Appleduring WWDC 2022 on Monday, announced the chip M2successor to the M1 family, available in the brand new ones MacBook Air e Pro revealed during the event. The company has, as always, praised the incredible performance of the new chip, elected the most performing ever. But let’s try to deepen the differences between the M1 and M2 chips.
Apple chip M2: the main differences from the M1
The head AnandTech has explored the features of the new SoC Apple Silicon, despite Apple not being too unbuttoned about specs, such as clock speed. We will certainly know more in case of further revelations from the company and concrete evidence of the new hardware that will be released soon.
Chip M1 vs M2 | Photo credits: Apple.
According to AnandTech’s Ryan Smith, in any case, the M2 looks a lot like a derivative of Apple’s A15 SoC, like the M1 it was similar to the A14. “Consequently, at first glance, the upgrade from M1 to M2 looks quite similar to the upgrade from A14 to A15,” he says.
Apple said the M2 chip is based on “a second generation 5nm process”. This increases performance without increasing the density of the transistors, and this is possible because the M2 chip is physically larger than the M1. Smith then collected data shared by Apple in a table, showing the main differences.
Credits: AnandTech.
The warhead suggests that one of the key differences between the M1 and M2 chips is that the latter has more powerful efficiency cores. “The M2 retains the main configuration of 4 core performance plus 4 efficiency. Apple doesn’t reveal which generation of CPU cores it uses, but based on performance expectations, there is every reason to believe these are the Avalanche and Blizzard cores. Which were first introduced on the A15. ” he claims Ryan Smith.
I type cores Avalanche they would offer performance gains. In addition, major updates are focused onoverall energy efficiencyas we have seen with the A15.
All in all, the M2 chip’s GPU appears to be more efficient energetically, but if you want to harness its full power, it will use more energy than the M1. “Apple is touting two performance figures for the M2’s GPU. At around 12W, the M2 should deliver 25% faster GPU performance than the M1. However, the M2’s GPU can, for better or worse, also draw more power than the M1’s GPU. At its full power state of 15 Watts, according to Apple it can deliver 35% more performance. ” writes Smith. It is also important to point out that the base M2 chip gets support for Apple’s ProRes and ProRes RAW codecswhich is only available on the Pro, Max and Ultra versions of the M1.
The M2 chip also supports memory LPDDR5 – like the more powerful versions of the M1s – compared to LPDDR4 of the base M1. This allows the chip to have around 50% more memory bandwidth, which will lend a hand to GPU performance.
All that remains is to wait for the concrete evidence
Photo credits: Apple.
He chips M2, as a result, it is much better performing than the base M1 chip, the direct competitor during Apple’s presentation. Obviously these comparisons are made on the basis of the technical data sheet: you will be able to find out more as soon as the new MacBooks are available. Recall that Apple, in fact, for now will insert the new chip in the next one MacBook Air 2022 and in the update of the 13 ”MacBook Prowhich will be available next month and are already available for pre-order now.