR5-6400 unified memory with a 512 bit bus (up to 400 GBit/s).

The GPU clocks between 389 and 1296 MHz and offers no short term boost (389, 486, 648, 778, 972, 1296 MHz steps according to Powermetrics). The GPU is intended to use Apple Metal 2 API and could still be based on the older PowerVR architectures (last used in the Apple A10).

The Apple M1 Max is manufactured in the modern 5nm process at TSMC and offers an excellent energy efficiency.

Intel Arc A770

The Intel Arc A770 is a mid-range desktop GPU and is manufactured using the 6 nm process at TSMC. The graphics processor has 4,096 shader units and 8 or 16 GB GDDR6 VRAM with a 256-bit interface (16 Gbps, 512 GB/s).

Features

As the top model based on the Alchemist architecture, Intel offers the Arc A770, the top model in the series. As a completely new development, Intel wants to put pressure on AMD and Nvidia with these graphics cards. Features such as ray tracing are supported and the Intel Arc A770 comes with 32 RT cores. Intel is also implementing 512 Tensor Cores, which we can already find in the current graphics cards from Nvidia. With support for AV1, the graphics card is particularly interesting for content creators. Only the Ada Lovelace models from Nvidia and the RDNA3 GPUs from AMD are currently capable of hardware-side encoding and decoding with the new codec.

Performance

The performance of the Intel Arc A770 is comparable with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 or an AMD Radeon RX 7600 comparable. The Intel model copes much better with newer games. With ray tracing enabled, the Intel Arc A770 can even outperform its two competitors. Based on the performance shown, the Intel Arc A770 is ideally suited for 1080p gaming in 2023.

Power consumption

The manufacturer specifies the power consumption of the Intel Arc A770 at 225 watts (TGP). This is slightly more than a Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 or the AMD Radeon RX 7600.

Intel Arc A770M

The Intel Arc A770M is a dedicated mobile lower- mid-range graphics card for laptops based on Xe HPG microarchitecture. It uses the ACM-G10 chip and offers all of the 32 Xe-cores (512 ALUs), 32 ray tracing units and a 256-bit memory bus for 12 GB GDDR6 graphics memory. The chip can clock from 300 MHz (low frequency mode) to 1650 MHz (high frequency) or in short bursts 2050 MHz (Turbo). The chip integrates 21.7 billion transistors, uses a BGA2660 package (soldered), and the die measures 406 mm2.

The performance of the Arc A770M is not yet known. The power consumption is similar to a RTX 3070 and therefore we see the performance slightly below a RTX 3070 mobile.

The chip also integrates two media engines for VP9, AVC, HEVC, and AV1 8k en- and decoding. The 4 display pipes support up to 4x 4k120 HDR via DMI 2.0B or DisplayPort 2.0 10G. 

The A770M is produced in 6nm at TSMC (N6 process) and supports dynamic power share (using Deep Link) with 12th gen Intel CPUs (Alder Lake).