Apple Silicon M2 Chip: What You Should Know

Anna

updated on 2022-07-04 to News

There are many things we still don't know, including specifics on performance and features, because products incorporating these processors haven't been released yet. Here is all we currently know about the M2 based on both Apple's announcements and information that has leaked.

M2 chip

What goods will have M2?

The upcoming Apple silicon generation was expected to be shown at WWDC, and those rumours were at least partially accurate. Apple announced a new MacBook Air that uses the M2 chip and has a design that is very similar to the recently updated MacBook Pros. Apple gave the 13-inch MacBook Pro the M2 chip as well, but it didn't receive the same updated design as the MacBook Air.

The Apple M2 is a central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) for its Macintosh notebooks. It is an ARM-based system on a chip (SoC). After transitioning from Intel Core to Apple silicon, it is the second version of ARM architecture designed for Apple's Macintosh computers, succeeding the M1. On June 6, 2022, Apple unveiled the M2, along with versions of the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro, at WWDC. TSMC's "Enhanced 5-nanometer technology" N5P process is used to create the M2, which has 20 billion transistors, a 25% increase over the M1 and is created. Compared to the M1, Apple claims CPU gains of up to 18% and GPU increases of up to 35%.

M2 chip

Dimensions and performance

Until we have evaluated the systems in-depth, we won't be able to validate M2 performance findings, although Apple has made some claims of its own on the enhancements made to the chip.

The 8-core CPU is still present, with four efficiency cores and four performance cores. This arrangement shares the same fundamental elements as the M1's.

Instead of the speculated N3 node, the M2 is based on a second-generation N5P process node from TSMC. According to reports, this was because of Chinese production bottlenecks and lockdowns, which allowed Apple to base the M2 on this 5nm node.

However, the M2 does come with a few additional additions and upgrades that make the bargain more appealing. For instance, it now supports Apple's unified memory up to 24GB. Additionally, it enables 100GBps of memory bandwidth, which is a 50% increase from 50GBps.

The same "high-performance media engine" found in the M1 Pro and M1 Max has also been imported by Apple. Faster, hardware-accelerated media encoding is now possible. Additionally, Apple asserts that its neural engine is up to 40% faster.

Apple claims that the M2 CPU is 18% quicker than the M1 overall. But there has also been an improvement to the graphics. The M2 now has 10 GPU cores, an increase from 7. According to Apple, this improves graphics performance by 35%. Additionally supporting this is the upgraded Metal 3 graphics framework.

Price and availability

The new MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro are the only M2 products that have been officially unveiled so far. The price of the M2 13-inch MacBook Air is $1,299. This is the same as the M1 variant's original price. Starting at $1,199, the M2 MacBook Air is more expensive than the M1 model. The starting price (and current price) of the M1 MacBook Air is $999.

Efficiency and effectiveness

Compared to its predecessor, the M2 has quicker performance cores and a bigger cache, and its efficiency cores have been enhanced for even higher performance advantages.

The M2's CPU offers roughly twice the performance at the same level of power consumption as the Intel Core i7-1255U CPU. With a fifth of the power consumption, it achieves peak performance.

The CPU in the M2 provides approximately 90% of the peak performance with a fourth of the power consumption of the Intel Core i7-1260P.

M2 chip

The GPU in the M2 performs 2.3 times quicker at the same level of power consumption and equals its peak performance with a sixth of that amount.

Design

The M2 features four "Avalanche" cores with high performance and four "Blizzard" cores with low energy consumption, which were first introduced in the A15 Bionic. This hybrid configuration is comparable to that of ARM DynamIQ and Intel's Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors. The energy-efficient cores contain a shared 4 MB L2 cache, a 128 KB L1 instruction cache, and a 64 KB L1 data cache, compared to the high-performance cores' exceptionally large 192 KB L1 instruction cache and 128 KB L1 data cache. Additionally, it features an 8 MB system level cache that the GPU shares.