Apple has teased the M2 Pro and M2 Max for a while, and they have been finally unveiled by the American technology company.
The Apple M2 Pro and M2 Max both come as improved and more powerful versions of the Apple M2 which was launched in July of last year. The Apple M2 itself was a noticeable step up from the original Apple M1, the first gen of Apple Silicon for Macs.
As well as the Apple M2 Pro and M2 Max, Apple also unveiled the new MacBook Pro and Mac mini models which is runs on the new chips.
In this article, I’ll share everything you need to know about the new Apple M2 Pro and M2 Max chipsets. Let’s get into it right away.
Apple M2 Pro
The Apple M2 Pro is the least powerful of the duo but when compared to the original Apple M2 or Apple M1 Pro, it is a significant upgrade.
The chipset is built on a second gen 5nm fabrication node which is known to be more efficient in power consumption. This leads to an industry-leading performance-per-watt ratio.
The M2 Pro features 40 billion transistors which is a massive step up from the 32 billion transistors that the M1 Pro featured.
It supports up to 32GB of LPDDR5 unified memory with a bandwidth of 200GB per second. This is a great feat and it will lead to better overall performance.
The Apple M2 Pro comes with either 10 or 12 CPU cores. It is 6 high-performance cores with 4 high-efficiency cores or 8 high-performance cores with 4 high-efficiency cores. It also has a larger L2 cache. The chipset comes with up to 19 GPU cores so it will eat up most graphics-intensive tasks easily.
The chipset has a 16-core Neural Engine which processes 15.8 trillion operations per second. According to Apple, it is about 40% faster than the previous gen.
It also has one built-in video encode/decode engine and one ProRes engine. This makes the chipset handle multiple 4K and 8K video streams using ProRes, HEVC, and H.264.
Apple says this chipset offers 20% higher CPU performance and 30% higher CPU performance over the M1 Pro.
Apple M2 Max
The Apple M2 Max is the most powerful out of the duo and it is a direct step up from the already very powerful Apple M1 Max.
It is also built on the same second-gen of 5nm fabrication process as the Apple M2 Pro. It is also very power efficient despite it being a powerhouse.
The M2 Max chipset features a mind-blowing 67 billion transistors which are 3X more than the base M2 or 1.7X more than the M2 Pro chip.
The chipset supports up to 96GB of LPDDR5 unified school and it has a memory bandwidth of 400GB per second. It is 4X more RAM than the M2 and is 2X faster than the M2 Pro.
The Apple M2 Max chipset comes with the same 12-core CPU as the M2 Pro but it has a more graphics performance with up to 38-core GPU. The L2 cache is also even bigger than the M2 Pro so expect better performance.
It features the same 16-core Neural Engine as the M2 Pro. It has two built-in video encode/decode engines and two ProRes engines. It will handle multiple 4K and 8K video streams using ProRes, HEVC, and H.264 better than the M2 Pro.
Power efficiency is a major talking point of the Apple M2 Pro and M2 Max. The new MacBook Pros running on the two new chips can last up to 22 hours on a single charge. They also perform better than their predecessors in literally everything.
