At this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple revealed the next generation of its home-grown silicon. The M2 chip is taking everything the M1 chip from 2020 did and doing it more efficiently. At least, that’s what Apple says. The charts and numbers are pretty. But then they would be, wouldn’t they?
Damn Apple, give the others a chance
The new M2 will feature an eight-core CPU (four performance cores and four efficiency cores), a ten-core GPU, and is built on a 5nm architecture. It’ll offer up to 100GB/s of unified memory bandwidth, double that of the M1. It’ll allow for up to 24GB of shared memory between the CPU and GPU.
Apple claims this provides an 18% increase in multithreaded CPU performance and a 35% faster GPU. Video editing will also see a big improvement. The new M2 chip will include ProRes encoding and decoding and will feature support for 6K displays.
Apple’s new M2 will first feature in the company’s new MacBook Air and Macbook Pro 13in models, available in the States in July starting at $1,199 (R18,400)and $1,299 (R19,900) respectively. This will see the M1 MacBook drop to $999 (R15,300). We’ll probably need to wait a week or three before we hear when South Africa will get these and how much they’ll cost locally.
