Apple unveiled the M2 chipset in June last year. That chip came with an 18% CPU and 35% GPU performance boost compared to the original M1. However, the M2 was only available in one configuration: 8 CPU cores and 10 GPU cores. Now Apple is unveiling the two more powerful chips, the M2 Pro and M2 Max. Both chips come with more cores and add support for more memory. Apple also announced two new products built with the new chips, MacBook Pro (14″ and 16″) and Mac mini. In this article we only cover the new chips.
Apple M2 Pro and M2 Max: Next-generation chips are now official
The Apple M2 Pro chipset is built on a second generation 5nm node. It features 40 billion transistors, 20% more than the M1 Pro. The new chip also supports up to 32 GB of unified memory with a bandwidth of 200 GB/s.
The M2 Pro has 10 or 12 CPU cores – 6 or 8 high-performance cores plus 4 high-efficiency cores – and up to 19 GPU cores, plus a larger L2 cache. This results in up to 20% higher CPU performance compared to the M1 Pro (10-core) and 30% higher GPU performance.
On the other hand, the Apple M2 Max chip has a whopping 67 billion transistors, three times as many as the base M2. It also supports up to 96GB of unified memory (4x what the M2 can handle) running at 400GB/s (twice as fast as the M2 Pro).
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The CPU is the same as the 12-core version of the M2 Pro. The GPU is twice the size with up to 38 cores, the L2 cache is even bigger.
Both the M2 Pro and M2 Max share the same hardware. Both use a 16-core Neural Engine capable of 15.8 TOPS, 40% faster than the previous generation. They also have built-in video encoding/decoding engines and ProRes engines – one of each in the Pro and two of each in the Max. This means the chips can handle multiple 4K and 8K video streams using ProRes, HEVC, and H.264.
The new MacBook Pros that use the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips can last up to 22 hours on a single charge.
