Despite reports of M2 Pro and M2 Max based products being delayed again, Apple today announced the launch of new MacBook Pros and Mac Minis with new SoCs. The M2 Pro and M2 Max are more powerful versions of the M2 that launched on the MacBook Air last year.
As Apple describes it, the M2 Pro “scales up” the M2, offering customers 10 or 12 CPU cores and up to 19 GPU cores. The 12-core configuration has 8 high-performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. For comparison, the MacBook Air M2 has an 8-core CPU and either an 8-core or 10-core GPU. The M2 Pro can also be paired with up to 32GB of unified memory.
Apple claims the 12-core M2 Pro is up to 20% faster than the 10-core version of the M1 Pro in multithreaded apps. Performance is up to 20% faster with a new 19-core GPU (three more than the M1 Pro’s).
As a real-life example, Apple says that a 16-inch MacBook with an M2 Pro is 25% faster than its M1 Pro counterpart when compiled in Xcode. It’s also claimed to be 2.5x faster than the previous 16-inch MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i9 processor. Additionally, image processing in Photoshop is reported to be 40% faster than the M1 Pro and 80% faster than the Core i9.
|
M2 Pro |
M2 Promax |
|
|---|---|---|
|
process technology |
5 nanometers |
5 nanometers |
|
number of transistors |
40 billion |
69 billion |
|
CPU core |
10 or 12 cores |
12 cores |
|
GPU core |
16 or 19 cores |
19 or 38 cores |
|
Max LPDDR5 memory |
32GB |
96GB |
|
Unified memory bandwidth |
200GB/s |
400GB/s |
|
neural engine |
16 cores |
16 cores |
The M2 Max is the flagship SoC, featuring the same 12-core CPU as the M2 Pro, but doubling the maximum number of GPU cores to 38. Performance is further enhanced by doubling unified memory bandwidth from 200 GB/s to 400 GB/s. For M2 Pro. As a result, graphics performance is up to 30% faster than the previous M1 Max. The M2 Pro can be paired with up to 32GB of memory, while the M2 Max triples that to 96GB.
The M2 Pro and M2 Max are built on the 5nm process node, with 40 billion and 67 billion transistors respectively. The two chips also share a 16-core neural engine capable of performing approximately 16 trillion operations per second (a 40% improvement over the previous generation). Other features include an enhanced version of the Secure Enclave security platform and an enhanced media engine.
The M2 Pro is available in refreshed versions of the Mac mini, 14-inch MacBook Pro, and 16-inch MacBook Pro. M2 Max is only available on the new MacBook Pro. All Macs with M2 Pro and M2 Max will ship on January 24th.
