Manzanathe Cupertino-based bitten apple giant, has just unveiled its processors M2 Pro and M2 Max with the purpose of raising the bar even higher for their own personal computers, more specifically that of the MacBook Pro and Mac mini models. Once again, we find SoCs based on the ARM architecture, which aim to combine power at the CPU and GPU level with an efficiency that is supposedly higher than that of x86 and with support for up to 96GB of unified memory.
Going deeper into the details, Apple’s M2 Pro extends the original chip’s own architecture with up to 12 processor cores and up to 19 GPU cores along with up to 32GB high-speed unified memory. For its part, the M2 Max chip further raises the proposal with a graphics processor of up to 38 cores and a support that doubles the bandwidth of the unified memory, which can reach 96GB of capacity. The company says the M2 Max’s leading performance per watt makes it the most powerful and most energy-efficient processor it’s ever seen in a professional notebook.
But in recent times it is not only the “raw” performance of the processor and graphics that counts, but also the ability to work with artificial intelligence, a sector that has experienced great growth in recent times. Here, both the M2 Pro and M2 Max include a Faster 16-core Neural Enginewhile the multimedia engine has been improved to reach its best version to date.
The Neural Engine introduced in the M2 Pro and M2 Max processors is capable of executing 15.8 trillion operations per second and reaching speeds up to 40% higher than those achieved by the previous generation. One of the areas where it comes into action is the optimization of camera image quality using computational video.
The Apple M2Pro is manufactured using a second generation 5 nanometer process and includes a total of 40 billion transistors, which is, according to the company, 20% more than the M1 Pro and double that of the original M2. The processor, which can have ten or twelve cores that are distributed in up to eight high-performance and another four efficient, offers performance up to 20% faster in multi-threaded tasks than the M1 Pro. Applications like Adobe Photoshop should run faster than ever, and according to Apple, the Xcode IDE runs up to 2.5 times faster than on the most powerful Intel-based MacBook Pro.
As far as the graphics processor is concerned, the M2 Pro has a total of nineteen cores, three more than the M1 Pro, and has an even larger level 2 cache to increase performance by up to 30%. In this way, the experience and power in that facet should be equivalent to that of a video game console, although Apple has not specified any model or generation.
For his part, he Apple M2 Max It takes over the throne of the brand at the performance level with its 67,000 million transistors, an amount that is 10,000 million more than the M1 Max and double that of the standard M2. However, it is possibly in memory where it stands out the most. doubling the bandwidth of the M2 Pro to reach 400GB/s and by supporting a maximum of 96GB of unified memory, so it should be able to handle super-heavy workloads with a smooth experience using the system. The company mentions things like outstanding visuals, machine learning model training, and the blending of multiple gigapixel images, both plugged in and running on the battery.
The M2 Max has the same number of cores as the M2 Pro at the processor level, but at the graphics level it is more powerful by being able to incorporate an even larger level 2 cache and up to 38 cores. Consequently, graphics performance has been increased by up to 30% compared to the M1 Max.
Apple says that “With 96 GB of memory, the new MacBook Pro with M2 Max handles graphics-intensive projects that other competing systems can’t.”. To do this, and depending on his version, he has tested with OTOY Octane X 2022.1 and has bought said MacBook with two compatible ones: one that included an Intel Core i9 as a processor, an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 with 24 GB of GDDR6 memory, and Windows 11. Pro, and another with an Intel Core i9, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti with 16 GB of GDDR6 memory and the latest version of Windows 11 Home.
Another feature of Apple processors is an advanced media engine with acceleration for formats such as H.264 and HEVC and ProRes video rendering (encoding) and playback (decoding), enabling multiple 4K and 8K video streams to be played with tight consumption. Here it is important to note that the M2 Max has two video rendering engines and two ProRes engines, so it should render videos twice as fast as the M2 Pro. In order to improve security there is the latest generation of Secure Enclave, a key component to the top-notch security offered by Apple.
As we can see, Apple seems determined to bet heavily on the professional market with its new M2 Pro and M2 Max processors, although in the end the equipment that includes them can be bought by anyone who pays the price. As long as Windows does not work as it should in ARM, Apple will apparently continue to position itself as the company with the greatest room for growth in the laptop sector, and that is that its ARM processors have been a breath of fresh air that the sector needed as the eat.
