Apple M1 vs MediaTek Dimensity 7020 vs Apple M1 Max

Apple M1

The Apple M1 is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the late 2020 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13, and Mac Mini. It offers 8 cores divided in four performance cores and four power-efficiency cores. The big cores offer 192 KB instruction cache, 128 KB data cache, and 12 MB shared L2 cache. According to Apple the performance of these cores should be better than anything on the market (in late 2020). The four efficiency cores are a lot smaller and offer only 128 KB instruction cache, 64 KB data cache, and 4 MB shared cache. The efficiency cores (E cluster) clock with 600 - 2064 MHz, the performance cores (P cluster) with 600 - 3204 MHz.

The M1 is available in two TDP variants, a passive cooled 10 Watt variant for the MacBook Air and an active cooled faster variant for the MacBook Pro 13 and Mac Mini. Those should offer a better-sustained performance according to Apple.

The integrated graphics card in the M1 offers 8 cores (7 cores in the entry MacBook Air) and a peak performance of 2.6 teraflops. Apple claims that it is faster than any other iGPU at the time of announcement.

Furthermore, the SoC integrates a fast 16 core neural engine with a peak performance of 11 TOPS (for AI hardware acceleration), a secure enclave (e.g., for encryption), a unified memory architecture, Thunderbolt / USB 4 controller, an ISP, and media de- and encoders.

The Apple M1 includes 16 billion transistors (up from the 10 billion of the A12Z Bionic and therefore double the amount of a Tiger Lake-U chip like the i7-1185G7) and is manufactured in 5nm at TSMC.

MediaTek Dimensity 7020

The Mediatek Dimensity 7020 is a fast mid-range SoC with an integrated 5G modem. It includes two fast ARM Cortex-A78 cores at up to 2.2 GHz and six power efficient Cortex-A55 cores at up to 2 GHz (Octa-Core with Heterogeneous Multi-Processing). Furthermore, the chip integrates a IMG BXM-8-256 GPU, a Wi-Fi 5 modem, a LPDDR5 / LPDDR4X memory controller, a AI processing unit  and video de- and encoding.

The 5G modem supports NR 2CC and mixed duplex (TDD/FDD) and dual SIM. The download speeds can reach up to 2.77 Gbit/s.

Compared to the Dimensity 930, the 7020 offers the same specifications and seems to be a rebrand.

The Dimensity 930 and 7020 are manufactured in the modern 6nm process and should be very power efficient.

Apple M1 Max

The Apple M1 Max 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 all 10 cores available in the chip divided in eight performance cores (P-cores with 600 - 3220 MHz) and two power-efficiency cores (E-cores with 600 - 2064 MHz). There is no Turbo Boost for single cores or short burst periods. 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. CPU and GPU can both use the 48 MB SLC (System Level Cache). The efficiency cores (E cluster) clock with 600 - 2064 MHz, the performance cores (P cluster) with 600 - 3228 MHz.

The unified memory (32 or 64 GB LPDDR5-6400) next to the chip is connected by a 512 bit memory controller (200 GB/s bandwidth) and can be used by the GPU and CPU. This is the main difference to the M1 Pro and the CPU performance is quite similar.

The biggest difference to the M1 Pro is the bigger integrated GPU with 24 or 32 cores (up from 16).

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 two ProRes engines).

The M1 Pro is manufactured in 5 nm at TSMC and integrates 57 billion transistors. The peak power consumption of the chip was advertised around 30W for CPU intensive tasks.