Apple launched its new M2 SoC at WWDC22 a few hours ago. This new chip will initially be used in the next MacBook Air and some other MacBook Pros. As many assumed, the M2 is etched in 5nm at TSMC. It is composed of 20 billion transistors. This is a 25% increase over the M1 chip. For the moment, the internal configuration of the new Apple SoC is not completely clear. But we do know that it receives a larger cache, offering up to 18% faster multithreaded performance compared to its big brother M1. The M2 also gets 24GB of LPDDR5 memory that acts as a unified memory ( two 12GB LPDDR5 DRAM chips for up to 50% higher bandwidth, advertised at 100GB/s).
The GPU part of the M2 seems to be where Apple’s attention has been focused. It has 10 cores and a larger L2 cache which, combined with higher bandwidth, offers up to 35% higher performance (again according to official figures).
Again, flattering performance…but difficult comparisons
It is once again on the field of efficiency that the M2 chip is expected. Apple compares its M2 to an Intel Core i7-1265U mounted on the Samsung GalaxyBook2 360 laptop. The comparison with this 10-core Alder Lake-M chip is obviously flattering for Apple. The Californian claims a 90 percent performance improvement at half power and similar performance at a quarter power.
But Apple also wanted to compare its SoC to a 12-Core Alder Lake-P chip, the Core i7-1260P mounted on an MSI laptop. In this scenario, Apple claims that the M2 offers almost similar performance (87% of Intel’s 12-core Alder Lake) for a quarter of the power. For the GPU part we are in the same line with once again a debauch of superlatives and favorable comparisons. Compared to the poor Iris Xe GPU of the Core i7-1265U, the M2 claims almost 2.3 times the performance at 1/5th the power consumption.
Apple‘s communication: The M2 also includes Apple’s next-generation GPU with up to 10 cores, two more than the M1. Combined with a larger cache and higher memory bandwidth, the 10-core GPU offers a big improvement in graphics performance, delivering up to 25 percent better graphics performance than the M1 at the same power level, and up to 35 percent better performance at its peak power. . Compared to the integrated graphics in the latest notebook chip, the M2’s GPU delivers 2.3 times faster performance at the same power level and matches its peak performance using one-fifth the power. M2’s higher performance per watt allows systems to have exceptional battery life and run cool and quiet, even when playing graphics-intensive games or editing large RAW images.
