The First Apple M2 Benchmark Results Are Out - Here's What They Reveal

It was at WWDC 2022 that Apple took the covers off the newest chipset from the company's self-designed Apple Silicon range. The new M2 chip is a direct successor to the first generation Apple M1 chip that launched two years ago and is slated to power most entry-level Mac products for the foreseeable future. Typical of Apple, the M2 chip segment saw the company make several performance improvement claims over the older M1 chips. These claims were accompanied by ambiguous graphs that claimed that the M2 chips would offer at least an 18% improvement in CPU performance over the M1 chips while consuming the same amount of power.

However, these claims were not backed by third-party benchmark results that chipmakers generally use as supporting material. For the same reason, when it comes to Apple Silicon-related benchmarks, consumers usually wait for real-world benchmark results before committing to a purchase. And that is exactly what has happened this time around, too, with the first M2 benchmarks having begun to appear just before the products begin to go on sale. The first of these benchmarks appeared on Geekbench, and initial impressions are that Apple's claim about the near 20% improvement in performance is realistic.

The first Apple M2 benchmark scores come from the M2 chip housed inside the newly launched 13-inch MacBook Pro. Compared to the M1-powered MacBook Pro models, this chip runs at a higher clock speed and manages to score 1919 points in the single-core tests on Geekbench. This makes the M2 chip 12% faster than the older M1 chip, which had a single-core score of around 1700. When it came to multicore scores, the improvement on the M2 MacBook Pro was around 20% — with the new machine scoring 8928 points compared to around 7419 on the older M1-powered machines.

The 10-core GPU on the Apple M2 chip also helped it score 30627 points in the Metal benchmark. This is a significant improvement over the score of 21001 by the M1 chip that featured an 8-core GPU.

To get your hands on the new M2-powered Macs, consumers will need to wait a few more days. While Apple has confirmed that the new MacBook Pro shall be up for preorder starting June 17, Apple has not yet released availability details about the next M2-powered machine that'll hit store shelves: the M2-powered MacBook Air.