In between the announcement of its latest operating system, Apple introduced the M2 chipset at WWDC 2022. The chipset that is the brain of the MacBook Air is claimed to be superior to before, what is the greatness?
The iPhone tech giant says its new chipset has significant improvements, especially on the GPU front, where Apple proudly says the M2 will make games on the Mac better than ever.
Specifically, Apple mentioned that the M2 was produced on a 2nd generation 5nm process, it is not known which company produced it, but it could be TSMC. This is a big improvement over the Apple M1 chipset produced on TSMC's 7nm process.
"The M2 kicks off the second generation of M-series chips and goes beyond the outstanding features of the M1," said Johny Srouji, Apple's Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies.
"With our relentless focus on power -saving performance, the M2 brings faster CPUs, GPUs, and Neural Engines. And along with higher memory bandwidth and new capabilities like ProRes acceleration, the M2 continues the incredible pace of innovation in Apple silicon to Mac. "
The Apple M2 chipset has 20 billion transistors - 25 percent more than the M1. This increase gives an integrated memory bandwidth of 100GB/second - 50 percent more than the M1. And LPDDR5 memory up to 24GB, M2 can handle larger and more complex workloads.
Apple says that the M2 still has an 8-core CPU, but the performance core is made faster paired with a larger cache, while the efficiency core has been significantly improved for greater performance improvements.
The compound provides 18% greater multithreaded performance than the M1. As a result, the M2 is capable of performing CPU-intensive tasks using very little power, such as creating music with layers of effects or applying complex filters to photos.
Apple claims that compared to the latest 10-core PC laptop chip, the CPU in the M2 delivers almost twice the performance at the same power level. And, the M2 delivers the peak performance of a PC chip using only a quarter of the power.
When compared to the latest 12-core PC laptop chips, the M2 provides nearly 90 percent of the 12-core chip's peak performance using only a quarter of the power.
The M2 also features a next -generation GPU with up to 10 cores - two more than the M1. Combined with larger cache and higher memory bandwidth, 10-core GPUs provide a major improvement in graphics performance.
Apple boasted that the M2's graphics performance increased up to 25 percent higher than the M1 at the same power level, and that it performed up to 35 percent better at maximum power.
Compared to the integrated graphics of the latest laptop PC chips, the GPU in the M2 delivers 2.3x faster performance at the same power level, and equals peak performance by using a fifth of the power. The higher performance per watt of the M2 allows the system to have a long battery life, and run coolly and quietly, even when playing graphics -intensive games or editing massive RAW images.
Overall, the improvement on paper is huge, but we have to look at benchmarks and comparisons of how big a leap Apple has engineered when compared to the M1 when the new MacBook Air was sold.