When Apple unveiled the M2 chipset last June, it brought an 18% CPU and 35% GPU performance boost compared to the original M1. However, the M2 was only available in one configuration – 8 CPU cores and 10 GPU cores.
Today, Cupertino is unveiling two higher-powered chips, the M2 Pro and M2 Max, which pack on more cores and add support for more memory. Apple also announced two new products built with the new chips, the MacBook Pro (14” and 16”) and the Mac mini, these are covered in a separate post.
The Apple M2 Pro chipset is built on a second-generation 5nm node and has 40 billion transistors, 20% more than the M1 Pro. The new chip also supports up to 32GB of total memory with 200GB/s bandwidth.
The M2 Pro has 10 or 12 CPU cores – 6 or 8 high-performance cores plus 4 high-efficiency cores – as well as up to 19 GPU cores plus larger L2 cache.
Apple M2 Pro CPU and GPU configuration
This results in up to 20% higher CPU performance compared to the M1 Pro (10-core) and 30% higher GPU performance.
The Apple M2 Max chip has a whopping 67 billion transistors, three times as many as the base M2. It also supports up to 96GB of total memory (4x what the M2 can handle) running 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 twice as big with up to 38 cores, the L2 cache is even bigger.
Apple M2 Max CPU and GPU configuration
Both the M2 Pro and the M2 Max share some hardware. Both use the 16-core Neural Engine capable of 15.8 TOPS, 40% faster than the previous generation. They also have built-in video encode/decode engines and ProRes engines – one of each in Pro, two of each in Max. This means the chips can handle multiple 4K and 8K video streams using ProRes, HEVC and H.264.
The new MacBook Pros, which use M2 Pro and M2 Max chips, can last up to 22 hours on a single charge. The old M1-based MacBook Pros topped out at 21 hours.
