Introduced The New Generation Of Apple Silicon; With 5nm Lithography, The M2 Offers An 18- And 35% Improvement In CPU And Graphics Performance Over The M1.
Apple seized the opportunity at WWDC 2022 and finally, two years later, introduced the new generation of Apple Silicon. The M2 is produced with 5-nanometer TSMC lithography compared to the M1, and it improves by up to 18% in CPU performance and 35% in GPU performance.
20 billion transistors and 100 Gbps bandwidth
Apple says the new M2 chip will be produced with “5-nanometer second-generation” lithography and will have up to 20 billion transistors on its surface. The M2 still has integrated memory, but its bandwidth is reaching 50 Gbps with a 50% improvement. Unlike the previous generation, which limits to 16 GB of RAM, Apple’s new chip is now compatible with 24 GB of LPDDR5 RAM with a 128-bit bus. All modules on the chip, including the CPU and GPU, have access to this memory.
Technical specifications of M2 vs. M1 |
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|---|---|---|---|
Parameters / Chip |
Apple M2 |
Apple M1 |
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| The manufacturing process | 5 nm second-generation TSMC | 5nm N5 TSMC |
|
| CPU | High-powered 4- core, low-power 4 -core |
4-core Firestorm with a maximum frequency of 3.2 GHz 4-core Icestorm with a maximum frequency of 2.0 GHz |
|
| Cache memory | 12MB L2 cache and 320K L1 cache for each high-powered kernel 4MB L2 cache and 192K L1 cache for each low-power kernel |
12MB L2 cache and 320K L1 cache for each Firestorm kernel 4MB L2 cache and 192K L1 cache for each Icestorm kernel 12MB system cache for the whole chip |
|
| Memory Bass | 128 bits | 128 bits | |
| DRAM | Up to 24 GB LPDDR5-6200 | 8 or 16 GB LPDDR4x-4266 RAM | |
| Memory bandwidth | 100 GB / s | Up to 68.2 GB per second | |
| GPU | 8 or 10 core graphics processing | 7 or 8 core graphics processing up to 1024 logical computing units 64 texture management units 32 output rendering units |
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| The computational power of FP32 graphics |
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6 Traflaps | |
8-core processor and eight or 10-core graphics
As before, the M2 chip uses a combination of low-power quad-core and high-power quad-core as the CPU. Apple says the kernel architecture has been upgraded, and the available L2 cache for high-power cores has been increased from 12MB to 16MB, But the sum of the smaller hearts still uses 4 MB of L2 cache.
Cupertino residents say the CPU used in the M2 chip with the same power consumption as the M1 is up to 18% faster while delivering 87% better performance than the 12-core Core i7-1260P processor with 25% less power.
While an 8-core GPU powered the M1 chip, Apple’s new generation Silicon uses 10-core graphics. Apple says the GPU used in the M2 chip has more L2 cache and provides 3.6 teraflops of computing power on numbers with a floating-point FP32; Thus, the computing power of M2 experiences a 35% improvement compared to M1.
18% and 35% CPU and GPU upgrades
Apple says the graphics processor used in the M2 can deliver Intel Core i7-1265U integrated graphics computing power with one to five power consumption. Its maximum power consumption (just over 15 watts) appears 2.3 times faster than that.
The new generation M2 chip has Secure Enclave modules and a neural processing engine at its heart. The new M2 16-core neural engine can perform 15.8 trillion operations per second, a 40% improvement over the M1. And the new generation Apple Silicon Media Engine now can encode and decode ProRes videos and 8K H.264 video processing.
At WWDC 2022, Cupertino residents unveiled the next-generation MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro with the M2 chip. Still, given the trend we saw in the previous generation, it is likely that McMainey, the 24-inch Aimak, iPad Pro, and iPad Air will also be equipped with the M2 in the future.