Apple’s new M2 Pro and M2 Max chips are so powerful that they’re actually over-performing for most Mac users.
A new benchmark ranking shows how the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips score against all other Apple Silicon chips currently available, from the A14 Bionic processor to the M1 Ultra.
Apple announced the new chips last week when it introduced the new Mac mini and the latest MacBook Pro models. The M2 Max builds on the features of the M2 Pro, including up to 38 cores of GPU, twice the unified memory bandwidth, and up to 96GB of unified memory, with industry-leading performance per watt making it the world’s most powerful and power-efficient professional notebook chip. Both chips also feature enhanced custom technologies, including a faster 16-core neural engine and Apple’s powerful media engine.
“Only Apple is building SoCs like the M2 Pro and M2 Max, which deliver incredible professional performance with industry-leading power efficiency,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technology. Max, with their more powerful CPUs and GPUs, support for larger unified memory systems, and advanced media engines, represent an amazing advancement for Apple chips.”
While these chips still use a 5-nanometer process, Apple says the M2 Pro crams in 40 billion transistors, nearly 20 percent more than the M1 Pro and twice as many as the M2 chip. the M2 Max even crams in 67 billion transistors.
Apple says the M2 Pro is 40 percent faster than the M1 Pro and 80 percent faster than the high-end Core i9 chip in the previous generation of Intel-powered 16-inch MacBook Pros.
Macworld looked at how the M2 Pro compares to the M1 Pro chip against all other Apple Silicon currently available. The fastest Mac is at the top of the chart, followed by the iPad and iPhone. The chart shows that the iPad Pro is arguably as fast as the MacBook Air, plus the M1 Ultra is still the speed king. 48-core and 64-core versions both give the M2 Max a run for its money, with a Geekbench 5 multi-core score of 23,369 compared to 15,242 for both M2 Max chips. The M1 Max also sits between the two M2 Pros, with a score of 12,590.
