Photoshop on Apple M1 MacBook 50% faster than Intel models, says Adobe

Adobe launched Photoshop on Wednesday for Apple’s M1-based Macs, an important software package for the new family of computers and works 50% faster than on equivalent laptops with Intel technology.

“Our internal tests show a wide range of features running on average 1.5x the speed of similarly configured systems from the previous generation,” said Pam Clark, product manager for Photoshop, in a blog on Wednesday about the launch of the native Photoshop M1 software. These tests included opening and saving files, applying editing filters and using automated tools to fill regions and select subjects, “which seem noticeably faster,” said Adobe.

The results reinforce the strong performance and battery life advantages that reviewers reported for New Apple Macs – and the serious challenge that Apple poses to Intel after years of delays in modernizing its manufacturing. Making a chip transition in the computing product line is a gigantic effort, but so far it seems that Apple has handled the change well.

The good performance of Photoshop is important for creative professionals, who are essential Mac customers. Even before the native version of Photoshop arrives, CNET photographer Andrew Hoyle declared M1 Macs a “safe bet”. Photoshop is widely used for editing and composing photos, but also for many other design and publishing tasks.

M1 processors are more powerful brothers of Apple’s A14 chips in new iPhones and take advantage of the miniaturization of circuits that TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.) has at Intel.

Adobe ran its tests on 13-inch MacBook Pros with 16 GB of RAM, 2 TB SSDs and Mac OS 11.2.2. The Intel-based machine used a Core i7 processor, although Macs do not ship with the latest models from Intel. Low-cost buyers should note that the M1-based MacBook Air probably offers similar performance. It doesn’t have the Pro’s bigger battery, a slightly brighter screen, sustained heavy-duty cooling fan and, in low-end Air configurations, a bit of graphics processing performance.

Apple has not yet released larger and more powerful MacBook Pro laptops, iMac desktops and Mac Pro tower computers using their M series of processors. There, it is expected to offer chips with more processing cores than the M1’s four powerful cores and four efficient cores. In this market, however, Intel and AMD processors are more competitive.

In February, Intel offered its own set of speed tests in February showing where its new 11th Generation Core chips, code-named Tiger Lake, outperform M1 Macs. (Apple’s Intel-based MacBooks use 10th Generation Core chips.) A specific test involved Photoshop’s content recognition filler technology, one of the tests cited by Adobe. In Intel’s test, your Windows machine using a quad-core 3GHz Intel chip was 1.5 times faster than a Mac M1. In this test, however, M1 was running Photoshop using Apple’s Rosetta 2 translation software, which is not as fast as running native software developed for the chip.

Some newer Photoshop features are not yet in the new native M1 version, including the ability to edit documents stored in the cloud and synchronize presets, Adobe said. Customers who need them can use the Intel version of Photoshop running on M1 Macs through Rosetta.

There are no Windows PCs using M1 processors, although it is possible that Apple’s success with the M1 could spur the progress of chips from Qualcomm’s Arm family or other chip designers.

Also on Wednesday, Adobe announced a new feature in Photoshop that uses AI to quadruple the size of photos. The feature will be coming to Lightroom soon too.