The American tech giant, Apple, has launched its next-gen SoCs—M2 Pro and M2 Max. These processors are the successor of the previous-gen M1 Pro and M1 Max. Moreover, you’ll find these powerful SoCs at the heart of Apple’s new 14-inch and 16-inch 2023 MacBook Pro.
Talking about the processors, they scale up the architecture of M2 to deliver more CPU cores, GPU cores, and unified memory. Besides, the M2 Pro and M2 Max feature enhanced custom technologies, including a faster 16-core Neural Engine and Apple’s powerful media engine.
Apple M2 Pro
Starting with the Apple M2 Pro, this chip is built using a second-gen 5nm process technology. It has twice as many transistors as M2, and 20% more than M1 Pro, totaling 40 billion. Adding on, the 10- or 12-core CPU in the M2 Pro features up to eight high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores, resulting in up to 20% greater multithreaded CPU performance than the M1 Pro's 10-core CPU.
Talking about its GPU, the graphics speed can go up by 30% as the M2 Pro can be configured with up to 19-core GPU. Besides, you get Apple’s next-gen 16-core Neural Engine, capable of 15.8 trillion operations per second, which is up to 40% faster than the previous generation. The new chip also supports up to 32GB of unified memory with 200GB/s of unified memory bandwidth.
Hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC, and ProRes video encode and decode are among the Apple M2 Pro's additional features, enabling the playback of multiple streams of 4K and 8K ProRes video. In addition, the latest image signal processor delivers better noise reduction, and the next-gen Secure Enclave provides the best-in-class security.
Apple M2 Max
Out of the two new Apple silicons, the M2 Max is the most powerful one. It is built on the capabilities of M2 Pro, making it the world’s most powerful and power-efficient chip for a pro laptop.
First off, the M2 Max boasts 67 billion transistors, which is more than three times as many as the M2 and 10 billion more than the M1 Max. Second, the chip supports up to 96GB of fast unified memory running at 400GB/s, which is twice that of M2 Pro and four times that of M2.
Like the M2 Pro, the M2 Max also features the same next-gen 12-core CPU. However, the GPU gets a massive bump with up to 38 cores, paired with a larger L2 cache. According to Apple, the graphics speed on the M2 Max climbs up by 30% more than M1 Max.
The M2 Max further features two video-encode engines and two ProRes engines that offer up to 2 times faster video encoding than M2 Pro.
Conclusion
With the introduction of the Apple M2 Pro and M2 Max silicons, we now have some of the powerful laptop SoCs powering the 2023 MacBooks. Both these chips are extremely powerful and power-efficient that can quickly tackle graphics-intensive projects while maintaining excellent battery life.
Source: Apple News Room
