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Apple is updating its MacBook Pro 14 and 16 lines with the latest Apple Silicon chips, namely the M2 Pro and M2 Max. How fast is it?
These two new chips are promised to have very high power efficiency and performance, with CPUs of up to 12 cores and GPUs of up to 19 cores (M2 Pro) or up to 32 cores (M2 Max). Only the number of cores more? Certainly not.
According to Apple's claims, these two new chips have 'pro' performance and unrivaled power efficiency compared to their competitors, and only Apple has this kind of chip.
"Only Apple has built a SoC (system on a chip-ed) like the M2 Pro and M2 Max. Both deliver great pro performance and the highest power efficiency in the industry," said Johny Srouji, SVP Hardware Technologies at Apple.
"Even with more powerful CPUs and GPUs, greater unified memory system support, and advanced media engines, the M2 Pro and M2 Max represent an extraordinary improvement on Apple Silicon," added Srouji in his official statement.
The M2 Pro is built using 2nd generation 5nm technology, and has 40 billion transistors in it, or 20% more than the M1 Pro, and twice as many as the M2.
The memory bandwidth is up to 200GB/s, or twice that of the M2, and a low latency unified memory with a capacity of up to 32GB. The CPU, which has 10-12 cores, is divided into up to eight fast cores and four power-efficient cores, which are claimed to produce 20% faster multithreaded CPU performance compared to the M1 Pro CPU.
This multithreaded performance will have an impact on the use of applications such as Photoshop or Xcode, which can utilize all cores and threads on the CPU.
Meanwhile in the GPU sector, the number of cores is up to 19 cores, three more cores than the M1 Pro and has a larger L2 cache. The graphics processing speed is claimed to be 30% faster than the M1 Pro, which has a big impact on image processing capabilities, also -- he said -- can produce game quality with console-level graphics.
Apple M2 Max
While the M2 Max, the number of transistors is much higher. Up to 67 billion, or 10 billion more than the M1 Max and 3x more than the M2. Its unified memory bandwidth reaches 400GB/s, twice as fast as the M2 Pro, and its memory capacity can reach up to 96GB.
What's the impact? Very large files will be opened instantly, and working on several large applications will feel very fast and smooth switching.
The number of CPU cores of M2 Max is 12 cores, same as M2 Pro. However, the number of GPU cores has been boosted, reaching 38 cores, and has a larger L2 cache. With up to 96GB of memory, Apple claims that the MacBook Pro with the M2 Max can process very heavy graphics projects, which, again, cannot be done by rival systems.
Apple said that this test was carried out using a 16-inch MacBook Pro with M2 Max, which was compared with a Windows 11 PC that used a Core i9 (no generation mentioned) with an Nvidia Quadro RTX 6000 GPU that had 24GB GDDR6 VRAM, also compared with a PC that used an RTX 3080. Ti.
According to Apple, this capability of the M2 Max is suitable for various things, from processing visual effects, training machine learning models, to 'stitching' gigapixel-sized images.
Performance is promised to be the same whether connected to a charger or not, and Apple claims the M2 Max is the fastest and most efficient chip for pro laptops at the moment.