Yep for me both CPU and GPU performance are not good at all, a relatively simple CNN on a free google colab (with a K80) took about 7 minutes to train, while this same model took about 30minutes on GPU and 42 on CPU in tf 2.6 on my mac mini m1 16gb. I have seen multiple posts of people experiencing the same issue and the solution always seems to be that you need to upgrade to 12.0 or use CPU (for smaller batch sizes), which both don't seem to fix the issue at hand for most cases. I would really expect Apple to come up some solution to this, it has been a year since this m1 model was released and I am paying for 3 party notebooks while I would expect such an optimised machine for ML (according to the marketing) to be able to at least run tf at a similar pace as a free colab notebook.