Apple has finally unveiled its M2 chip, successor to the M1.
The Apple M2 takes up the fight of the M1 to increase the energy efficiency of its predecessor. There are 20 billion transistors in a chip engraved in 5 nm with a second generation process.
18% faster processor
This allows the company to announce 18% more performance on the processor part compared to the Apple M1, for similar consumption (about 15 watts). There are still 8 cores, separated into two: four high performance cores (16 MB of shared cache) and four high efficiency cores (4 MB of shared cache). The overall power is listed at 3.6 teraflops per second.
35% faster graphics chip
On the graphics part, the new GPU of the Apple M2 brings a gain in power of 35%. On the energy efficiency part, the graphics chip of the Apple M2 provides 25% more power for the same energy consumption. The GPU will be available in configurations with up to 10 cores.
50% faster memory
Unified memory is LPDDR5 with 50% higher bandwidth: 100 GB/s. There was LPDDR4 on the Apple M1. Apple indicates a maximum capacity of 24 GB.
8K videos and 6K displays
The Neural Engine has been revised, with 40% more performance and 16 cores, allowing it to process 15.8 trillion operations per second. The Media Engine has also been updated to be able to encode and decode multiple 8K streams in ProRes and HEVC while supporting 6K displays on output.
Apple compares itself to Intel again
Apple took the opportunity to compare its Apple M2 to Intel’s chips (Core i7-1260P and 1255U). We find on the CPU part a better energy efficiency with 87% of the performance of the Intel chip for only 1/4 of the consumption of the latter. For the GPU part, it’s 2.3 times more performance for 1/5 of the power required.
Be careful, however, to take these figures with tweezers since we have no more information on the benchmarks used. But it seems that Apple is digging a little further ahead it has over Intel in the field of low-power chips.
Apple M2 in MacBook Air 13 and MacBook Pro 13
The Apple M2 is already available in two devices: the 2022 MacBook Air 13 and the 2022 MacBook Pro 13.
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