Apple has officially launched its all-new M2 chip on Apple WWDC 2022. In the yearly event, the tech giant unveiled more stuff – software and hardware. The new Apple M2 SoC will power all-new Apple MacBook Air 2022 and 13-inch MacBook Pro 2022 laptops. But what are the differences between the two processors – M2 vs M1?
Though we could not test the M2 ourselves at the moment, we have listed all the specs and performance claims made by Apple. It should give you an ample amount of idea of what’s the difference and how does the new CPU differs and compares it to the previous generation M1 chip.
Continue reading the article to get to know everything about the M2 chip and the upgrades it carried with its launch.
M2 vs M1: Release date
The Apple M1 silicon chip was released in 2020. It debuted with the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro which were launched back in 2020.
The Apple M2 processor has been launched in June 2022 and will start to be delivered in July 2022 via MacBook Air and MacBook Pro (13-inch model).
M1 vs M2: Specs
Per Apple, M2 chip is built upon 2nd gen 5nm architecture. On paper, M1 also uses a 5nm node, so it’s not a huge upgrade. But Apple has claimed that it has added an enormous amount (4 billion more) of transistors. So, it should mean a significant boost in performance.
However, Apple didn’t increase the core count for the M2 CPU as compared to the M1. Both CPUs have the same number of core counts, i.e., 8. The 8-core CPU has 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores.
But Apple did increase the number of GPU cores in M2. The M2 sports up to a 10-core GPU. On the other hand, the M1 has a maximum of 8 cores in GPU.
Apple also revealed that M2 supports up to 24GB of LPDDR5 unified memory while M1 chip supports 16GB of memory only.
M2 vs M1: Performance
At the moment, we just have the claims of Apple as we couldn’t test it at the time of writing. So, you should take the claims with a pinch of salt for now.
Apple M2 chip is said to be 18% faster than M1 in terms of CPU speeds. The number of CPU cores is the same, so the performance boost can be attributed to the improvements made to the Apple Silicon architecture.
Apple claims that the new M2 chip’s GPU is 35% faster as compared to that of the M1 GPU. As the number of GPU cores has increased, it should clearly mean a big bump in GPU performance. It would make M2 processor a very good option to buy for graphics-intensive workloads like video editing.
Stay tuned to The Reporter Times as we will be updating this article with the new benchmark scores for the M2 chip.