Apple’s new M2 chip for the Mac is coming sooner than you think, potentially as soon as the rumored
March 8th Apple event according to various sources including Mark Gurman who just put out a new
report over the weekend that is probably the most important confirmation we’ve received to this day.
But what makes everything really confusing is that he also expects multiple Macs to come out
later this year that are actually based on the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips that we already have.
And the problem this creates is that a lot of people are gonna be very confused
when it comes to understanding the differences between the M1 Pro/Max
chips and the new M2 chip, because based on the Number 2,
it seems like it should be a much faster chip, but that’s actually far from the truth.
So before I go into all of the technical details and leaks,
including giving you guys estimated benchmarks for the performance of the M2 compared to the
original M1 and the M1 Pro/Max chips, I want to cover exactly what Mark Gurman said in his report
and why it proves that the M2 chip is coming sooner than we expected!
The first point I want to make is that Mark believes that there will be multiple Macs
appearing next month at Apple’s event, and that’s based on recent filings in the EEC database
where Apple registered three brand new Mac models, including a laptop.
And if you watched our recent video covering these three new Macs, I concluded that there’s a pretty
good chance that the entry-level M2 MacBook Pro is actually gonna be revealed at next month’s event.
And that’s based on multiple sources, like when Digitimes randomly claimed that an M2
MacBook Pro would be coming next month when at the time, it made zero sense at all. And then
after that, the leaker who was the only one that predicted that the new 14 and 16” MacBook Pros
would have a notch, also claimed that the new M2 MacBook Pro would be coming next month, which
lines up to the new EEC filings that show one new laptop and two desktop Mac machines coming soon.
And then we also had an older Mark Gurman report where he claimed that the M2 chip
would debut on the MacBook Pro instead of the MacBook Air, like many people believed.
And then now, in his new report, he also agrees that the new MacBook Pro will keep the same 13”
design but get an upgraded M2 chip, sitting below the 14 and 16” MacBook Pro.
And if this is, in fact, true, that it’s getting the old design,
then it really needs to get released ASAP because if it wouldn’t make sense to release an old
design alongside the full MacBook Air redesign that we’re expecting in the fall of this year.
So with that said, there’s a pretty good chance that Apple is gonna be revealing
this new M2 chip at their upcoming event,
and even if they don’t, it should be coming no later than October, guaranteed.
But the most important thing we have to discuss
in this video is the difference between the M2 chip and the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips,
because Mark Gurman also believes that we’ll be seeing both low-end M2 and high-end M1
Pro/Max Mac mini models coming out this year, potentially both at the upcoming March event.
So without further ado, let’s get into those differences.
According to Mark Gurman, he believes that the M2 chip will probably be a bit speedier
than the M1, but the chip should retain the same eight-core CPU architecture,
but the graphics on the other hand will be getting a boost from seven or eight cores to nine or 10.
So what he’s saying is that the M2 chip will be a direct upgrade to the original M1 chip,
with no changes to the CPU core layout itself, but instead focusing on raising the clock speeds
of each core to improve performance, while potentially making other updates
like adding more cache or upgrading other parts of the chip like the machine learning accelerators,
the Neural Engine, the video encoders and decoders and other things like that.
In contrast, the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips are a completely different beast
because they only have two efficiency cores instead of four, but they instead have double
the number of performance cores, eight instead of four, which basically means that it’s
hyper-focused on high-performance workloads while the regular M2 will be focused on efficiency.
And even though the new M2 chip is expected to get either 9 or 10 graphics cores, it’s still
nowhere near the M1 Pro chip's 14 or 16 graphics cores, let alone the M1 Max’s 32 GPU cores.
Because of this, I can guarantee you that the M1 Pro chip
will STILL be faster than the M2 chip in terms of raw multi-core CPU and GPU performance,
even though the M2 will have the latest chip architecture, as I’ll show in just a minute.
And this is very important to understand because Apple’s current M1 Pro and M1
Max chips are positioned and marketed as the highest-performance chips that are currently
only in Apple’s 14 and 16” MacBook Pros which start at $2,000, compared to the M1
chip which you can get for as low as $650 on a brand new M1 Mac mini from Amazon.
And since the M2 chip will directly replace the M1,
it’ll only be going into Apple’s lower-end products, like the entry-level M2 MacBook Pro,
the MacBook Air, the low-end mac Mini, and the 24” iMac.
And if you’re looking at it from that perspective, it makes total sense for
the much more expensive Macs to also be much faster in terms of performance,
even if they still technically have M1-based Pro and Max chips instead of the new M2.
But the next point I want to get into is that RAW performance won’t be the only difference!
The new M1 Pro and Max chips got some major additional upgrades,
like for example, coming with ultra-fast SSDs which can give you speeds up to 7,400 MB/s,
making them literally the fastest SSDs in the industry.
But looking at the SSDs that come with M1 Macs, they’re limited to 3,300 MB/s speeds,
basically 2x slower, and in my opinion, the new M2 Macs will continue to use these slower SSDs,
because they’re meant for regular consumers who don’t need anything faster than that!
And then going even further, the M1 Pro and Max chips also boast incredibly high memory
bandwidth up to 400GB/s compared to the original M1 chips 68.25GB/s, which is almost 6x lower!
And the reason for that is the fact that the M1 not only uses slower RAM,
but it’s also running on a 128-bit memory bus instead of 256 bits on the M1 Pro and Max.
And then on top of that, another reason is that you can only get up to 16GB of
RAM on the M1 chip, compared to up to 64GB with the M1 Max.
So in my opinion, even though I expect the M2 chip
to come with faster RAM than what comes with the M1, I don’t think it’ll be as fast as the RAM
that comes with the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips, and I’m also pretty sure that the M2 will still come
with only 8GB of RAM at the base price and be limited to the same 16GB as before.
So the point that I’m making is that even though the M2 chip will sound like it’s better,
the M1 Pro and Max chips will still have major performance advantages including RAW power,
SSD speed and RAM speed as well, among other differences like the M1 Max actually coming
with TWO video encoders as well as two sets of ProRes encoders/decoders,
while I fully expect the M2 chip to stick with just one set.
And now, with that said, the last thing we’ve gotta cover is the performance benchmark estimates
to show you guys the real-world differences, and before I get into the charts, I want to mention
that while everyone is expecting the M2 chip to be based on last year’s A15 Bionic iPhone chip,
I actually think there’s a chance that it could be based on this year’s future A16 chip instead!
And if you’re wondering why I think that would happen, be sure to watch
this video where I laid out my reasoning for the M2 to be based on the A16 instead of the A15.
But because we don’t know that for sure just yet, I ended up giving
you performance numbers for both scenarios to give you a better idea of the possibilities.
So with that said, the first benchmark we have is Geekbench 5’s single-core test,
where the M2 chip will actually have an awesome performance boost over the M1 chips,
which could help for things like common web browsing, and this result is because
of using the new chip architecture based on newer chip technology from TSMC.
But moving over to the multi-core performance, you can see that even in the BEST-case scenario
for the M2 chip, it’s STILL slower than the binned 8-core M1 Pro, which is exactly what Apple wants,
since they wouldn’t want the cheaper M2 to be faster.
And then finally for the graphics side of things, we see the exact same thing, the binned 14-core
M1 Pro still being quite a bit faster than the new 10-core version of the M2 in both scenarios.
So as you can see, the new M2 chip should give us a decent improvement over the original M1, but
there’s no way that it can cannibalize the sales of the higher-end machines since it’s still a ways
away, especially if you consider the differences in the expected SSD and RAM performance,
as well as the differences in the number of video encoders and decoders with the Pro and Max chips.
So there you guys go, hopefully you now fully understand the differences between the future M2
and the current M1 Pro and Max chips, and if you learned something new,
click that circle above to subscribe for more videos like this one, and definitely check out
our M2 leaks videos right there. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you in the next one!