When Apple unveiled the M2 chipset in June last year, it brought an 18% CPU and 35% GPU performance boost over the original M1. However, the M2 was only available in one configuration: 8 CPU cores and 10 GPU cores.
Today Cupertino is lifting the veil from two higher-powered chips, the M2 Pro and M2 Max, which stack more cores and add support for more memory. Apple also announced two new products built on the new chips, MacBook Pro (14″ and 16″) and Mac mini, which we’ll discuss in a separate post.
The Apple M2 Pro chipset is built on a second-generation 5nm node and features 40 billion transistors, which is 20% more than the M1 Pro. The new chip also supports up to 32GB of unified bandwidth memory of 200GB/s.
The M2 Pro has 10 or 12 CPU cores – 6 or 8 high-performance cores plus 4 high-efficiency cores – plus up to 19 GPU cores, plus a larger L2 cache.
Apple M2 Pro CPU and GPU configuration
This results in up to 20% higher CPU performance than the M1 Pro (10 cores) and 30% higher GPU performance.
The Apple M2 Max chip has a whopping 67 billion transistors, triple the base M2. It also supports up to 96GB of unified memory (4 times what the M2 can handle) at 400GB/s (twice as fast as the M2 Pro).
The CPU is the same as the 12-core version of the M2 Pro. The GPU is double the size with up to 38 cores, the L2 cache is even bigger.
Apple M2 Max CPU and GPU configuration
Both M2 Pro and M2 Max share some hardware. Both use a 16-core Neural Engine capable of 15.8 TOPS, 40% faster than the previous generation. They also have built-in video encoding/decoding engines as well as ProRes engines – one for each in the Pro, two for each in the Max. This means the chips can handle multiple 4K and 8K video streams using ProRes, HEVC and H.264.
The new MacBook Pros that use the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips can last up to 22 hours on a single charge. Older M1-based MacBook Pros exceeded 21 hours.
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