Apple M1 Pro 8-Core vs MediaTek Dimensity 1300

Apple M1 Pro 8-Core

The Apple M1 Pro 8-Core is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the late 2021 MacBook Pro 14 and 16-inch models. It offers 8 cores from the 10 available in the chip divided in six performance cores (P-cores with 600 - 3220 MHz) and four power-efficiency cores (E-cores with 600 - 2064 MHz). The cores are similar to the cores in the Apple M1.

The big cores (codename Firestorm) offer 192 KB instruction cache, 128 KB data cache, and 24 MB shared L2 cache (up from 12 MB in the M1). The four efficiency cores (codename Icestorm) are a lot smaller and offer only 128 KB instruction cache, 64 KB data cache, and 4 MB shared cache. Finally, the SoC includes 16 MB System Level Cache shared by the GPU. The efficiency cores (E cluster) clock with 600 - 2064 MHz, the performance cores (P cluster) with 600 - 3228 MHz.

The unified memory (16 or 32 GB LPDDR5-6400) next to the chip is connected by a 256 bit memory controller and can be used by the GPU and CPU.

The integrated graphics card in the M1 Pro offers 14 cores (of the 16 cores in the chip).

Furthermore, the SoC integrates a fast 16 core neural engine, a secure enclave (e.g., for encryption), a unified memory architecture, Thunderbolt 4 controller, an ISP, and media de- and encoders (including ProRes).

The M1 Pro is manufactured in 5 nm at TSMC and integrates 33.7 billion transistors. The peak power consumption of the chip was advertised around 30W for CPU intensive tasks.

MediaTek Dimensity 1300

The Mediatek Dimensity 1300 is a high-end SoC with an integrated 5G modem. It includes three CPU clusters. One fast ARM Cortex-A78 at up to 3 GHz with 2x L2 cache, 3 additional A78 with up to 2.6 GHz and for power efficiency four ARM Cortex-A55 cores at up to 2 GHz. The SoC looks to be identical to the older Dimensity 1200.

Furthermore, the chip integrates a 9 core ARM Mali-G77 MC9 GPU, a Wi-fi 6 modem (ax), a LPDDR4x memory controller (up to 5266Mbps), a AI processing unit (APU 3.0 with 6 cores) and video de- and encoding (including AV1).

The chip is manufactured in the modern 6nm process and should be very power efficient.