Panorama merging benchmarks needed - M3 vs M4

I am a photographer who uses mostly Photoshop and Lightroom classic. I shoot both Sony A7R5 raw and also have the smaller APS-C Sony 6000 shooting raw for street, travel and hiking. I have been using them on both with an Intel MBP and a Intel WIndows 10 machine. My computers are getting long in the tooth so I'm looking to upgrade to either a:   MBA M3 15", 8-CPU, 10GPU, 24GB Mem with a 1TB SSD or MBP M4 Pro 16",  14-CPU, 20GPU, 48GB Mem with a 1TB SSD or MBP M4 Max 16",  16-CPU, 40GPU, 64GB Mem with a 1TB SSD   I love the size weight and price of the MBA M3. To me 15" is just right. The 14" MBP is too small and the 16" a little to big. Cost is roughly 2k, 3k or 4k respectively. I can afford the extra cash if it would really offer me a lot more performance for my workflow. I do a lot of panorama merging and some HDP Panorama merging. That is my current bottleneck on my older machines. Takes a long time to build previews between Spherical, Cylindrical and Perspective and can be painfully slow to render. I wonder if any of you have any benchmarks or an idea how much faster those two MBP would be in merging panos? I do anywhere from 3 to 15 frames for each composition. Rarely I do HDR panos, but when I do, they are 9 to 45 frames to make my finished merged RAW DNG file.   I saw a youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2W6Hx5mxWs comparing MBP M3 vs M4 pro vs M4 Max. He says that the pano module uses mostly ram rather then CPU or GPU to render. And in his tests, only the M3 could complete the renders without crashing. He talks about this bug about 10 minutes into the video.   Strange but I assume eventually Adobe will rework the code for that module to work with the M4 and when they do, I wonder how much faster it would be than the MBA M3? It would be great if it were near real time or under a minute but I suspect even with the faster machines, it is still in the neighborhood of roughly 10 minutes for each merge depending on the amount of frames?   All thoughts are welcome and thanks in advance for your input. ... View more