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CUPERTINO, California: Exactly two years after Apple first announced the M1, its direct successor has finally been revealed. Apple executives and product managers presented details about the new chip, predictably called the M2, during its annual developer conference.
The M2 is an improvement on many aspects of the M1, but it is not intended to surpass the high-end M1 Pro, M1 Max or M1 Ultra seen in the MacBook Pro and Mac Studio. The M2 Pro, Max, and Ultra variants have more CPU and GPU cores that will still outperform M2 performance enhancements.
Like its predecessor, the M2 has eight CPU cores: four high-performance cores and four low-efficiency cores. Apple says it will perform about 18 percent faster than the M1’s CPU. It also increases the GPU cores from eight to 10, providing a 35 percent increase in performance, although as with M1 we can see several versions of the M2 chip being shipped with different numbers of GPU cores.
Expand / An overview of the new functions of M2.
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Apple says the M2 uses 20 billion transistors, 25% more than the M1, and has 100 GB / s of memory bandwidth; this should benefit the performance of the integrated GPU, among other tasks. The processor is still based on a 5 nm manufacturing process, the same as M1. The chip will also support up to 24GB of memory, more than the 16GB limit of M1.
The first Mac to ship with the new M2 will be an upgraded MacBook Air. We will detail this laptop in a separate post.
Apple’s WWDC presentation is underway and this article will be updated with new details as we get them. You can follow it in real time with our liveblog here.