I recently got a M4 Max Macbook Pro with 128 GB of DRAM. It has seemed to be a peppy machine. Today I benchmarked it against my main workstation, using the Puget Systems Photoshop benchmarking tool.
Spoiler: it’s pretty darned fast.
This isn’t really a fair fight. On one hand, the Dell 64-core 512GB Ryzen workstation is optimized for workloads with large memory footprints and lots of parallelism, like the Matlab programs that I run on it. Its scalar processing speed is modest. On the other hand, the Dell workstation consumes far more power than the Macbook, takes up a lot more room, and functions as a space heater in the winter.
Here’s the Mac, with a Logitech keyboard and the 27 inch Apple Studio display, a 5K monitor with excellent speakers and video camera.
Here’s the Dell workstation, with my Eizo 27 inch monitor:
Here are the Puget benchmark results for Photoshop 26.2 on the Mac.
And with the same version on the workstation.
The Mac is more than twice as fast.
Here are some more system specs:
The current beta version of Ps is about the same speed as 26.2 on the Dell workstation.
Thanks for the helpful comparison. Debating between a threadripper and a M4 ultra for my next workstation. Clearly Lightroom and photoshop favors the M4 but also do a bunch of video processing (motion blur, cc wide time, optical flownretiming) in after effects/premiere.
I’m always surprised by how much single-threaded stuff there apparently still is in Photoshop and Lightroom at least on PC.
How much of the speedup is them using Apple’s accelerator APIs that leverage the GPU?
Quite an achievement for a laptop and done with relatively low energy consumption.
I can see on the Puget benchmark rating that it is among the best results.
The larger equally fast but energy consuming Windows Box options remain cheaper as they always have been. About half the price of the Apple laptop.
Less elegant and less mobile.
( I am still on my 7 year old ‘Hackintosh’ ; build in a time Apple refused to make a decent workstation- now 3x slower than this laptop)