This story is part of WWDC 2022, CNET’s full coverage of and about Apple’s annual developer conference.
Apple on Monday unveiled the new M2 processor, a chip that improves basic processing performance by 18% over the M1 without compromising the battery life of the company’s new 13-inch MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops.
The 18% increase in speed comes from the redesigned central processing units of the M2. The processor has four fast CPU cores and four efficient cores, a hybrid approach taken from the world of smartphones. By redesigning the graphics processing units and increasing the count to a maximum of 10 instead of eight for the M1, GPU performance is 35% faster. Overall, the new MacBook Air is 20% faster in Photoshop image editing and 38% faster in Final Cut Pro video editing, Apple said.
“We continue to focus on energy-efficient performance,” Johny Srouji, leader of Apple’s hardware team, told the World Developers Conference.
Energy efficiency is crucial to reduce laptops, as the most important component is the battery. The new MacBook Airs take up 20 percent less volume, but still have a long battery life of 18 hours, Apple said. The company is also using the M2 on a new 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Apple’s M2 processor has large amounts of high-speed cache built into the chip itself and up to 24 MB of normal memory included in the chip package, two attributes that should increase performance over the M1 of the Apple was 2020.
Screenshots of Stephen Shankland / CNET
The M2 processor also has a significant increase in memory, reaching up to 24 GB instead of 16 GB for the M1. Memory is important, especially as software gets older and laptops have a lifespan of years. M-Series chips incorporate memory directly into the processor package for fast performance, but cannot be upgraded.
Apple debuted the M1 at the 2020 WWDC and began shipping it later that year to the previous version of the MacBook Air. The M1, along with the more robust successors called the M1 Pro, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra, struck an effective balance between performance and battery life and garnered rave reviews.
The M2 doubles with the same balanced approach, offering up-to-date processing cores that are variants of the chips at the heart of newer iPhones. The new chips continue with the phasing out of Intel processors from the Mac family of personal computers and could allow the latest member with Intel technology, the Mac Pro, to switch to Apple chips.
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Designing processors is an expensive and difficult task. But with the M-Series chips, Apple takes advantage of the A-Series chip design work it already does for its iPhones and iPads, then pays Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to build chips in their advanced product lines.
The M2 is based on TSMC’s 5 nm (5 nanometer) manufacturing process, but is an improved version of the one used for the M1. TSMC is working on a more advanced 3 nm process that should allow customers to introduce a little more transistors, the basic electronic elements that process data on a chip.
The M2 has 20 billion transistors, 25% more than the M1, Apple said.
One use of the new transistors is to increase the number of GPUs. Another is an improved neural engine: a block of chips used to speed up artificial intelligence workloads. The new 16-core neural engine can perform 15.8 trillion operations per second, Apple said, a 40% increase in speed.
With its own chips, Apple gains more control over the technology base of its products, an important principle for CEO Tim Cook. This includes both the processor itself, with specific features such as AI acceleration, video encoding and security, and the software that Apple writes to take advantage of these features.
Apple’s M and A series chips are members of the Arm processor family. Arm, based in the UK, licenses designs that companies can customize to varying degrees. The Arm chips from Qualcomm, Apple, MediaTek, Samsung, Google and others power almost every smartphone that sells.
The Apple M2 processor is significantly larger than the M1. This increases manufacturing costs. Apple raised the prices of its M2-based MacBook Air laptops.
Screenshot of Stephen Shankland / CNET
Intel has struggled for most of the past decade with problems advancing its manufacturing. This halted their progress as Apple, Qualcomm, AMD, Nvidia and other Intel rivals took advantage of TSMC’s manufacturing progress.
Because Apple doesn’t offer its chips to others, and because most computers use Intel processors, Intel is a bit isolated from Apple’s switch. Intel is working to modernize its manufacturing, spending tens of billions of dollars on new chip factories. Intel aims to regain its lead over its rivals TSMC and Samsung in 2024.
Intel’s latest PC processor, codenamed Alder Lake, includes the same combination of high-performance, high-performance CPU cores found in smartphone chips and Apple’s M series. Future products are designed to improve GPU performance, particularly with Intel’s revamped focus on high-end graphics designed to leave the company dependent on AMD and Nvidia. This is important for a large market, games, where computers with Intel and AMD processors are used much more than Macs.