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American electronics giant, Apple, on Tuesday unveiled its next-generation custom-designed SoCs (systems on a chip), the M2 Pro and the M2 Max, which the company claims will take the "power-efficient performance of Apple silicon to new heights."
Additionally, the company also revealed the launch of two new products that will be powered by the new chipsets, the MacBook Pro (14” and 16”) and the Mac mini.
The M2 Pro processor is built on a second-generation 5nm process technology and supports 32GB of low-latency unified memory with 200GB/s bandwidth. The new chipset houses 40 billion transistors which are nearly 20% more than the older M1 Pro, the company said in a press release. The company claims that the M2 Pro multithreaded CPU performance is up to 20 per cent faster than the 10-core CPU in M1 Pro.
The M2 Pro chipset will have 10 or 12 CPU cores: Up to eight high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores. It will have a GPU that can be configured with up to 19 GPU cores and feature a larger L2 cache.
"The GPU in M2 Pro can be configured with up to 19 cores — three more than the GPU in M1 Pro — and includes a larger L2 cache. Graphics speeds are up to 30 percent faster than that of M1 Pro, resulting in huge increases in image processing performance and enabling console-quality gaming," the company wrote in a blog post.
On the other hand, the M2 Max is a much more powerful processor with support for up to 96GB of fast unified memory. The chipset has 67 billion transistors which is 10 billion more than the older M1 Max and three times that of M2. Additionally, the M2 Max has a bigger GPU with 38 cores and boasts a larger L2 cache. Apple claims that the M2 Max graphics performance is 30 percent faster than the M1 Max.
"From powering visual effects, to training machine learning models, to stitching together gigapixel images, MacBook Pro with M2 Max brings incredible performance whether plugged in or running on battery power. M2 Max is the world’s most powerful and efficient chip for a pro laptop," the company wrote.
Despite the differences, the two chipsets share similarities including Apple’s next-generation 16-core Neural Engine, built-in video encode/decode engines, ProRes engines and Secure Enclave. The company claims that the Neural Engine is capable of 15.8 trillion operations per second and delivers up to 40 per cent faster than the previous generation. Both chipsets have hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC, and ProRes video encoding and decoding. These chipsets are also very energy efficient and can handle multiple streams of 4K and 8K ProRes video while using very little power.