Expectations have been exceptionally high for Apple’s new M2 processor to outperform Intel’s best CPUs, but in the end, the M2 won’t outperform Intel’s faster chips. That was the news of Apple’s WWDC presentation on Monday.
The new 8-core M2 processor will appear on a redesigned MacBook Air as well as an upgraded MacBook Pro laptop. The M2 includes 50 percent more memory bandwidth than the M1, and CPU performance is 18 percent faster, according to Apple.
But despite its state-of-the-art 5 nm TSMC process and 20 billion transistors, Apple said the new M2 is slower than Intel’s best chips.
Obviously, Apple didn’t emphasize this narrative, and its performance slide below shows the new M2 surpassing a 10-core Intel Core i7-1255U on a Samsung Galaxy Book 2 360.
What exactly Apple says is that the M2 is faster, well, we don’t know, since the company has never publicly defined the meaning of its performance criteria. We have no doubt that it is based on reality, as public companies do not invent things for fear of demands, and the original M1 is an incredibly fast chip.
Apple’s new M2 outperforms the Core i7-1255U
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When the M1 came out, Intel’s best CPUs were pretty big, but today it’s a different story. Intel’s new 12th generation CPUs are really very competitive against Intel’s key opponent, AMD, as well as its secondary enemy, Apple.
This can be seen on Apple’s second slide, which I’m pleasantly surprised to see, as Apple admits that the new M2 is slower than the 12-core Core i7-1260P on an MSI Prestige 14 Evo laptop. Apple is also to be praised for showing the full performance graphics, as it took a long time to essentially truncate the performance of Nvdia GPUs to make the M1 Ultra look more powerful. So, yes, surprising: Apple actually says that the Intel Core i7 is faster.
The M2 may not outperform Intel’s Core i7-1260P in performance, but it can definitely outperform it in energy efficiency.
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Obviously, this isn’t just gross performance, and Apple’s main point is that it can deliver exceptional performance with the M2 at a fraction of the power consumption of an Intel Core i7-1260P CPU. In fact, this has been Apple’s key strength, as it can no longer be supported by the “we’re much faster” argument.
I will not be petty and insist that it is not a shock, a 5 nm chip is more efficient than a 10 nm chip. But I’m sure someone will do it on Reddit, on YouTube comments, or on Twitter. In the end, if you like a longer battery, you should seriously consider a MacBook as an option.
But I want to point out a fallacy of anyone arguing that a Core i7-1260P is a full-time power pig. Intel’s mantra lately has been to push extremely high magnification clocks for a few microseconds or milliseconds to increase responsiveness. In fact, this MSI Prestige 14 Evo would advance with low power usage, and when you click on a browser link, it could increase to 55 watts for a split second and then re-establish itself with a low energy use.
I don’t want to look partisan and just show off Apple’s split victories at M2. One area where Apple seems to dominate is in graphics. With its additional graphics cores, Apple says it can outperform the Samsung Galaxy Book2 360 with a Core i7-1255U by 2.3 times the whiplash while using less power.
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This is something to be commended for, as Intel’s Iris Xe graphics, while older, are a big improvement over their UHD graphics. This last point is something that will surely annoy AMD fans who are still up to par with the amazing performance of the new Ryzen 6000 series. With its RDNA2 graphics cores and 6 nm process, it currently also easily surpasses the Intel Iris Xe.
How would the M2 go with an AMD Ryzen 7 6800U? This is something we are curious to find out.
In the end, M2 looks like an impressive sequel to M2 and, in its very narrow ecosystem of software and hardware, a pretty impressive upgrade for Mac fans who haven’t made the switch to M1 yet.