Apple's new M2 Pro and Max MacBook Pros are fast while getting extra battery
life but there's just one little problem they're still being built on the same
second generation five nanometer technology as the M2 Chip sadly not
three nanometer and not even four nanometer which is basically just third
gen 5 nanometer that the a16 chip is built on so in this video I'm going to
talk about the implications of that and what it's going to mean for you by
analyzing the chips to see what we should expect in terms of the
performance overheating GPU scaling which is a huge problem with the M1
family of chips and I'll even explain how these machines could get much better
battery life in the real world we're also doing a worldwide giveaway of a new
Macbook Pro and Mac Mini and all you got to do to enter is subscribe enable
notifications and comment down below which you can do on each new Mac video
that we make for more chances to win and we're gonna reveal the winner on
February 1st so don't miss out on that video but before I talk about the
implications of 2nd Gen 5 nanometer I want to show you guys some analysis of
these new Chips as you can see right here high yield on Twitter labeled some
of the different parts of the M2 Pro champ right here in the center we can
see the a performance cores along with a memory cache for those cores we also
have an AMX co-processor on each end now containing blocks of nine Matrix units
instead of four per block on the M1 Pro chip which should help with matrix
multiplication tasks over to the left we have the efficiency cores and now
there's four of them double than before with their own AMX units as well and
just like the M2 Chip they are now larger and more powerful just like we
had on the a15 chip and I'll explain what that's going to mean in just a
minute at the top we have some dye area for the i o which is used for things
like the ports and on the right we have four more i o spots with some
Thunderbolt 4 controllers behind behind them for the Thunderbolt ports and even
the HDMI port as well and that's why we have the display engines below them
highlighted in teal and then below that we have the 16 core neural engine which
is the same one from the M2 Chip with 15.8 trillion operations per second
compared to 11 on the M1 Pro then below that in blue we have the 19 core GPU and
you can even count each little core from core 0 to core 18 with the miscellaneous
area containing things like extra caches and whatever else and if you're
wondering why there is 19 cores instead of 20 it's actually not because of
bidding which means disabling a faulty core so they can still Salvage the chip
instead of throwing it away which is what they're doing for this 16 core base
model M2 Pro chip right now the 20th core has actually been completely
removed and replaced with a bunch of other transistors that I haven't been
able to confirm just yet and yes you can even see this missing core on an actual
photo of the M2 Pro from the Apple event but I actually have a theory about what
this is for which I'm going to explain in just a couple of minutes getting back
to the diagram we have the SLC cache on both sides of the GPU cores which is
basically the system level cache which is like temporary memory for data that
the entire chip uses and then on the sides we have the channels for the lp
ddr5 memory modules which are housed outside of the die right on the M2 pro
package and the really interesting thing this year is that the M2 Pro now comes
with four Ram modules on the package instead of two like on the M1 Pro which
could help with memory performance due to having more memory buses but I'm not
really sure and then of course the M2 Max is simply a larger version of the
chip adding basically another copy of the GPU cores SLC cache and memory
channels which connect to four larger memory modules on the M2 Max package to
allow for up to 96 gigs of RAM and now let's finally get into the actual
implications of the chips being built on second gen 5 nanometer when the M2 Chip
was released I called it a stop Gap chip because it ended up just being an
overclocked and tuned up M1 chip and it wasn't just me because even Mark German
called it a stop Gap chip when I interviewed him on this channel last
summer I even proved my own Theory by showing that in a cinebench R23
benchmark test the M2 Chip consumed 36 percent more power to get only 13
percent more performance which screams overclocked and don't worry notebook
check found basically the same thing in their own testing worse CPU efficiency
compared to the M1 and both single core and multi-core tests even though its
second gen 5 nanometer instead of first gen which the M1 was based on so it
technically should be more efficient so the only conclusion is that they pushed
the power to the limits to get that performance increase not only that but I
ran the logic pro music production stability Benchmark and found that the
M2 Chip handles the same or even less tracks before the system overloads which
means that the extra power that they pushed causes stability issues basically
confirmation that it's mostly an overclocked chip and now we have the M2
Pro and Max which are once again on second gen 5 nanometer so yes I do
believe they're overclocked stop Gap chips which aren't going to be as
efficient as the M1 Pro and Max I fully believe that the a16 chip and the entire
M2 family of chips were originally planned to be on tsmc's three nanometer
process which was unfortunately delayed due to all the supply chain issues so
Apple was forced to push these three nanometer chips back to the a17 ship and
M3 three family of chips and give us these overclocked and tuned up stop Gap
five nanometer chips for the time being but anyway here's the problem with the
M2 Pro and Max being on five nanometer again when we tested the M1 Pro and Max
MacBook Pros we ran into a couple of issues the first one was the fact that
the 14-inch M1 Max model suffered from Thermo throttling because it simply
couldn't keep itself cool and therefore it saw a huge performance drop compared
to the 16 inch model a good reason for that is because a 16 inch is of course a
lot bigger volume wise but when we tore them down we discovered that the 16-inch
had a much beefier cooling system all around which was one of the reasons why
the 16 inch with the M1 Max was slightly heavier than the 16 inch with the M1 Pro
chip model so if the new M2 Pro and Max ships are overclocked to consume a lot
more power to squeeze out that 20 CPU and thirty percent GPU performance gains
then we could run into even more severe thermal throttling issues than we did
before now of course we're going to be doing a lot of testing with 10 different
2023 Mac models that we ordered so subscribe right now so you don't miss
out but the upside this year is that the 14 inch now also is a bit heavier when
specked with the M2 Max which hints at a beefier cooling system for the 14 inch
as well so hopefully Apple improved it now the second issue I was worried about
in terms of second gen 5 nanometer was GPU scaling which got exponentially
worse on the M1 Max and M1 Ultra chips as you added more GPU cores in our
testing as you added more cores the scaling got worse in terms of score or
FPS per core then we found the culprit as you added more GPU cores the clock
speed on those cores went down which is basically throttling but it wasn't
thermal throttling because as you added more cores the temps actually went down
so it had nothing to do with overheating something in the chip wasn't allowing
the course to run at full performance almost like the chip literally couldn't
deliver enough power to the cores to Max them out or something else and the
system was slowing them down and then we discovered from an exclusive source that
the M1 family of chips were built with an overlooked flaw in the tlb buffer
memory which would fill up quickly and throttle performance if the app wasn't
properly optimized for the new tile base GPU memory system which is almost all of
the apps that we tested and of course that impacted the scaling as you added
more and more GPU cores but thankfully we just heard some great news Apple has
apparently greatly improved on this issue with the M2 family of chips so we
might actually see better scaling with the the M2 Max and M2 Ultra chips this
by itself could make the higher end M2 Max chip perform much better than the M1
Max which suffered from the scaling issues but wait it gets even better
ta-tec 15 on Twitter noticed that the M2 Max has a much larger area for the tsvs
right here in the center or through silicon Vias it's basically channels
that go through the Silicon which could be used for things like power delivery
or potentially connections to different caches or memory so if the M1 Max and
Ultra chips had a power delivery issue this could fix it and then hishnash on
Twitter also mentioned that this could be part of the Improvement Apple made to
improve the tlb GPU scaling issue and on top of that what if whatever is in that
last 20th GPU core is there to help improve scaling as well and I actually
have a theory about this what if Apple initially planned to make the M2 Pro
throw a 20 core GPU chip with 40 cores on the M2 Max but they noticed that the
M1 Max and M1 Ultra chips scaled quite badly so they edited the design of the
M2 Pro and Max to remove one core and add something else in there that would
help with the rest of the GPU especially scaling but one thing we know for sure
is that Apple decided that whatever is in the place of the 20th core is more
important than the extra core itself and it even looks like there are some extra
connections on the left side of that area that connect to the larger tsvs
almost like it helps the bandwidth or throughput somehow so with that said I'm
pretty hopeful that the new M2 Max chip will scale better than before and now
let me get into explaining why the new four efficiency core layout will greatly
help battery life with the M2 Chip we noticed that it came with larger
efficiency cores that were actually clocked higher than before as you can
see in this chart 2016 megahertz e-core clock speed on the a15 chip compared to
1823 on the A14 which translates to the difference between the M2 and the M1 so
the idea here is that the M2 Pro and Max chips not only have faster e-cores but
twice as many so basically if you're not doing high performance tasks the MacBook
Pro can give those to the e-cores themselves to handle instead of having
to fire up the performance cores and that saves battery life we even proved
this Theory by running both the M2 and M1 chips in low power mode which relies
heavily on the efficiency cores and there was a massive difference in
performance and battery life so that's why the new Macbook Pros are getting an
extra hour of battery life on paper but I think we might even see a bigger
difference in some use cases now with all of that said do I think the M2 Pro
and Max ships are disappointing stop Gap chips well they are stop Gap chips for
sure but I'm happy to see those hidden improvements within the die and if Apple
did truly improve the GPU scaling then this is a huge deal for the M2 Max and
especially the upcoming M2 Ultra chip and I am expecting the M2 Max to Thermal
throttle in the 14 inch more than the previous model but if they did in fact
beef up the cooling system for that 14 inch model then it's another piece of
good news and then finally even though we don't have three nanometer yet the
extra efficiency cores should still help in terms of real world battery life so
that's another positive so to wrap it all up I do still think they're stopgap
chips but they are better than I expected especially on 2nd Gen 5
nanometers so hopefully you enjoyed this chip analysis and if you did let me know
down in the comment section below especially to join the giveaway and use
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thanks for watching and we'll see you in
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