it's been over a year since apple's m1 chip was revealed and to this day the m1
macbook air is a killer value and a great choice for a lot of people but now
apple's working on a brand new m2 chip that's gonna be at the heart of apple's
upcoming lower end max like the redesigned macbook air and probably even
the new ipad pro so the big question that we've got to figure out is this how
much of a performance boost should we expect with the new m2 chip both in
terms of the cpu and gpu performance so without further ado let's jump right
into it now the most important detail in terms of the m2 chip that we have to
understand is this report from mark german from back in may he said that the
macbook air with the m2 chip is coming with a 9 or 10 core gpu so what he
essentially means by that is that instead of the current m1 chips 7 or 8
gpu cores depending on which model you get
we're going to be getting either 9 or 10 gpu cores with the m2 chip but if we dig
deeper into his actual report on bloomberg.com he says that the new chip
which is going to be codenamed statin is going to include the same number of
computing cores as the m1 but run faster so that means we're getting the same
four high performance cores and the same for efficiency cores but they will be
faster now this is way different compared to the new m1 pro and m1 max
chips that we have in the new macbook pros which have eight high performance
cores and only two efficiency cores so because of that the m2 chip will stay
much slower than the m1 pro as i'm going to show you very soon and before we get
into calculating the performance for both the cpu and the gpu side we have to
answer a couple of different big questions like which processing node
will the m2 be built on because originally we thought it was going to be
built on the three nanometer process from tsmc but it does look like that was
delayed and then a little bit later we found out that the new a16 bionic chip
in the upcoming iphone 14 is gonna be based on tsmc's four nanometer process
but then this article was updated to say that tsmc actually refers to it as n4p
which is not four nanometer at all it's actually the third major enhancement of
the five nanometer family so with that said if the m2 chip is in fact gonna be
built on the third major enhancement of five nanometer here is what we should
expect first of all it says that n4p will deliver an 11
performance boost over the original n5 technology now if you don't already know
the m1 chip is actually built on the original so it should have an 11 boost
over the m1 even if nothing else changes and we have basically the same design we
should get at least 11 so with that said let's go ahead and get into the
calculations so if we start with the single core geekbench score of the m1
which is a thousand seven hundred and fourteen points and then add eleven
percent to that we should be getting 1902
single core points which is actually very impressive and then if we apply
that 11 jump to the multi-core performance we should be getting at
least 8 278 points
which is actually faster than the 8 core mac pro and going even
further tsmc says that compared to n5 n4p will also deliver a 22 improvement
in power efficiency as well so that means we could get up to 22 better
battery life if the performance stays the same which is very interesting
however i don't know if you guys saw those renders of the m2 macbook air
which you probably have the new design is incredibly thin so maybe apple is
going to make the battery size smaller and keep the battery life the same just
to give us a really nice thin design but who knows and now with that said we do
have the major dilemma of whether apple is going to be actually going to rnv9
with this m2 chip or not because if apple sticks to the same a15 bionic
cores and gpu cores those actually did not have rnv9 support they were still on
rv8 so if apple uses a15 cores then the new m2 chip is not gonna have rnv9 so
that basically gives us a bunch of conflicting information because we can't
have a15 cores and arm v9 at the same time if we are truly getting rv9 on the
m2 chip than the m2 actually has to be based on next year's a16 chip for the
iphone 14. so in my opinion there are actually two possible scenarios for the
m2 chip scenario one is that apple completely holds off an rv9 and the new
features like better security sve 2 support and more and they just base the
m2 off of the a15 chip which can make sense and then scenario 2 is that of
course the m2 chip is based on the next generation a16 bionic chip which comes
with rnv9 support so with that said let me go through both of those scenarios in
the first case with scenario 1 the process node will no longer be 3rd gen 5
nanometer and if we go back and look at the difference between the single core
performance of apple's a14 chip and the a15 which basically shows the difference
between first and second gen 5 nanometer we're actually getting a larger nine
percent performance boost instead of tsmc's quoted six percent boost so
that's probably coming from extra additions like the doubling of system
cache and other design changes including clock speed improvements and now since
we know that the m1 chip is built on first gen 5 nanometer we can apply that
same 9 boost going up to the second gen 5 nanometer with the m2 chip which gives
us a single core score of around 1876 points which is actually quite a
good improvement even without needing the new rnv9 changes but then things get
a little bit weird when we take a look at the multi-core performance jump from
the a14 to the a15 where we actually get a huge 18 jump in terms of iphone
performance and this doesn't really make sense because the single core
performance only went up by nine percent so how in the world are we getting an 18
performance jump well as it turns out the a15 chip cpu is made out of two high
performance cores and four efficiency cores and apparently the efficiency
cores themselves got a huge boost in performance this time around and we can
actually calculate how much performance they'll collectively add by multiplying
the single core score by two and then subtracting that from the total
multi-core score to reveal the total score that's coming from the efficiency
cores alone and based on that the efficiency cores and the a15 chip are a
massive 55 faster than the set that's in the a14
channel so now that we know all of that about the a14 to a15 chip jump we can
actually use it to predict the performance of the m2 chip if we take
that single core score of 1876 that we predicted for the m2 performance cores
and multiply it by four to give us four high performance scores we get
7504 points from the performance cores alone and then if we add in the
1234 points from the new a15 efficiency cores alone we're left with a total
multi-core score of 8738 for the m2 champ but now with that said
we also have the possibility of the second scenario with the m2 chip
actually being based on the new a16 chip in the upcoming iphone 14 instead of the
a15 chip which means that it's almost certainly going to be built on the new
rv9 architecture and if you think that's completely unrealistic keep in mind that
in 2020 the m1 ship was revealed only 18 days after we got our hands on the
iphone 12 which packs the same a14 ship that the m1 is based on so next year
apple could easily release the iphone 14 with the a16 chip in september and then
a month or two later they can reveal the new m2 chip which could be based on the
a16 instead of the old a15 so that's totally reasonable and with that said we
can bring out the numbers from the beginning of this video when we added in
an 11 performance boost going from first to third gen five nanometer process node
and then add in some more performance improvements thanks to arm v9 and
probably extra cash like we saw in the a15 and i'm personally gonna estimate a
conservative 20 performance boost over the m1 with everything combined together
giving us a massive single core score of 2057
which would make it the fastest performance core in the world but then
switching over to multi-core performance i'd expect a conservative 25 performance
boost over the m1 ship giving us a multi-car score of 9322
which actually outperforms the current fully specced out 27 inch intel imac so
as you can see the new m2 chip is still going to be a beast in terms of
performance but now let's finally get into estimating the graphics performance
with both of these scenarios and the first thing we've got to do is figure
out how much faster the a15 gpu cars are compared to the a14 the best score we
got with the a14 chip was within the larger ipad air 4 chassis scoring 12
488 points compared to 14 437 with the iphone 13 pro and the new a15
chip making the iphone 15.6 faster but the weird thing is that it
actually has a 5 core gpu instead of 4 with the a14
so it technically should have scored at least 25 higher but i think that the
smaller iphone chassis is throttling down the performance due to heat and one
thing we know for sure is that the gpu cores and the current eight core gpu m1
macbook air are also throttled because it scores up to around 22 000 metal
points but if we take the score from the four core a14 ipad air and then double
it to match the a core gpu in the macbook air it should technically be
able to get around 25 000 metal points but it doesn't so there are some
diminishing returns so because of all this iphone throttling confusion i think
the safest bet would be to take the 14 437 score from the five core a15 gpu and
then double it to create a very conservative theoretical score for a 10
core m2 chip giving us 28 874 metal points which is a solid
improvement and then for scenario two if the m2 chip is actually based on the a16
chip then we can add in another 10 conservative boost on top of that due to
the 3rd gen 5 nanometer process node and other design improvements giving us a
total score of 31 762. so with all that said these
calculations in terms of the performance should give you some perspective in
terms of whether you should wait for the m2 max or just buy one of the m1 or m1
pro max right now so hopefully you enjoyed this video and if you did go
ahead and click the circle above to subscribe for more videos like this one
and definitely check out one of those two right over there thanks for watching
and we'll see you in the next video [Music]