Mac M1 Mini Ultra to MacBook M4 Pro Max upgrade?

I was going to upgrade to a new PC but what does the VCV Commnity think about the benefits of moving from an M1 Mini Ultra to a MacBook M4 Pro Max? I have significant processing limits on my M1 that overloads my CPU on modestly large patches using my M1 Mini.

I can load large DAW projects but I have a strange 50% processor bottleneck so I don’t know if a MacBook M4 Pro Max can actually be a little more than 3 times faster than my M1. I just want advice on if I should upgrade now or wait for the Mac Studio M4? I’m real anxious to make my move.

What do you mean by M1 Mini Ultra? That description of a Mini doesn’t exist as far as I know.

Standard answer, lots of memory. You don’t mention how much, but with 16gb I have no struggles, after upgrading from 8.

One significant change with M2 and later, vs M1, is improved core-to-core latency. That was my primary reason to upgrade to M2. This (probably??) matters with bigger patches pushing over 150% CPU usage in ActivityMonitor.

But your general premise/question: will an upgrade be 3x faster than your M1? No. Probably not. But I don’t know what you mean by 3x faster in terms of audio production.

deeper dives:

CPUBenchmark’s webpage lists Multicore Ratings on the M1 at 14157 and Single at 3688 and the Macbook I’m looking at lists Multicore Ratings at 43569 and Single Core at 4505. The only other Mac available now I’m considering is the 24 Core Mac Pro M2 Tower in it’s silver glory but the MacBook says it has better thermal protection and if I get an 8TB SSD drive it’s in the GB/s range of speed. Seemingly it should be 3 or more times faster.

You don’t answer questions, do you. Still have no idea what 3x faster means for VCV or any other audio environment. Would consider helping your problem more, but your test patch with “all free modules” in fact contains 3 paid modules, so…

A M4mac might be roughly 2x more powerfull than an M1mac, 1core vs. 1core. No clue how that would translate in case you had a M4mac with more cores. This is just me guessworking, based on, that i had an M1, M2, and now M4, and was running the same patches on all of them. “Patches” does not refer here to VCV, to make this clear.

I find the heating situation with the M4Soc not satisfactory. It´s completely different than it was on M1 or M2. Thus i would wait for the M4 studio max to come out. At least if it is about audio work with sustained high loads. I would expect the M4studio to have a better cooling situation

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