When the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros landed earlier this week, there was some confusion on the spec sheet regarding the number of encoding engines on the M2 Max. Apple has clarified things: the M2 Max processor has twice as many ProRes engines as the M2 Pro, as does the M1 Max.
When the page originally went live, the M2 Max processor in the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros was listed as having only one video encoding, ProRes encoding, and ProRes decoding engine, although the M1 Max has two of each. Adding to the confusion was the press release for the M2 Max, which touted the chip’s “dual video encoding engines and dual ProRes engines, bringing video encoding up to 2x faster than the M2 Pro”.
Apple has now clarified in the MacBook Pro tech specs that the M2 Max indeed has twice as many video encoding engines and ProRes as the M1 Pro and M2. The M1 chip does not have a video encoding engine or a ProRes encoding and decoding engine. The M1 Max also offers more graphics cores and memory than the M2 Pro, with either a 30 or 38-core GPU and up to 96GB of memory.
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Apple’s ProRes engine provides generally smoother performance for high-end codecs such as H.264, which would otherwise strain system resources. When using video production applications such as Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve, ProRes encoders can deliver much faster speeds, and obviously two of them mean even faster performance.
So if you’re spending $3,000 or more for a MacBook Pro with an M2 Max processor, rest assured that the media engine will indeed be faster than the M2 Pro.
