There are a few reasons why publications such as The Verge called the 2021 MacBook Pro models with Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips “the most powerful laptops” they’ve ever tested. In a recently published blog post, the folks at DataBase as a Service (DBaaS) provider Unum pit an M1 Max-equipped 16″ 2021 MacBook Pro with 64 GB of RAM, against an Intel-powered 16″ 2019 MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM and a $50,000 USD server with an AMD Threadripper Pro 3995WX and a whopping 1 TB of RAM, through a series of memory-heavy workloads.

Spectre-v2 isn't going anywhere soon. VUSec, a group of researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, recently discovered Branch History Injection (BHI), a byproduct of Spectre-v2 that affects Intel and Arm processors. According to Phoronix's latest report, while Intel has taken a performance hit up to 35%, AMD's processors got off easy.