We didn’t count on any design adjustments since there was a significant overhaul final 12 months and Apple normally makes use of designs for a number of years. Apple launched the common M2 processor within the new MacBook Air final 12 months and the chip was nonetheless manufactured in a 5 nm course of (N5P). This lead many to imagine that the brand new M2 Professional and M2 Max chips will already be primarily based on a brand new and extra environment friendly 3 nm course of. Nevertheless, this isn’t what we obtained and Apple nonetheless makes use of the acquainted, though optimized, 5 nm course of. Our experiences with the common M2 SoC within the new MacBook Air already give us some hints for the efficiency of the brand new MacBook Professional fashions. Our evaluation clearly confirmed that the M2 supplied extra CPU efficiency in comparison with the outdated M1, nevertheless it additionally required extra energy, so the effectivity went down.
Apple continues this technique with the brand new M2 Professional and M2 Max SoCs by doubling the variety of effectivity cores from two to 4. The bottom mannequin of the M2 Professional (solely accessible within the MBP 14) will get 6 efficiency cores, all different fashions are outfitted with 8 efficiency cores, so each chip variant will get two extra effectivity cores. Apple has elevated the core clocks just like the common M2, so we as soon as once more count on a efficiency improve together with increased energy consumption and due to this fact decreased effectivity.
All in all, the brand new chips are just about improved variations of the M2 chip with extra cores (each for the CPU in addition to GPU), the improved neural engine (in comparison with the M1 Professional & M1 Max) in addition to a wider reminiscence interface. Nevertheless, the reminiscence bandwidth continues to be just like the outdated chip at 200 GB/s and 400 GB/s for the M2 Max, which as soon as once more suggests 256-bit LPDDR5 RAM and 512-bit LPDDR5-RAM, respectively. Apple additionally elevated the utmost quantity of RAM to 96 GB for the M2 Max with 38 GPU cores, however the reminiscence bandwidth continues to be 400 GB/s.