New Apple M2 Chip
The Apple M2 chip has officially been unveiled at WWDC 2022, and as the name might have implied, it is the successor to the custom ARM-based computer chip launched in November 2020, the Apple M1.
Created on a second generation 5nm process, it will be powering the new MacBook Air and 13″ MacBook Pro. It has an 8-core CPU which is said to be 18% improved performance over its predecessor thanks to a larger cache and the efficiency cores having “greater performance gains”.
In comparison, it boasts “nearly twice the performance at same power level” compared to the Intel Core i7-1255U. Compared to the Intel Core i7-1260P on the other hand, it is said to provide “nearly 90% of the peak performance” with just a quarter of the power consumption.
As for the GPU cores on the other hand, it’s slightly more efficient than its predecessor with 25% better performance, especially given it has 10 cores over the predecessor’s 8-core setup with the same power consumption. With more power, it’s said to jump up to 35% improved performance.
Moving on to the 16-core neural engine, it is 40% faster than the M1, capable of processing up to 15.8 trillion operations per second. You also get 50% more memory bandwidth at 100GB/s, and it supports up to 24GB LPDDR5 RAM. The Apple M2 chip has over 20 billion transistors and supports 6K external displays, ProRes encode / decode, 8K H.264, and HEVC video.
Pokdepinion: I’m personally curious to see how well it truly performs, but I’m also wondering if the M1 might end up powering a future iPhone device instead since it can power an iPad Pro.
