Apple M2 Revealed: Meet Mac's New Secret Weapon

Apple has revealed its next-gen in-house silicon, the M2, and it is going to appear in the all-new MacBook Air and the updated MacBook Pro slated to hit the shelves next month. Based on the 5nm process — the same as the M1 — Apple claims that the M2 boosts the number of transistors to 20 billion.

The architecture is octa-core, with four performance cores and an equal number of efficiency cores, complemented by an update to the shared cache. The biggest upgrade, however, was reserved for the graphics processing hardware. The M2 comes with a 10-core GPU, up from the 7-core or 8-core GPU configurations offered by the M1. When pitted against PC chips made by the likes of Intel and AMD, Apple claims that the M2 offers "90 percent of the peak performance of the 12-core chip while using just one-fourth the power."

Now, let's talk performance. Apple claims that the M2 is 18% faster than the M1 while still using the same amount of power. Coming to the raw boost in graphics performance, the new Apple chip is claimed to be 25% more powerful than the M1 at the same power consumption level, while the net boost in GPU prowess stands at 35% on a generation-over-generation basis.

The unified memory now touches the 24GB mark, up from the 16GB memory maximum hit by the M1 chip. The memory bandwidth on Apple's second-gen M-series silicon peaks at 100GB/s, which is 50% higher than its predecessor. The upgraded Neural Engine is also touted to hit the 15.8 trillion operations per second mark, allowing it to perform 40% more operations than the M1.

Apple has also upgraded the M2's media engine to feature ProRes encoding/decoding capabilities, allowing users to playback multiple 4K and 8K video streams simultaneously. Apple also gave a demo of gaming on the Mac, with the likes of "Resident Evil Village" coming to the Apple computers powered by the M2 silicon and its predecessor's variants.

The company hasn't shared any details about the M2 SKUs just yet. However, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman recently speculated that the M2, just like the M1 before, will spawn its own series of powerful CPUs that will include Pro, Max, and Ultra variants. An M2 Extreme is also said to be in the pipeline and it will reportedly cram as many as 48 CPU cores and up to 128 GPU cores on the board.