The Apple brand has lifted the veil on its new laptops and Mac mini model. To complete its catalog, the American giant is also unveiling the new M2 Pro and M2 Max chips, which multiply the already very solid performance of the M2 processors launched last summer.
Deep technical advances
Officially divorced from Intel, which provided MacBook chips before 2020, Apple is continuing its merry way with its own “M” chips. We have come to the second generation, and the brand is now presenting its most advanced models: the M2 Pro and M2 Max.
These will find their way to the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro and the new Mac mini (M2 Pro only). So what exactly are they up to?
The M2 chip is a 5 nm SoC containing a 10-core processor, a 16-core graphics circuit, 16 GB of unified RAM, and a 16-core NPU. In its most muscular (and most expensive) configuration, you can even go to 12 cores for the CPU, 19 cores for the GPU, and 32 GB of unified RAM.
The SoC has 40 billion transistors, which is a 20% increase over the M1 Pro. Apple also promises doubled memory bandwidth (200 GB/s) compared to the recent M2 chip. In terms of image processing and graphics performance (especially in games), the graphics chip makes a giant leap which, according to the manufacturer, would be equivalent to 1.3x that of the M1 Pro.
The M2 Pro chip explodes all the counters.
At the end of the food chain, however, there is the M2 Max chip which does not compromise on anything in technical terms.
With 67 billion transistors (against 57 billion for the M1 Max), this chip still engraved in 5 nm has a 12-core processor and a 19 or 38-core GPU for its most powerful version. It comes with 16 GB of unified RAM by default and can reach a total of 96 GB if you put the price on it.
A RAM that still sees its bandwidth doubled compared to the M2 Pro chip, with 400 GB/s. Cut for image professionals in need of extravagant power, the M2 Max is displayed 30% faster on this type of graphic process than its predecessor – already more than capable in this area. And Apple declares, “ the M2 Max chip is the world’s most powerful and energy-efficient business notebook chip. »
On the other hand, M2 Pro and M2 Max have identical decoding and hardware acceleration capabilities with support for H.264 and ProRes, particularly on several 4K and 8K ProRes streams. Except that the Max model boasts video encoding twice as fast as the M2 Pro.
