Apple’s new M2 Pro and M2 Max chips are so powerful they’re actually overkill for most Mac users.
A new benchmark ranking shows how the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips compare to every other current Apple Silicon chip, from the A14 Bionic processor to the M1 Ultra.
Apple previously announced the new chip with the launch of the new Mac mini and the latest MacBook Pro models. The M2 Pro expands on the M2’s architecture, offering up to 12-core CPU and up to 19-core GPU, plus up to 32GB of fast unified memory.
M2 Max builds on the capabilities of the M2 Pro, including up to 38-core GPU, twice the bandwidth of unified memory, and up to 96GB of unified memory, and its industry-leading performance-per-watt makes it the world’s most powerful and cost-efficient Electric 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. They deliver incredible professional performance while also delivering industry-leading power efficiency,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technologies. “The M2 Pro With a more powerful CPU and GPU, support for a larger unified memory system, and an advanced media engine, the M2 Max and M2 Max represent an incredible advancement in silicon for Apple.”
While the chips are still made on a 5-nanometer process, Apple says the M2 Pro packs 40 billion transistors, nearly 20 percent more than the M1 Pro and twice as many as the M2 chip. M2 Max is stuffed with 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 Intel-core 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Macworld looked at how the M2 Pro compares to the M1 Pro chip compared to every other Apple Silicon currently available. The fastest Macs are at the top of the chart, followed by iPads and iPhones.
The graph shows that the iPad Pro is arguably as fast as the MacBook Air. Still, the M1 Ultra, used in Mac Studio last March, is still king for speed (and price, of course). Both the 48-core and 64-core versions put the M2 Max in the dust, with a Geekbench 5 multi-core score of 23,369, compared with 15,242 for the two M2 Max chips; It is 11,851. The M1 Max also sits between the two M2 Pros with a score of 12,590.
