FCP 10.6.2 - Export significantly faster on M1 Mac Mini, compared to M1 Max MBP 16”

This befuddling question just came up: It appears the latest update to FCP 10.6.2 has either super charged my M1 Mac Mini, or it has severely hampered my M1 Pro and M1 Max machines?

Using a project that used to bring my iMac Pro 18 core Xeon to its knees, I tried an export comparison between three machines:

M1 Mac Mini, 16GB, 1TB, 10Gb Ethernet

14” MBP M1-Pro, 32GB, 4TB

16” MPB M1-Max, 64GB, 4TB

All machines are running Monterey 12.3.1 and FCP 10.6.2

In every single export test, the Mac Mini way outperformed the other machines.

Project 1 is all ProRes clips, but a lot of them. Was120 separate chorus singer videos, this version had sections in chorus box effects, many tracks. Pretty difficult project to handle. 3:55 run time.

In this case, I left it un-rendered on each machine. Project on same thunderbolt, OWC NvME drive, directly plugged into thunderbolt port on each machine. All three machines played back with no dropped frames. Scrubbed like butter.

That was amazing enough.

Next, I tried exporting to H.264, to the same hard drive. I got:

M1 - 1:33 / M1-Pro - 2:04 / M1 Max - 2:01

All are exceptional times, but what is up with that mighty M1?! Tried a few times, same result. Result was identical when I put the project on each machine’s internal drive, and exported to internal drive.

Tried another project with 14:30 minutes of mostly video recorded from Zoom, so mp4 of some kind at 25p. Exported to H.264 30p, the results (same results, internal or external):

M1 - 2:45 / M1-Pro - 7:19 / M1-Max - 7:24

What does this mean? How is the lowly M1 Mini crushing these Pro laptops? There is no real differentiation between Pro and Max, but the base M1 is clearly working better. I couldn’t believe how fast it was speeding through the exports, just chewing through the footage.

All machines were silent during export, fans never reached above 1600 rpm on any machine.

Is the performance the M1 is experiencing supposed to be distributed to the Pro and Max, and it’s just not happening? Is there a setting I’m supposed to enable? Should I be buying up all of the M1 Mac Minis?!