Well, less than two years on and it’s already time for the second generation of Apple Silicon chips to make an appearance at WWDC 2022. Also: Are M1 Macs a bad buy now? Called the M2, this builds on what the M1 chip bought to the table with significant improvements across the board without compromising power efficiency. So, what does the M2 bring to the table?
Apple Silicon M2 specs
Second-generation 5-nanometer technologyUp to 8-core CPU (4× high-performance + 4× high-efficiency)Up to 10-core GPU16-core Neural Engine capable of up to 15.8 trillion operations per secondUp to 24 GB LPDDR4 unified memory100GB/s memory bandwidthSupport for ProRes encoding and decodingOver 20 billion transistorsNew Secure Enclave
What are the improvements over the M1 chip?
Up to two extra GPU coresUnified memory bumped up from a maximum of 16GB to a maximum of 24GBTransistor count up 25 percent from 16 billionUnified memory bandwidth up 50 percentNeural engine operations per second up over 40 percent
OK, but how do these specs translate into performance? Right now, we only have Apple’s numbers to go by, but the performance gains of the M2 chip compared to the M1 are huge. Comparing the M1 to the M2, Apple claims an 18% performance increase at the same power consumption, which is quite a boost. But it’s when the M2 is compared to 10-core and 12-core chips that we find some impressive gains. For example, against the Core i7-1255U found in a Samsung Galaxy Book2, the M2 offers 1.9x the performance at the same power level and delivers a peak performance while using a quarter of the power. Compared to the 12-core Core i7-1260P found in an MSI Prestige 14Evo, the M2 delivers 87% of the performance of this chip while using only a quarter of the power. The 10-core GPU of the M2 is also a powerhouse, delivering up to 25% higher graphics performance than the M1 at the same power, and 35% more performance at maximum power. Compared to the integrated graphics in the Core i7-1255U chip, it delivers 2.3x the peak performance while using just a fifth of the power.
