Monday, June 6, 2022

Apple M2

Apple (MacRumors, Hacker News):

Built using second-generation 5-nanometer technology, M2 takes the industry-leading performance per watt of M1 even further with an 18 percent faster CPU, a 35 percent more powerful GPU, and a 40 percent faster Neural Engine. It also delivers 50 percent more memory bandwidth compared to M1, and up to 24GB of fast unified memory.

[…]

The media engine includes a higher-bandwidth video decoder, supporting 8K H.264 and HEVC video.

Apple’s powerful ProRes video engine enables playback of multiple streams of both 4K and 8K video.

Previously:

Update (2022-06-10): Dylan Patel:

M2, codenamed Staten, is generally based on the same IP blocks as A15, codenamed Ellis. The codenames being based on some of New York’s most well-known islands which should be a hint to how closely related these architectures are. A lot of the disappointment in performance uplift comes from weak gen-on-gen gains given the nearly 2 yearlong gap versus M1.

[…]

We discussed this in the past, but a lot of the slow down stems from Apple losing leagues of amazing engineers to firms such as Nuvia and Rivos.

[…]

The funkiness of Apple’s marketing image does mean there is an error window of about 3% after the die was scaled in size.

[…]

The [P] core itself is 21% larger than in M1, and 7% larger than A15. The big area of gen-on-gen growth is with the shared L2 cache which has gone from 12MB to 16MB compared to both M1 and A15.

[…]

One very interesting change is that the ROB appears smaller in the Avalanche core that is found in A15 and M2 versus the Firestorm core found in M1 and A14.

[…]

The E-Core was the main unit of change from a CPU perspective from the A14 to A15 and that holds true here.

[…]

The combo of minor wafer price increases, larger dies from 118.91mm2 to 155.25mm2, and more expensive memory hurts [costs] a lot.

Update (2022-06-16): See also: Hacker News.

4 Comments RSS · Twitter

Ghost Quartz

Still limited to single display output (6K at 60Hz). I vaguely recall reading TB4 requiring dual display out, so I assume the I/O is listed as Thunderbolt 3 / USB 4 because of this restriction. It was maybe understandable on the M1 but seems unnecessarily restrictive on the M2… are they trying to upsell buyers to the 14"/16" MBP?

@Ghost_Quartz do you think that is realistic? How are they possibly going to replace the Mac Pro?

Ghost Quartz

@Paul It’s a limitation in the entry-level chip. The M1 Pro/Max/Ultra support two to five external displays depending on the system.

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