Apple announced the M2 chip, claims to be 18 percent more powerful than M1!

The Cupertino giant just unveiled the new MacBook Air in the global market, and inside it is the flagship processor called M2.

Apple revealed the M2 chip

The birth of 2nd generation Apple chip

After the M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra chips, Apple is now ready to move on to a more powerful M2 chip. The company introduced it during the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with great claims of performance improvements. 

Apple's Senior VP of Hardware Technologies Johny Srouji explained,

M2 starts the second generation of M-series chips and goes beyond the remarkable features of M1. With our relentless focus on power-efficient performance, M2 delivers a faster CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine. And along with higher memory bandwidth and new capabilities like ProRes acceleration, M2 continues the tremendous pace of innovation in Apple silicon for the Mac.

The new M2 still uses Apple's custom Arm silicon, and it's created on a 5nm process complete with 20 billion transistors, which is 25 percent more than the original M1. The company is using four high-performance cores, with four high-efficiency cores on the M2, with a shared 16MB cache on the performance cores, and a shared 4MB cache on the efficiency ones.

The M2 is said to have an 18 percent CPU speed boost, 35 more powerful GPU, and 40 percent faster Neural Engine compared to its predecessor. Allegedly, this one also offers 50 percent more memory bandwidth versus M1 and up to 24GB of fast unified memory.

According to Apple, the M2 is faster than the "latest 10-core PC laptop chip". It also sports a next-generation secure enclave and neural engine and an updated media engine that supports 8K H.264 and HEVC video. This means systems that run M2 chips can simultaneously handle multiple streams of 4K and 8K video.

Apple also made enhancements on its GPU since it now has 10 cores, compared to 8 cores of M1. As a result, it now has a bigger cache and higher memory bandwidth that should increase graphics performance here. As mentioned earlier, this promises up to 35 percent better performance compared to the predecessor.

Lastly, the Cupertino giant said that M2 can deliver a power-efficient performance of M2 for the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro.

Source: Apple