apple has finally revealed their m2 chip for their new redesigned macbook air and
base macbook pro and a lot of people are disappointed so i've been digging into
the technical elements of the m2 and the more i dig in the more i realized that
this might be a stopgap m 1.5 chip with a ton of apple marketing fluff hiding
the truth but don't worry the new m2 max are still very good and there's actually
one way that the m2 is faster than the m1 pro in the 2 000 14 inch macbook pro
but before i get into that let me first go through everything you need to know
about the m2 chip including the performance calculations and comparisons
now let me first give you guys a quick rundown of the m2 chip it's basically a
larger version of the m1 with the same cpu core layout with four performance
cores for efficiency cores but with two extra graphic scores on top of that
apple improved the memory bandwidth by fifty percent up to a hundred gigabytes
per second by giving it a maximum of 24 gigabytes of even faster lp ddr5 ram and
they also upgraded the neural engine making it 40 faster than the m1 and
according to apple the cpu is 18 faster and the gpu is 35
faster now all of that sounds really good but wait until you actually dig
into the real numbers about five months ago i made this video on youtube
estimating the performance of the m2 chip and the way i did it was by looking
at the difference between the a14 and the 15 and then applying that to the m2
and the way i did it was by looking at two scenarios with scenario one being
that the m2 chip is gonna be based on the a15 cores built on second generation
five nanometer from tsmc and then scenario two was that the m2 chip would
be based on the future a16 chip built on tsmc's third gen five nanometer which is
known as four nanometer which the new qualcomm snapdragon 8 gen 1 chip is
already on and unfortunately it looks like scenario one is what apple went
with because they just confirmed that the m2 is on the second generation five
nanometer which disappointingly means that the m2 chip is based directly off
of the a15 channel so what this basically means is that the method that
i use to estimate the performance is actually fairly accurate and it matches
up to apple's own estimates of 18 faster cpu performance and now looking at the
actual graphics performance my estimate was around 28
874 points in the metal test and if we add 35
to the m1 ship as you can see we have around 28 580 points which is around 300
points off my initial estimate five months ago so i'm happy about that but i
am not happy about this performance improvement and before i dig in and show
you guys why this is so disappointing let me first prove to you that the m2
cores are directly copy and pasted from the a15 course and how do i know this
well first of all apple says the m2 chip comes with a new neural engine with 15.8
trillion operations per second which is 40 faster than the m1 however if you dig
into it that same exact neural engine already showed up in the a15 chip it's
literally identical to this one and it was copy paste in but as for the nail in
the coffin evidence apple actually gave us a real die shot of the m2 chip and if
we look really closely we can find something very interesting first of all
dylan patel last year posted an a15 chip die shot and annotation showing off the
actual performance cores the efficiency course and the gpu cores on the a15 chip
compared to the a14 and as you can see right here the image on the right is a
screenshot of one performance core on the m2 chip compared to the a15 on the
left and if you look really closely you'll see that they are literally
identical to the t copied and pasted over from the a15 to the m2 not only
that but this is the efficiency core on the m2 compared to the a15 and if you
look closely once again literally copy and paste it identical and then finally
the graphics core a15 on the left m2 on the right they are literally identical
once again copy and paste it and you might be wondering why in the world does
this matter at all well it matters because last year i did a full analysis
of the a15 ship compared to the a14 and i concluded that it was mostly a
disappointing stop gap chip the a15 performance cores were only 7.6 percent
faster than the ones on the a14 and that was mostly because apple simply boosted
the clock speed and added a bunch of extra caches to help performance which
is exactly what they just did again for the m2 so this right here is my estimate
for the single core performance of the m2 chip and it is definitely
underwhelming now the multi-core performance went up a bit more being 11
faster but that was mainly due to the efficiency cores which was the real
upgrade in the a15 being 23 faster than the efficiency cores within the a14 chip
and all of that is going to transfer over to the m2 chip which is why my
estimate of the m2 chips multi-core performance was almost bang on with
apple's 18 improvement claim and then finally the
gpu was perhaps the most disappointing part because the a14 chip within the
ipad air 4 was actually quite a lot faster than the new 4 core version of
the a15 ship within the iphone 13 and that is due to thermal throttling of
course only the new 5 core version of the a15 actually beat out the 4 core a14
in the ipad air and it gets even worse when you divide the metal performance by
the number of cores and as you can see the a14 chip within the ipad air
actually has more score per gpu core than the iphone 13 pro max with the a15
chip look at that 3122 compared to 2887 and the reason that's important is
that if we take the score of 3122 from the 814 chip per core and
multiply that by five cores pretending that the a14 was a five core chip we
would have gotten 15 610 but no the brand new a15 chip with
five cores is only 14 437 so there's basically no difference and it's
suffering because of the thermal throttling so basically the new a15 gpu
cores didn't really get any faster or significantly more efficient and apple
essentially hid this by adding another core to make it look like it's a lot
faster and guess what apple just did this year with the m2 chip exactly the
same thing they added two more gpu cores compared to the m1 so let's dig into the
numbers on the surface a 35 faster gpu sounds very nice getting up to 28
874 points but that's actually disappointing
because the new m2 chip has 25 more gpu cores than the 8 core m1 champ
so it should automatically be getting a 25
performance boost even if they were the same m1 course assuming there's no
thermal throttling involved so that extra 10 bringing us up to a 35 gpu
performance boost is the real performance improvement that we're
getting this year so apple did everything they could to hide this by
adding more cores to the a15 which they're doing to the m2 as well so with
that said the m2 chip is a stop gap kind of like an m 1.5 with improvements that
are hidden by an increase in core counts faster efficiency cores more ram and a
lot more caches and memory bandwidth and the real upgrade is going to be the m3
chip next year built on three nanometer from tsmc but don't get me wrong just
because it's an m 1.5 it doesn't mean that these are bad macbooks they are
definitely still good and you still get an improvement and it's definitely more
than powerful enough for a lot of people and finally let's finish off with the
one way that the m2 chip is actually better than the m1 pro chip the video
encoders apple said that the m2 chip supports 8k h.264 hevc and pro res video
encoding and decoding which is actually a huge improvement compared to not only
the m1 chip but also the m1 pro which did not support 8k h.264 or hdbc and the
awesome part is that the encoders scale linearly with the resolution so if it's
able to encode 8k video at 30fps it should be able to encode 4k video at 120
fps which basically means that the video exporting for video editors is going to
be a lot faster even faster than with the m1 pro chip which you gotta pay two
thousand dollars to get basically meaning that the m2 macbook air is gonna
be the best bang for the buck video editing laptop for many people out there
but once again if you're not a video editor then you're not gonna see those
media engine gains and as it turns out the m2 chip is a disappointing stop gap
chip where apple is hiding the lack of performance and efficiency gains by
adding more cores onto it so with that said if you disagree with everything i
said in this video go ahead and comment down below but if you enjoyed it click
subscribe so you don't miss out when we actually buy all of these laptops and
compare them definitely check out those videos right there thanks for watching
and we'll see you in the next video [Music]